Hollywood

Three artists working in various media share a spare notion of how shapes ought to fit together. Minoru Ohira makes small, deft wall pieces with thin slices of wood, chunks of slate and twine. Some have unusual silhouettes that really click; others seem frustratingly bland or pointlessly gunked up with modeling paste. “Tortuga No. 3-89” is a mask-like shape--it looks like an ethnographic artifact--finely formed of small wedge-shaped sections of parallel bits of wood and slate, bristling with small sticks. On the other hand, “Salida del Sol No. 6-89”--a semi-circular mat of clear and colored glass shards, wood chips and wire mesh under glass--reads merely as a polite assembly of conventional textural contrasts.

Bay Area sculptor Gregg Miller collects chunks of asphalt. Sometimes he gets overly enamored of the way they look au naturel , with their splotches of yellow road-marker paint. But he also works the chunks into rough-and-ready assemblages that have a back-to-the-late ‘50s honesty about them. Using fly-away tangles of wire, found wood, old bent nails and other humble materials, he builds simple folksy structures that look a bit like stop lights or flags or railroad crossing lights. With titles like “Mind’s Eye Road” and “Staff of Knowledge Road,” these pieces have a homely charm.

Hiroo Imai is a Japanese poet and architect whose “Fence House Series” is a wispy set of pastel drawings that sketch out the boundaries of some imaginary piece of architecture with a few blurring straight lines and arrows, lots of stray fingerprints and notations like “hidden space” or “wind.” It’s all so very minimal; you get the feeling you need to crawl inside Imai’s mind to find out what’s going on here. (Space Gallery, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., to Feb. 17.)