LA CIENEGA AREA

Jill Giegerich forged among the most convincing Post-Mod hybrids of any artist hereabouts. Her meld of Neo-Cubo-Dada is smart, open-ended and fun to look at. The fact that her current show gains virtually nothing but suavity and aplomb is probably not a cause for alarm; the work retains its vigorous and amused sense of metamorphosis.

One large untitled relief shows a welter of cones and troughs in the process of becoming sand-and-tar paper becoming a stylized plume of putrid factory smoke becoming a blocky man. Giegerich is more than ever a deadpan social critic. It may get a bit thick when she attaches the bells of two horns to a big black block in illusory relief, but it does feel like some monster survivalist off-road van attacking your rear view on the freeway.

A cut-out trough spewing streams of printed wood does nicely for a metaphor of media glut. She is more lyrical in a classic tan corrugated swath where broken French-horn valves long for innocence and poetry. Actually there is something new in this show. Giegerich never built quite so much subtext into previous work or if she did she never got it across quite so deftly. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd. to April 18.)