Wonderful Tinkering by Rosen

Kay Rosen is a tinkerer, playing with words and letters as if they were discarded radio parts, odd bolts and stray pieces of wire. In her small text paintings at Richard Telles Fine Art, strange and wonderful things happen.

Questions are distilled so that they are transformed into their own answers. Words are layered so they become their opposites. Letters are switched so that the words they compose seem to reveal themselves for the first time.

It’s tempting to call Rosen a slacker semiologist. Her work is rather smart and quite dumb.

One canvas reads, “Elvis livEs.” The phrase is rendered in gold, pseudo-Gothic letters, a pat reference to both the excess and the ersatz of the King’s late years. What’s amusing is that the two words are distorted reflections of one another, precisely like the sentence they spell out: at once a cliche and a declaration of faith.

The obvious question is why transform palindromes, puns and linguistic jokes into images anyway? It’s a gratuitous move. But it’s also logical, because art is a rule-based language. Like all Postmodern hipsters, Rosen knows that it is only in the cracks and slips that art’s workings are revealed. She spells out those moments of rupture, and demonstrates that interesting work can be done there.

* Richard Telles, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.