Santa Monica

“Victoria” seems an odd title for works in a range of media by a passel of artists, until you see what they’re up to. As a group, these pieces share a taste for aspects of Victoriana--from fussy ornamentation to medieval revivalism and fin de siecle decadence. But nearly all the artists replace the Victorians’ cheerfully positivistic attitude with the restless, ironic attitudes of our time, yielding intriguing marriages of form and idea.

Ann Preston’s “Pendants” are a trio of giant, plump dangling bobbles in ruby velvet with fussy curves resembling double-sided silhouettes. In a set of paintings on Masonite, “Four Portraits (Echo),” Sabina Ott offers the faint, lingering traces of a portrait gallery consigned to corrosion and neglect. One of these memento mori images has the emaciated quality of a Giacometti head; another is a noble male profile furtively nibbled away by a waxy, yellowing ground.

Lari Pittman’s set of “Souvenir of This Century” paintings on paper contain clusters of old-fashioned oval-inset portrait silhouettes along with the artist’s familiar mix of energized typographic devices and fine-line doodling. The doodles--fantastic scenes of chivalry, flag-waving celebration and aquatic high jinks--leave teasingly imprecise exactly which century is being recalled.

Dede Bazyk’s triptych “The Body Is a Fence” brackets an image of an Indian contortionist between an X-ray of a hand and a drawing of a crustacean--as if to “prove” a Darwinian point about adaptive bone structure.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival, a group of South Bronx teen-agers with whom Rollins created a workshop) paint fancifully ornamental gold horns on pages of Franz Kafka’s novel “Amerika”--an activity that calls to mind both medieval manuscript illumination and the social programs of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. Tom Knechtel’s delicate silverpoint drawings breathe life into a pair of chatting rodents reminiscent of characters in “The Wind in the Willows”; his dreamy gouache, “A Congress of Wonders,” evokes an old-fashioned celestial fantasy.

The devil gets equal time in David Best’s beak-nosed portrait, framed in a gothic thicket of branches and thorns, and the balding, red-faced, horned guys Fred Stonehouse paints on pages of antique botanical and entomological drawings.

A dry echo of Wildean decadence seeps into Cliff Benjamin’s drawing “Sodomy” (the title word written in large Olde English script above a writhing floral ornamental border) and informs a series of photographs by Arne Svenson in which views of stocking-covered heads, curtains and knotholes create the effect of bizarre amateur theatricals. (Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., to Sept. 1.)