West Los Angeles

Totally at home with narrative assemblage, Janice Lowry makes anxious, occasionally droll little commentaries on life. Evidently sent spinning by the last good quake, her latest painted Cornell-like boxes are tight little cosmic question marks that mumble somewhat distractedly about fractured order and natural instability.

Rife with sprung clock springs, measuring stick figures and skeletal ladders, the pieces develop an idiosyncratic cast of characters representing an increasingly dislocated state of mind. Pieces such as “Shutting Up Like a Telescope” are like a William T. Wiley version of “Alice in Wonderland” and jewels of understated bewilderment and tension.

All the wit that so enlivens the assemblage boxes is absent from Lowry’s gouache and oil pastel drawings on paper. These images of vague figures lost in “Low Clouds” or “Hazy Sunshine” put the individual at the mercy of the weather. But as drawings they are as bland as visuals for the TV weather report. (Art Space, 10550 Santa Monica Blvd., to Nov. 4.)