ART REVIEW : ‘Night Lies’ Is a Passage to Viewer’s Own Dark Place

Even though you aren’t the least bit tired, your parents have sent you to bed. So you lie there in the dark, looking at the changing patterns made on the ceiling by passing car lights and listening to the roar and hum the world is making outside your room.

Or maybe it is the middle of the night and you have just awakened from a dream. Your room is alive with a pale, speckled light that turns the ceiling into a blurry planetarium.

“Night Lies,” an installation by Angie Bray at BC Space gallery in Laguna Beach, is one of those generously malleable works of art that hold whatever memory or narrative a viewer chooses to find in it.

At first, the piece doesn’t seem to exist at all. You walk into a dark space behind a curtain, and there is nothing to see.

Ever so gradually, though, the outlines of a big box appear out of nowhere. Oh, wait, it is not a box; it is a bed frame hanging in space, a bed that seems to switch back and forth between two and three dimensions. Now the space is awash with a fragile light that glances off the porous material (dust? insulation?) on the ceiling and spills over the floor. Distant cars honk. And the allusive magic of “Night Lies” begins.

The title seems to allude both to the distortions of night vision and to the horizontal posture of a person in bed. As poets long have suggested, night is both an enfolding, protective presence and a frightening one, a realm of romance and a realm of delusion. No matter how vigilant or curious we are, the journey from our waking selves to our dreaming selves and back again is one we make every day without ever being able to watch the scenery at the border crossings. Being awake in bed at night is the closest we get to that other place, where stillness and darkness coalesce and conscious thought bottoms out into dreams.

Needless to say, the piece doesn’t literally spell out any of these themes. You might think of utterly different things, or of nothing at all. Bray has tinkered carefully with the stage machinery of her deceptively simple piece and then tactfully has withdrawn to let the viewer’s musings wander freely.

The gallery also is showing two bodies of work of black-and-white photographs by Karl Gernot Kuehn, a German-born film editor and free-lance photographer who lives in Los Angeles.

The “Hollywood Nocturne” group offers a nose-dive into a world of transvestites and misfits costumed (even if nearly nude) to the hilt and engaging in the sort of bleary antics that no one can precisely reconstruct the following morning.

In “Alter Ego,” a heavyset, dowdy audience watches a black man with oiled, glistening skin who supports on one hip a man wearing a bra. In “Late Bloom,” the subject is an old woman clutching a walker; she wears a tiara and an elaborate, floor-length dress that cruelly reveals the collapsed, turkey-skin flesh of her upper arms.

This is psychic territory that the photographer Weegee exploited mercilessly in the New York clubs of the 1930s and ‘40s. Kuehn’s vision, too, is best at its most unsparing and unsentimental. Sometimes--as in an image of a woman in a large hat taking a drag on a cigarette near a leaf of potted palm and a couple of glasses of wine--he goes in for cliched design that defeats the hard-nosed, truth-under-glamour details he aims to ferret out.

The other set of images, “Metropolis,” is utterly devoid of a human presence. Eerie, glowing white buildings, empty streets and piles of rubble under pale black skies suggest a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles and (in Kuehn’s wonderful phrase) “the tranquillity of decay.”

These are not, of course, “straight” photographs but prints cannily over- and underexposed to obtain precisely calibrated effects. The stylized F-shapes of an Art Deco facade rise above a crumbly mountain of chalky debris. Lazy gray shadows fall across the vast territory of a deserted white street that curls around a skinny corner building. A long stairway to nowhere sits, with the gravity of an Egyptian pyramid, near glowing stone markers and a hillside covered with graffiti.

Bray’s and Kuehn’s work is light-years above anything else showing right now in Laguna Beach galleries. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it shouldn’t. More power to BC Space for finding some of the really good stuff and giving it the attention it deserves.

BC Space Gallery, at 235 Forest Ave in Laguna Beach, is open from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The exhibit remains on view through March 26. Admission: Free. Information: (714) 497-1880.