WEST LOS ANGELES

Miki Warner makes large black-and-white photographs of groupings of identical bottles--numbering from two to five--that she’s painted black, white and gray. Classically formal still-life studies in the manner of Edward Weston, the pictures reside in that neutral, perfectly lit vacuum peculiar to the realm of art.

Warner describes her pictures as “an attempt to show the absolute physicality of objects, and the tension between objects and the space that surrounds them.” Unfortunately, the pictures are so perfectly composed and pleasing to the eye that they’re virtually tension free--so on that score they don’t succeed in doing what Warner intends. Seen as purely technical exercises, however, these subtly shaded images certainly prove Warner’s mastery of the vocabulary of black and white.

There’s something oddly horrific about the bulbous, swelling shapes that appear in work by Magdalene Kispal, also on view. Photographs of impermanent, site-specific sculptures fashioned of sand, snow, rocks and twigs, Kispal’s images reinterpret the primitive sexual iconography that began with the Venus of Willendorf and has refused to vacate the premises ever since.

Tightly framed shots of organic shapes that read as metaphors for female fertility, Kispal’s photos depict the life cycle in its bud-like beginnings, ripening to monumental proportion, bursting apart, then decaying. These powerful pictures function as an evocative parable for a process that’s amazingly perfect in its violence and inevitability. (Art Space, 10550 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 16.)