Wilshire Center

The name Hudson Marquez may not ring a bell, but his Cadillac Ranch--a bunch of upended Cadillacs buried off Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas--is likely to jog some memories. Marquez was also a co-founder of Ant Farm, a conceptual and video art group based in San Francisco, and of TVTV, a “guerrilla TV” group. His series of mixed-media drawings, “Single Bullet Theory,” are media-wise, art-savvy images of events surrounding the assassination of John Kennedy 26 years ago.

Many of the opinions represented in texts that are part of the workmanlike drawings seem to come from the mind of some low-life scumbag yapping at the heels of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby. In “Four Jackie Oh’s,” images of Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, status symbol brand names and snippets of outrageous gossip are displayed below four identical Warhol-esque heads of the President’s wife. Other images evoke the racist underbelly of Dallas, the small-time smarmy world of Ruby’s nightclub, the hangers-on, the maligned Life magazine cover of Oswald with his rifle (“conviction in a snapshot”) and the Oswald shooting captured live on TV.

The series effectively sums up the incredible mix of fact, fantasy, hatred, ambition, pettiness and outlandish trivia that were funneled through the media to a ravenous public. Shifting back and forth between public and private attitudes, Marquez appears to turn himself into a neutral dispenser of information while actually exposing the complex and illusory nature of historical “truth.” (Zero One Gallery, 7025 Melrose Ave., to Thursday.)