Hollywood

Barbara Foster makes moody lithographs from photos taken at the empty Alcatraz prison--images of alienation and confinement. Originally part of the San Francisco “Artists at the Rock” exhibit on the island, the images are all deep shadow and crisscrossed patches of bright light. Foster’s additions of drawing and subtle color tap into almost tangible human presence left in the abandoned buildings. But in her high-contrast studies of rusting bathtubs, cold steel bunks and grill-covered windows, she comes to a poignant equivalent for the psychological desolation of the outcast--estrangement as a mind set. In images like the subtly altered untitled photograph that shows a pool of standing water reflecting a barred window, light becomes the symbol for what is both forbidden and locked out by the darkness within.

Where Foster concentrates on the architectural linearity of prison bars, Masafumi Maita is intrigued by the spontaneous lines in barren trees. His wall-mounted nylon rope sculptures resemble tattered nets or spider webs stretched into geometric shapes bound here and there with fragments of colored cloth and string. As much as the intersecting lines recall the stark linearity of a winter tree’s canopy, the man-made materials also suggest a bedraggled children’s game of cat’s cradle or wind ripped sails. This merger of the natural and artificial world is one of the strengths of this work. It allows us to see in the convoluted winding of “Root No. 4” parallels between the intricacy of a root system and the obsessive activity of puzzle makers who make art. (Space, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., to Feb. 25.)