Santa Monica

Eric Magnuson’s savvy mixed-media work seems concerned with shifts in the impact of language over time, with variable meanings of creation and with personal identity. The young CalArts graduate recycles ponderous ruminations about the sources of art and social behavior, using formats reminiscent of the “shaped poetry” once popular in Modernist circles.

The most eye-catching piece is “A Typical Whorl,” a huge spiral on a white ground. It is made of words pieced together, ransom-note style, from individual letters printed in varied arty, Modernist type faces. The cautious, message is: “A mortal must think mortal and not immortal thoughts.”

Whorls, of course, are usually associated with fingerprints, the indisputably “authentic” marks of personal identification. Other works by Magnuson slyly conflate this meaning with other notions. In “Untitled (Signage),” a single hugely enlarged pattern of fingerprint whorls is printed in a grid of yellow, red, blue and black squares--the basic palette of color reproduction. This “sign” reads as a highly original creation, even though it was reproduced via a workaday photo-etching process and contains a graphic format that has become a modernist cliche. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1542 10th St., to Nov. 4).