WILSHIRE CENTER

Barbara Kasten has photographed distinctive buildings on both coasts--E.F. Hutton and the Equitable Center facilities in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles--but you may not recognize them in her big Cibachrome prints. Instead of cropping ready-made design qualities, as is the practice of less original and energetic photographers, she has transformed her “Architectural Sites” into Cubist compositions of dynamic, faceted space and sizzling color. At 30 by 40 or 50 by 60 inches, they are startlingly imposing photographs that take the “fabricated to be photographed” genre into a brave new world of real places in invented space.

Taking off from earlier studio installations that she set up solely to photograph, Kasten arrived at these sites at night with lights, mirrors and a production crew. Now working in an architectural setting instead of a vacant room, she nonetheless orchestrated every aspect--hot color, mirrored reflections, spatial dislocations--with a clear idea of the disorienting results. Arata Isozaki’s pyramidal skylights at MOCA, Frank Gehry’s columns at Loyola and Roy Lichtenstein’s painting at Equitable provide clues to the identities of her subjects, but Kasten’s Cubist portraits also create a new reality that could only have been conceived in an artist’s mind. (Richard Green Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to April 20.)