Santa Monica

Jon Kessler’s large constructions mimic walls yet suggest whole buildings in abbreviated shorthand. Partly well crafted minimalist objects, the aluminum struts, wallboard and braces illuminated from the inside with fluorescent lights gain their edge from the way a single wall’s construction can echo the overall configuration of a glass office building. Kessler pushes the poetry of that rather mundane observation along by seeing architecture’s walls as curtains and using light to create a sense of theater.

His most intriguing pieces are quite literally off the wall. They involve a roll of rusting fencing material and a light source on a motorized pulley that moves slowly up and down behind it. Ever changing shadows from the coiled material are cast onto a foggy piece of curved plastic for a lovely, albeit romantic, view of a building stripped down to its girders.

Kessler seems to be trying to touch on issues like the economy by making credit cards block the light source on one piece. But the theatricality and genuine beauty of many of the light effects is too overwhelming to be disturbing. Even the refinery-in-a-crate synchronized lights of “American Landscape” are too charming to consider for long as a warning about the eventual depletion of natural resources. (Luhring Augustine Hetzler, 1330 4th St., to Jan. 13.)