ART REVIEW : Exhibit Toys With Myths of Old West

David Levinthal’s large-format Polaroid prints present a glorious, playful, birds-eye view of the Wild West. In a wide and lively selection of his soft-focused, color-saturated photographs at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, tough gunslingers shoot it out, seasoned ranch hands lasso stallions, lone trappers paddle canoes, ruthless outlaws ambush stagecoaches, savvy Indians hunt buffalo and solitary women wait at home with the children.

The twist to such mythic, stereotypical images is that they’re entirely made up of little plastic toys set on table-tops--amid sand, rubber foliage and model buildings. So obvious in their cheap fakery that they never pretend to stand in for “real” scenes, Levinthal’s props are even too crude to pass as backdrops for unconvincing B-movies.

The reality his fantastic photographs depict, however, is our own. In an age shaped by television and movies, distorted myths and full-blown fantasies naturally have more resonance and power than any supposedly direct experience of what we usually think of as real.

Since Romanticism, art has struggled to bring us genuine emotions and true sentiments. Since Modernism, it has emphasized the arbitrariness of its conventions. Levinthal’s charming and charged photographs fuse these apparently contrary impulses.

Reality, it turns out, is as much a matter of facts and history as it is of fabrications and fantasies.

* Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, (213) 667-2000, through Oct. 3. Closed Mondays.