Wilshire Center

We all have mental pictures of natural events large and small: cyclones, phases of the moon, lightning, the simple act of dropping a rock into a pond. In his recent work, John Divola meditates on the distance between these frozen, simplified images and the nuanced complexity of real-life events. He constructs engagingly raffish mock-ups of natural scenes with wildly painted papier-mache and photographs them in black-and-white with a large-format Polaroid camera.

Resulting images reduce grandiose acts of God into simple plays of form and light, and amplify small corners of nature into exuberant fanfares. In the sequence of four photographs that make up “Cyclone on the Beach,” a cone shape gradually darkens, shadows deepen and “stars” emerge on the gray “sky” backdrop. In “Splash,” a papier-mache rock churns up a frankly fake wake of choppy brush strokes on a painted body of water.

Most works have a strong, elemental visual appeal especially “Lightning,” with its trio of whisper-thin, vertical white lines cutting through a drippy gray-black ground. As Divola writes, his work is about “accident, gesture, process and a melancholy faith.” (Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 17.)