Wilshire Center

Amy Sabrina’s white earthenware teapots and other vessels suffer from terminal cuteness. Most of them offer coy catalogues of flora and fauna: fruits, flowers, bugs, cats and mutts (heads and hindquarters), painted in demure ovals and grids. The lid knobs continue the theme: a sliced watermelon standing on one end, a puppy’s tale. Cataloguing small or lovable objects might have been a wry or tongue-in-cheek endeavor, but in the work of this Minnesota ceramist, it reeks of playing to the market.

Carme Collell’s table-top earthenware pieces convey the feeling of architecture without quite delivering the substance. Curving, slant-edged walls enclose hidden pockets of space and sketchy blues and rusts (sometimes with brighter colors) hint at archways and shadows and the burnished look of old, weathered walls in Collell’s native Spain.

The goal seems to be the creation of haunting archetypal structural presences, but the results are vaguely attractive, fuzzy generalizations that need either more plausible details or a bigger dose of fantasy. (Garth Clark Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 1.)