Wilshire Center

Lance Carlson makes glossy product photographs of Cuisinarts, Braun coffee machines and Touch Tone phones. There is no observable difference between them and the multitude of similar commercial images used in advertising. Polished shells of newness imply wealth and technological superiority. Only the display of these images in the context of a gallery, instead of a sales counter, gives the work meaning as art. Like Duchamp’s ready-mades, the pictures are art because of how they are seen. Carlson’s intention is to generate confusion in the conceptual distinction between art and promotion, but it also suggests some interesting analogies for an art world turned high-powered art market.

Photographer Nic Nicosia’s high-gloss photos focus on fads, characters and urban angst rendered with the slick artificiality of a soap opera. The invented environments he fabricates, fills out with props and actors and then photographs have a surreal sense of fakery even though there is something disturbingly familiar about his scenarios. The viewer recognizes stereotypes like the well-oiled, bulging “Ken” on the beach of Hawaii or the uncertain reality of an earthquake wiping out a hospital. Like photographers Patrick Nagatani and Andree Tracey, who capture the half-cracked mentality of a world shaped by 40 years under the threat of the bomb, the violence and danger Nicosia whips up is tinged with an absurd sort of impersonal destiny and happenstance. It’s an awareness that feels very much a part of the contemporary experience.

Large swatches of ripped, photo-enlarged, black-and-white magazine imagery blotched with expressionist passages of paint make Kenneth Shorr’s photo constructions read like huge billboards after a storm. His Rorschach-blot approach to meaning in collage constructions like “Failure to Perceive This Popular Image Is an Indication of Pathology . . . ,” with its amalgam of borrowed media imagery, strongly recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s early collage paintings on topical subjects. Shorr’s indefinite but still harmonic works are similarly about straining cohesion and meaning from disparate pieces of reality. (Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., to Saturday.)