La Cienega Area

Three woman--two California veterans of the 1989 Whitney Biennial and a widely exhibited West German--have produced a strong group of conceptually oriented works.

Meg Webster fashions materials from the natural world into massive, simple sculptural shapes. “Concave Earth” is a 15-foot wide pit of gently sloping packed earth, kept in place by a self-effacing wire fence. The piece dams up the vastness and awesomeness of nature into an immaculate package that retains the smell and the palpable reality of the real thing. Webster’s “Star Tank” is exactly that: a massive steel enclosure in the shape of a star filled with slightly brackish water. The inner portions of the rim rise slightly above the water level--contradicting the viewer’s impulse to see the entire figure as an indissoluble whole--and the impurities in the water counteract its invisibility.

Liz Larner’s “Come Together” is a huge rag-tag Maypole made of bits and pieces of plastic, rubber, metal, carpet and multicolored fabric with a high man-made fiber count. The crass materials and discontinuous treatment of form suggests a jaundiced metaphor for cultural pluralism. Larner’s floor piece, “One Two Three”--a trio of sagging purple fabric sacks shaped like quotation marks and wrapped with lengths of wire--turns the sober legacy of an Eva Hesse into creatures vaguely reminiscent of Slinky toys.

Rosemarie Trockel’s idiosyncratic view of the world takes various forms, including sly, quizzical installations and “knit paintings.” In “Untitled (Pro),” a black-and-white striped swatch of machine-made knitting with the word PRO incorporated into the design looks like a blown-up detail of a man’s shirt. Distorted from being stretched on a rectangular support, these stripes are a world apart from the purity of minimal painting. Other issues swirling around this provocative piece include the curious ways of consumer-culture (you needn’t be a professional at any sport to wear a shirt with this logo); the relationship between “high” art and craft, craft and mass-production; and the contemporary status of “woman’s” work. (Stuart Regan Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to March 2.)