Wilshire Center

If life is a stage then Laurie Pincus is a playwright turned set designer. The New York artist’s thin wooden cutout plywood figures are painted with the bright colors of a third-grade primer. They display a fascination for the theatrics of early film as well as folk art’s straightforward approach to articulating the figure. Yet despite all the melodramatic posturing the tableaux she creates are emotionally empty.

The characters, in their shallow plays with real space, feel as remote as single frames taken from an unfamiliar old movie. Titles like “Gangster, T.V. Man and Art” run by like a list of lead characters taunting the scene’s ambiguity with meaning only to let the hint drop.

As metaphors for the human condition Pincus’ characters are a bunch of wooden eccentrics, more facade than real. What makes them interesting in their flat, paper doll stylishness is the way the artist adds playful fragments of film technique to suggest states of mind. From the enlarged figurative montage in pieces like “The Witness” to the bent, ominous shadow doppelgangers in “The Shadowboxer,” Pincus translates old film devices into interesting and surprising pseudo stagecraft. Most intriguing is the rolling canvas backdrop she uses in three small wall pieces. Here the figures stay rooted while the background unfurls time, space or a dream narrative behind them. This kind of invention, recalling the rotating scenery in old Western movies, is what makes the static stylizations fun. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to April 29).