La Cienega Area

James Casebere continues to construct idiosyncratic indoor and outdoor scenes from cardboard, cast plaster and wood. He paints every eerie prop a matte white, eliminating all textural and object-specific details. Then he photographs the tiny tableaux under dramatic light and mounts enlargements in handsome light boxes. In “Office With an Apple,” a gritty, clearly fake apple sits among vague accouterments of business, like a high-tech telephone receiver and stacked cuboidal shapes. In the poetic “Kitchen Window With Corral,” a sill with drying dishes and other domestic trappings opens onto a corral cloaked in darkness. Removed and theatrical, this work is like distant memories or the attenuated narratives of Edward Hopper. But their real thrust turns our attention to the way language is cliched--propagated by cultural habit and the media--automatically stitching meaning onto deliberately arbitrary or neutral information.

Scottish-born New York artist Thomas Lawson is best known for perspectival fields obscuring classical facades or cathedrals that stand for moribund “temples” of art and Western values. Hints of buildings are gone in his current paintings. Instead, Lawson makes sumptuous silvery fields woven with light-drenched striations that look like crudely perspectival roads or waterways tilted toward the viewer. In “Walking Like an Egyptian II,” a metallic blue field is sectioned off by dark red mottled bands. Over this Lawson paints quick, broad strokes of poppy-yellow paint. A geometric band painted directly on the wall connects the work and the gallery space.

Lawson remains ideological even in these visually alluring, more abstract works. The semi-systematic striations (that in “Walking Like an Egyptian IV” suggest starched, posturing figures) seem to represent gestures petrified into formula, while Lawson’s energetic, bright slashes of paint and his strips of discordant color painted on gallery walls represent the liberating jolt of self-critical art. (Kuhlenschmidt/Simon, 9000 Melrose Ave., to April 2.)