La Cienega Area

Alan Belcher is a young Canadian who explores photographic images--the way they are co-opted by commercial art and their potential as political agents provocateurs. Punningly titled “Traveling Exhibition,” the show consists of fabricated luggage covered with photographs that subvert the object’s utilitarian function.

A group of three cases are plastered with photos of firearms, as if to blatantly advertise their terrorist contents to any suspicious customs official.

Belcher deliberately restricts the photographic image’s power by transforming it into an aesthetic object: just one more set of art goods marketed for easy consumption. While such contradictions suggest that Belcher is trying to have his conceptual cake and eat it too, the work’s disarming irony saves it from the cynicism that usually dogs work of this nature.

Contradiction is the catalyst for Jackie Winsor’s latest concrete sculptures. Familiar forms such as rounded cubes, spheres and pyramids are rendered in raw concrete, exposing richly painted interiors in bright primaries through “windows” at the top or sides. The industrial material masks a more “luxurious” interior that redefines the form. Winsor pulls it all off through a disconcerting combination of estrangement and seduction, a strategy that imbues the work with a quiet, resonant energy. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to Dec. 23.)