La Cienega Area

John Mottishaw’s tree limb forms move though space with the grace of a sumi brush stroke before resolving into delicate linear cranes, wolves, snakes and crows. Yet for all the elegance there is more than a touch of whimsy to the gangling animals with spindly legs. The bodies may retain the fluid spontaneity of a tree limb but the realistically carved heads have a loony, cartoon quality that, in pieces like “Mated Pair” is delightful. Playful and inventive, these eucalyptus branch animals come across like a James Surls kind of sculptural shorthand for obscure old myths and fables.

When Mottishaw lets go of the animal form, as he does in the bronze human-headed “Three Graces” and “The Hill That Gave Birth to A Mouse,” the work loses much of its sly humor and revels instead in its abstract underpinnings. This makes the landscape and three stick figures seem incomplete. They can’t make the multilayered transformation of the other pieces where nature becomes art then becomes an anthropomorphic parable that flows back again to nature.

Julie Scott’s paintings wage a range war of cryptic but dire inflection. In her first L.A. showing she renders the ground a desolate hot bed of vibrantly painted symbols and marks. The earth vibrates with incomprehensible signs as scattered pieces of trash and pebbles, thistles and barbed wire pop out from all the activity like irradiated islands of calm. In this insane wasteland, animals and humans merge into silent, haunted composites. There is an alluring charm to Scott’s colorful flashes of landscape and the gentle animals she pictures. But that only leads to a potent sense of vulnerability. Terror and helplessness cease to be species specific in the face of this kind of unnamed, ubiquitous danger. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Dec. 31.)