Santa Monica

In the darkness Christian Boltanski’s altar-like memorials to nameless children glow like votive candles or sad, dim memories of war victims. Almost identical to the pieces he showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art last year, the wall-mounted grainy photos, biscuit tins, memento boxes and crudely wired electric lights express once again how closely Boltanski comes to creating contemporary sacred art (while tenaciously keeping alive its secular underpinnings). All the emotional components are there for making icons of the dead. Yet the gallery context acts as a subtle reminder that this is art, not religion, arguing for caution on the part of any viewer who might confuse them.

After the blatant emotionalism of Boltanski, the clinical distance of Joseph Nechvatal feels all the more intellectual. His small red, high contrast, computer/robot generated images mix high technology with nature. The results are almost as unreadable as infrared photographs to the untrained eye as they pit their technical format against fragmented images of what look like enlargements of leaves and skin. In the next space are two intriguing found objects by Ann Messner that appear to embalm energy in lead as a way of suspending time. (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., to Jan. 13.)