Santa Monica

Southern California artist Stephen Kafer uses ordinary building materials, painstaking craft and a geometric vocabulary in sculpture that suggests a standoffish, politely academic interpretation of Constructivist notions.

“Wedgeway,” a steel-framed doorway attached to a chest-high wedge of patinated copper, doesn’t quite succeed. The same lack of presence bedevils “Corrine’s Walk,” a long sheet of glass clamped horizontally into a rusted metal framework that also expands in other directions to enclose a couple of rectangular sheets of steel. A carefully pieced-together copper box comes along for the ride.

Faiya Fredman comes a cropper in another way, by trying to construct a reverie around the shapes of plumbing fittings.

Inspired by viewing a demolished home, she has produced sand-sprinkled paintings of over-life-size gray or softly rust-colored pipes. Some of these “K Series” pieces involve multiple paintings jazzed up with insertions of black-painted corrugated cardboard. But the effect is too jauntily arbitrary, the cardboard serving neither to add a formal rigor nor to enrich the fanciful aura Fredman seems to be after.

But even these “no-frills” paintings--hung at wildly skewed angles as if to give them a spurious liveliness--seem too simple-minded. Muting every surface with sand is like shooting all one’s film with the same filter. Modulated color and large, gently delineated shapes make a beginning, but can’t carry the whole show. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., to July 30.)