LA CIENEGA AREA

Kenneth Capps’ steel sculpture has a bullying quality reminiscent of work by Richard Serra; this is the kind of brutishly masculine art Hemingway could get behind. Scattered about the room like the debris of an ill-fated space mission, Capps’ imposing forms make the metaphorical point that man’s most heroic efforts often result in nothing more than a scrap heap of rusting cogs and wheels.

Reading one minute like a collection of sad souvenirs of the Industrial Revolution, the next like an homage to man’s appetite and capacity for war, the work is, above all else, about power. Capps tips his hat to Serra a second time in the way he installs his work. With large metal shards jutting from the wall and a phallic silo en pointe, Capps taps into the tension of massive objects poised in space. He executes an elegant pirouette on that score, but that aspect of Capps’ sensibility is far outweighed by his two-fisted bluster.

Also on view are six heavily impastoed paintings of ornate Italian architecture by Vivian Kerstein. Kerstein explains her work as being about, among other things, the duality of the mundane and the sublime, and she certainly draws a bead on this theme. All grand promenades, archways and soaring vaulted ceilings, Kerstein’s is a very gooey interpretation of the Italian architectural tradition. No crisp, clean lines here; what we get instead are buildings encrusted with the dust of history and crowded with a few centuries worth of ghosts. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Feb. 7.)