The Valley

Religious faith has its problems coexisting with the look and theoretical underpinnings of contemporary art. One popular way to attempt to resolve them is to borrow the look of untutored folk art. But incipient cuteness lurks for the unwary.

Redondo Beach artist Vicki Livingston marches little crosses around brightly colored paintings of flat houses and silhouetted cats and ascetic-looking female figures. “In Self-Portrait With Lotus,” tiny animals sit in the tiny windows of a lavender house, a yellow cat rises on its hind legs, three lotuses filled with tiny crosses float in the sky and a photographic image of the artist, ensconced within its own little house, sports a gold lotus necklace.

There is also a “T. S. Eliot Series” strewn with famous lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that seems scarcely connected to any of the themes or images it contains. The cat in a doorway may be related to the poem’s sustained cat-like image of yellow smoke that “licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,” and the gold silhouettes of dancing women might be the female forms that so provoked the narrator, but the passages of blue lace, the circles and the hearts and the crosses are pure Livingston.

Why she chooses such a dark view of civilization for her repetitive imagery of “spiritual evolution” is surely a mystery. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to July 30.)