La Cienega Area

Cynthia Ann Kelsey-Gordon, a young artist living in Santa Barbara, paints as if the world were a fresher and crazier place. With a style that seems to borrow its plump contours from American Regionalism, its brash colors from Cinemascope and its content from dreams, Kelsey-Gordon creates a set of pocket mythologies.

In “Dancing Fools,” a couple dance manically on a patch of land outside their home as if whirling at the edge of the known world. Laundry flies into a billowing wave, a curtain arcs in the breeze, a tornado gathers over the soft, pillowy landscape and a pitcher pours into a tub floating a toy sailboat. Inside the house there’s a painting of a tightrope walker balanced above water. Outdoors, a postcard with the image of a juggler wafts into the air. There’s risk afoot, all right, but these delirious folk just shine it on.

Just this side of cute, a blue clownlike figure wanders into some of these canvases, scrutinizing a handless clock in the forest in “Forever” and listening to a pair of lovers in “Surrender.” In general, the paintings work best when they merge the bizarre and the everyday in an intense and rhythmic magnification of single moments. When Kelsey-Gordon settles for evoking standard brands of escapism and mystery--as in “Alone,” “So Long” and “Where Did You Go?”--the spark just isn’t there.

Karla Holland-Scholer is another recent UC Berkeley grad school alumna in her first Los Angeles solo show. Her “constructed paintings”--made with modeling clay--are all of lone, doll-like figures in small rooms sparsely furnished with bare light bulbs, chairs, windows and ladders. These are the ambiguous settings of dreams, but most of the little tableaux come across as little more than laundry lists of Objects That People Dream About rather than actually evoking specific psychological states.

A few of the pieces offer rather outre characters (like the bald creature with bisexual organs in “Heaven”) or more clearly defined situations (like the figure floating in a roomful of water in “Waiting/Listening”) to engage the viewer’s imagination. But for the most part, the symbolic import of these scenes remains locked up in Holland-Scholer’s mind, beyond the viewer’s reach. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Sept. 2.)