La Cienega Area

Mineo Mizuno, who used to do smallish ceramic pieces, is now producing 6-foot-high ceramic stanchions dripped with waves of a single bright color and pricked with pin-holes. Some of the members of this “Landscape Nebraska Series” are block-like; others have two flat sides and one curved one. You have your choice of smoothly flowing drips or steep, craggy drips (the effect of foam cushions torn apart) or a sort of distressed look. The piece de resistance is done up in stalactite-like drips of rose, brown and silver. There’s no telling what effect a place like Nebraska may have on an Angeleno.

New work by Tony DeLap is much like older work by Tony DeLap. The sleight of hand remains the same in the wood-and-canvas shaped pieces: edges that do a funny little flip and stretch or shrink as they disappear from view. But these sculptural paintings are also deftly elegant in frontal view. The best one is “Arigo,” an all-white piece that curls up in an ample, Caspar-the-Friendly-Ghost curve dimpled with a notch of wood. A trio of DeLap’s drawings all seem to be about mild-mannered balancing acts disguised as draftsman’s scribbles.

Carlos Almaraz’s revved-up, anything’s possible universe poaches shamelessly on other artists’ territories in a large group of pocket-sized paintings. James Ensor’s here (“Even Clowns Cry”) and Franz Marc (“The Blue Horse”) and Wayne Thiebaud (“California Theatre”) and a spacey John Sloan (“Girl with a Hoop”). Other glimpses are pure Almaraz, like the scene of joggers in a park with a starry sky, skyscrapers, palm tree silhouettes and green waterfalls that turn out to be arcs of light from street lamps. Or “The Happy Cup,” which hangs in the sky and smiles over a blue bridge. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 9.)