SANTA MONICA

As a conceptualist who does an unbelievable amount of work to put her ideas into visual form, Kim Abeles has hit on her best theme to date: the legend of Saint Bernadette. No, she didn’t go to Lourdes to witness the annual pilgrimage and commercial spectacle that celebrate a young woman who had 17 visions of the Virgin. Abeles’ installation is more a commentary on how secondhand information becomes a body of popular knowledge than a report based on original research.

She has collected Bernadette kitsch--rosaries, cards bearing the saint’s likeness, bottles of “curing water”--and created her own versions as raw material for elaborate collages and assemblages. One of the simplest is an ornately framed ad from the National Enquirer that offers Bernadette trinkets along with testimonials to the luck they have brought to buyers. In another piece, actors in still photos from “The Song of Bernadette” become tourists gawking at the “World’s Largest Painting”--an image of the saint, reproduced from a reproduction. Abeles then imposes a grid on a copy of the same image and enlarges a square of it as a tattered fragment.

Among other wonders: Bernadette’s dress, re-created in three-dimensional oil on canvas and “floated” in mid-air; white ceramic vases in the shape of the saint’s head, filled with roses in memory of the Lourdes “miracle” of a rose bush that bloomed in winter; a Pachinko game with Bernadette’s face painted on its glass; two Duchampian homages presenting Bernadette lore in a suitcase and on an elevated bicycle wheel.

Witty, poignant and loaded with irony, the show presents a baffling array of purposefully overcrafted objects, but there’s nothing confusing about the message. In her ironic shrine to exploitation, Abeles shows how a young girl’s faith led to a commercial bonanza. (Karl Bornstein Gallery, 1662 12th St., to March 15.)