DOWNTOWN

A free-wheeling installation by Jim Lawrence puts one in mind of the small-town kook who converts his front yard into some kind of manic vision whose meaning is known only to him. Simon Rodia and Grandma Prisbrey would no doubt grasp what Lawrence is up to in a second.

An L.A. artist who refines the make-do sensibility of an amateur artist into something cool and sophisticated, Lawrence is known for carving large, roughly hewn wooden figures evocative of dime-store Indians. He’s still making those folk-art manikins, but this time he supplements them with paintings, text, assemblages, cloth dolls and an American flag.

Based on a 1984 trip the artist took to Australia, the piece is essentially a traveler’s diary and, subject to the element of chance that governs life on the road, is in perfect harmony one moment, flat and out of kilter the next. Cliched ideas of Australia as a lawless frontier with aboriginal shamans lurking just beyond the city limit crop up in much but not all of the work. This is, after all, a Post-Modern evocation of Australia, which is to say the references are all over the map. Among them: a Joseph Cornell-style memory box, a small replica of the Eiffel Tower, a thinly veiled homage to Sam Shepard and a piece titled “School Girl” that might be described as the afternoon reverie of a pedophile.

Lawrence’s central premise is neither as cohesive nor as fertile as some he’s previously tackled (Florence during the Plague, the photographs of August Sander and Wagnerian opera, among others). A 10-figure grouping titled “Garden Piece” is a knockout, however. Seven towering forms are elongated in the manner of Giacometti to the point that they come to resemble menacing totems. Staring down at the viewer with cruelly impartial gazes, they’re like an army of Grim Reapers. An animal skull suspended from the ceiling floats above them while a mangy dog stands at their feet, baying at the moon. (Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., to April 4.)