La Cienega Area

It’s tough to imagine that Madeline O’Connor’s spare shaped paintings and mixed-media constructions are inspired by the marshes and woods of her native south Texas. It’s also difficult to glean the sensibility of a naturalist (who claims James Audubon as one of her heroes) in these minimal shapes. Once a realist painter, O’Connor says she’s now after “stripping away the envelope and getting at the essence of things.” This strategy has all but become a cliche of expressive abstraction, but O’Connor does a respectable job of transmitting the mood of desert flora and fauna by arranging a few well chosen shapes, colors and negative spaces.

Depicting an aquatic bird indigenous to south Texas but also held sacred by ancient Egyptians, “Glossy Ibis” captures the flight and subtle color effects of light passing on the bird’s ebony feathers in 20 overlapping rectangular panels across a huge expanse of gallery wall. Each panel gradually changes from pearlescent purple to brick to mossy green and the physical divisions between each register as some metaphor for gliding motion. In a “Fractured Earth” piece, O’Connor shapes huge puzzle-piece shards of canvas.

These works push and pull on the imaginative gallery space designed by Larry Bell, but ultimately they speak in such attenuated tones that it’s hard to hear them. (Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332-A Melrose Ave., to April 29.)