WILSHIRE CENTER

Keith Downey is a 1982 graduate of CalArts, and his work bears the indelible stamp of the institute’s conceptual emphasis on art’s relationship to media imagery and language. That fact is far more clear than anything else in Downey’s current show of color photographs and illuminated transparencies. The images are generally vague, shadowy collages composed of fragmented magazine ads and reproductions. They conjure up a dreamy world that Downey says, believably enough, is a search for personal identity.

The search goes on through a wasteland of bottled-up emotion that occasionally oozes sexual tension but more frequently just moons around in veiled atmospheres. An aptly titled “Peep Show” gives us a look--through a slit in a big steel box--at a nude woman masturbating, but other works are far less explicit. We see, for example, boys looking off in the distance or observing a nude male statue, a “Woman Touched by Men,” a burning building and blissed-out faces. Such titles as “Drifting Too Far From the Shore,” “Rites of Passage” and “Hidden Love” reinforce a pervasive mood of adolescent introspection.

Downey concludes in a printed statement that his identity is an aggregate and declares an interest in au courant notions about “cultural encoding” and “the effects of mass media on our notion of representation.” Unfortunately, his work is so murkily self-obsessed that it rarely gets around to communicating much of this to outsiders. (Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 7416 Beverly Blvd., to Feb. 19.)