Santa Monica

Art of the Odd: Steve Galloway’s large, meticulously crafted new paintings are loaded with odd objects and goings-on that yield morality tales or fantasy scenarios of one sort or another. One or two are so obvious they fall flat: In the dusty land of “Hungry Belly,” three ceramic bowls grow on slender stems that dangle labels reading “breakfast,” “lunch” and “dinner.”

In “Migration of Light,” events are more quaint and curious. A Breughel peasant drowses under a spreading tree, oblivious to a strange procession: A dog carries a piece of architecture strapped to his back and pulls a cubic video screen that broadcasts landscape views. On top of this portable entertainment, a skeleton plays the xylophone. Mingling 20th-Century technology with 16th-Century imagery doesn’t add any particular freshness to this scene, however. It’s as if Galloway’s effortless technique and runaway imagination make it too easy for him to embroider away to his heart’s content.

A series of small carbon pencil drawings are mostly of vaguely threatening, unnatural views of such things as eerily vast and empty architecture on stilts, a “monument” created with a hulking stack of pipes and a trio of doors standing mysteriously over potholes in a field. Less ambitious but more concentrated and without the distractions of lovely color and immaculate rendering, these images have a directness the other, more archly riddling images don’t possess. (James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., to March 17.)