Santa Monica

New Mexico artist Carlos Quinto Kemm makes intimate, power-packed glass collages that have the frenzied clarity of hallucinations. He appropriates bits of macabre printed imagery, collages it to sheets of glass and adds careful detail with pigments that look like aged varnish or tin foil. The tinsely surfaces, the figures set on--and then behind glass--create that indefinite, claustrophobic space of our worst nightmares. Exotic and erotic narratives of lust, discovery, resurrection and death appear culled from a subconscious run amok, then reined in by Kemm’s innate knack for form and anecdote. The excellent “Soul’s Birth” is a Bosch-esque little figure with the head of an erupting pod and the male anatomy of an erect pine cone. “My Phoenix Love” is a queer talon-footed nude reclining in a dark arbor.

Jason Knapp is as cerebral as Kemm’s is wild. He makes free- standing constructions that bring together found and formed objects made from painted wood. Stepladders and sawhorses recur holding arrangements of such things as a huge, kitschy Indian mask, a chain saw crafted from wood, T squares, cones, pencils and references to Magritte’s “This Is Not a Pipe.” You sense that works are about the magic of making--making images, making cultures. The problem is that these are extremely well-crafted works whose direction can elude you. (Natoli Ross Gallery, 2110 Broadway, to Feb 4.)