Santa Monica

Barbara Kasten has been shooting glossy, vividly colored neo-Constructivist images throughout the ‘80s. In her recent “Architectural Site” photography series, images of urban American buildings are sliced up into geometric shapes that tilt and carom across the paper in high-voltage Cibachrome. The Japanese Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art becomes a series of quick hits: a blur of rocks and trees, pink and blue columns and glimpses of other architectural details in jolting bright green, red and orange. In a more reflective mood, “Juxtaposition: Site 4” offers a view of the East Hampton, N.Y., studios of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Pollock’s memory dominates the image, which contains a wood floor spritzed with the traces of poured paint and a photograph of the painter tacked up on an old red garden shed.

Elizabeth Bryant seems to be in the process of refining her large-scale photograms filled with small everyday objects. But new “Flash Card” pieces introduce another level of cryptic content. In one of these is a photogram in the silhouette of a giant key. It contains floating images of such things as pearls, a shield, a doily and a phone receiver, as well as a series of phonetically related three-letter words. The piece also contains a list of simple words all beginning with the letters “Ki.” It is unclear whether Bryant expects the viewer to piece together some social meaning out of such clues or whether these pieces relate strictly to linguistic matters--and if so, what the overriding issue is. We need a key to follow Bryant’s mental processes.

A selection of Ed Ruscha’s lithographs from the ‘70s has the warm appeal of a greeting from an old friend. A number of these works employ water-drop imagery, as in “Vanish,” with its barely readable title word spelled out in drying droplets on a gray ground. In another, more complexly teasing vein, “Western Blind” drops the slanting orange shadow of a rodeo fence over a pale brown wood grain pattern. (Krygier Landau Contemporary Art, 2114 Broadway, to Dec. 30.)