Wilshire Center

Photographer and painter Jim Morris tries to capture something of the ambiguity of the Post-Modern psyche--you know, that niggling, self-absorbed mental state that keeps casting mankind’s past on top of the present in an attempt to create meaning. It’s a complex realm of ideas, but one that Morris negotiates without much difficulty in his photographs.

His small brownish-silver prints are the potent carriers of an intangible sense of something meaningful hidden in the past but influencing the present. These are composite images, sandwiched in the enlarger, that form mysterious combinations of landscapes and architecture. Frequently, Morris will use an expanse of land to draw the viewer into the picture, past an insubstantial historic image of burnt-out or crumbling architecture. As the eye follows the perspective deep into the landscape, the mind is imprinted with latent emotions triggered by the destruction. The result is a strong whiff of nostalgia laced by feelings of guilt or loss.

Morris’ paintings are curiously underdeveloped ideas, so vague they can only suggest the non-representational atmospheric painting of James Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.” These dreamy, insubstantial images are dense stormy skies of dark-colored washes parted by passages of steamy light that leave the viewer wondering what all the fuss is about. (Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to Oct. 14.)