Wilshire Center

Cameron Shaw’s assemblages resemble time-stiffened satchels, aged mailbags, or museum specimens from an old snake-oil sideshow. However, despite the work’s apparent age and the morbidity of many of the incorporated photographs, each piece seems to be contemplating something more enduring than preservation. Lining each case are glass bottles, filled with black ink or white powdered gesso. Their contents allude to mortal remains and lead to thoughts on the nature of immortality.

Many cases have photomontage fronts that couple a letter from the first American President to his biographer with images circa World War I. Over Washington’s remarks about his father is impressed the notion of a national First Father revered historically for honesty. This truism is unsettled only slightly by the juxtaposition of powdered white wash or liquid black ink--the things that make for good public relations if not great history.

Shaw’s photos are a curious bit of time-relative reality. They seem to root the work in a certain moment of history but are just as effective in evoking a sense of something living that has passed away. At heart Shaw’s milk-bottle boxes filled with chalk-white seem to lead toward the conclusion that all that endures is memory. But this work also appears to assert that memory is too fragile and unstable a vehicle upon which to nourish the present. (Richard/Bennett Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to June 30.)