Wilshire Center

Evergon is a Canadian photographer who goes by a single name and conceives of his work as “homo-baroque” in style. Mockingly theatrical, his large-format Polaroids poke into various corners of art history.

“Jacob Wrestling With the Angel” borrows from Caravaggio’s sharply lit, teasingly homo-erotic figures who are pushed smack up against the picture-plane. The “angel,” a guy in a white headband trimmed with baby’s breath, pokes his head over the torso of nude Jacob--who writhes as if caught up in a particularly steamy dream--and contrives to hold his hand. One translucent wing brushes Jacob’s thigh, slyly in keeping with the biblical image in which the angel “touched the hollow of (Jacob’s) thigh.”

Two small, gauze-wrapped boys with crumpled tinfoil at their feet pose in “Cupid,” a diptych. One child holds a big album, the other balances a globe. This set piece seems evocative of the sentimental sort of Victorian photography that predated the Photo-Secessionists.

On the whole, Evergon’s figurative work seems cleverer than his still lifes. The most subtly insidious of these is probably “Squash,” a close-up view of the cut-open fruit resting on a white tablecloth, contains a fleeting memory of the 17th-Century still life masters as well as a voluptuous delight in the fruit’s interior tangle of seeds and membranes. Dangling dried chilis on the wall add a lascivious, quirkily South-of-the-border touch. (Glenn/Dash Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 26.)