Santa Monica

A Perspective on the City: Stephanie Sanchez’s unsettled paintings of Los Angeles exude a sense of slow demise and ongoing change. Her boulevards and rooftops outlining urban industrial sprawl are a hodgepodge of left-listing spindly telephone poles and palm trees, blatantly sub-texted by billboards that advertise earthquake amusement park rides and the world wrapped up in a day-old newspaper.

To a denizen of Los Angeles, the scenes are unremarkable and bland but their construction is noteworthy. Space is condensed. The horizon is forever concealed behind clustered buildings, the sky tethered securely to the near distance. The linearity of the city’s architecture divides the pictorial space into vaguely abstract piecemeal compositions that Sanchez works as independent flat parcels further chopping the city into a mishmash construction of line and shape.

Despite the familiarity of the scenes, there is something different about Sanchez’s perspective of Los Angeles. The tattered quality to her sites gives an unaccustomed sense of age to a city that likes to think of itself as still adolescent. Where the cement gives way to patches of weeds in drainage ditches and culverts, bridges seem to sit astride a boggy destiny like wooly mammoths in the La Brea Tar Pits. Her images capture something specific but it is a tentative time and place at best. (Tatistcheff Gallery, 1547 10th St., to March 24.)