LA CIENEGA AREA

Connor Everts’ new series, “Alpha II / Incongruent Elements,” is rooted in the artist’s interest in a child’s first encounters with language and in the editing process we all employ in deciding what we must acknowledge and what we can safely ignore. The visual gestalt of these elegant jumbles of information is of society as a colony of industrious worker bees. Man is caught up in an endless cycle of creating, cataloguing and discarding data.

High-spirited collages that saunter along with a snappy gait evocative of Stuart Davis, these bright patchwork quilts include a variety of disparate images and ideas that struck Everts’ fancy. Among the recurring motifs: instruction signs (“open this end,” “no parking”), baseballs, cigarette packaging, postage stamps and mathematical equations with the visual beauty of musical notation.

Droll quotations of work by other artists pop up frequently as well. There’s a Bengston iris here, some Jasper Johns twig/crosshatching there, along with friendly winks in the direction of Schwitters, Rauschenberg and Rosenquist. Everts, however, differs from those modern masters in that rather than hammer out a major manifesto intended to dazzle the intelligentsia, he seems content to make pictures that are simply pleasing. (Ruth Bachofner, 804 N. La Cienega Blvd., to March 21.)