LA CIENEGA AREA

Imagine honey-hued landscapes of Claude Lorrain invaded by giant hyper-real leeches. House these in pagoda-shaped constructions complete with Barnum & Bailey lettering and all the repugnant voyeuristic lure of carnival sideshows and you have the knotty drift of Samuel Suhr’s dioramas.

For a newcomer in his mid-20s, Suhr packs enough menace to give a veteran artist pause. His vision and panache are commendable even when they fail.

The works log macabre collisions between events in real time and in dream time. In the painted panel “Jacob on the Edge of a Dream,” a fallen figure in blood-red robes is overcome by composite demons that make Max Ernst’s worst surreal inventions look like house pets. In “Dream Dreaming,” a three-dimensional oozy mass--somewhere between a big slug, a hairy deformed fish and an amorphous purple body organ--rises iconically inside a dark wood chamber surrounded by tiny votive candles.

Visually indebted to all eerie art from Hugo Van der Goes to Surrealism, Suhr transmits a Jungian concept of an amoral collective unconscious that is the common wellspring of our highest and basest inclinations.

Also shown are large Ektacolor prints by photographer and curator Richard Ross. He pulls off the ultimate metamorphosis, from the banal to the appealing, transforming worse-than-awful knock-offs of classical sculpture at Caesars Palace into romantic, dramatic fragments of antiquity. (Simard & Halm Gallery, 665 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Aug. 29.)