Wilshire Boulevard

Italian-born, CalArts bred Luciano Perna has turned out all sorts of stuff for a show gamely titled “Profound Nonsense.” One sculpture is a stuffed Dumbo sitting in a frying pan on top of a cardboard box. Another piece, snickeringly titled “El Pollo Loco,” is a tarred and feathered motorcycle.

Perna’s paintings, which come in slim vertical slices, can be positioned any which-way to serve as “markers and/or backgrounds” for contemporary settings. “Tired Burlap” is imprinted with the black impressions of tire treads. “Diamond Points” offers rows of ivory-colored tissue diamond shapes and bare canvas. Sprightly patterns made of iron burns, coffee mug stains, film reel silhouettes, broken records, shattered light bulbs or tabloid photo-portraits turn other canvases into the equivalent of fancifully vernacular wallpaper swatches.

Perna’s framed “Common Coin Series” assemblages--each has a homemade lead coin at its center--variously commemorate an object, an idea or an activity. In “Photography” tiny camera fragments don’t give away their identity (you have to check the gallery list to understand what they are) and the lengths of film that serve as a background seem deliberately chosen for their anti-metaphoric obviousness.

Lynn Henkel, who also sojourned at CalArts has moved from semi-figurative concerns to the creation of small, perversely deadpan sculptures with a vegetative or reptilian bent.

One is a tapering vertical solid entirely covered with green leaves overlapping in strict patterns. Another piece consists of a rather “feminine” cluster of ruffle-edged white leaves that could be read as a stem-headed figure.

Snakes appear either as rubber or clay wiggles worked into a sphere format or as a tidy black writhing mass, straggling to one side, like a plant seeking sun. “Untitled (Stucco Diamonds)” translates preoccupations with repetition and motion in these pieces into more abstract form via four lengths of white diamond shapes that wriggle crazily against the wall. (Fahey-Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea, to May 28.)