Dissecting Language of Space in 3-D

As a sculptor, Tiffanie Morrow takes the language of space quite literally. She diagrams it, much the way sentences are diagramed in school.

Remember diagraming sentences? A branching linear structure is carefully drawn to locate the logical, systematic relationships among a sentence’s subject, verb, object, modifiers and so on. Now, imagine removing the words from the linear structure, making the structure three-dimensional and arranging it on the floor, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the disconcerting look of Morrow’s two largest sculptures at Newspace Gallery.

These exceedingly spare, linear floor sculptures are made from layered canvas and lengths of wood and cardboard, all painted a flat white. One is nearly 7 feet square, the other is a big rectangle, more than 26 feet long and 8 feet wide.

Although reminiscent of architectural floor plans, they differ substantially in having a third dimension. The structure’s spindly “branches” reach out at various angles, sometimes standing several feet tall.

These pseudo floor plans don’t quite look like any place you’d immediately recognize. But their eccentricity pulls you in close to scrutinize how they’re made--and to puzzle out what exactly these unusual structures are.

Oddly, this process of examination and discovery begins to create the very sense of place that an architectural floor plan can only point to. As with a diagramed sentence, the complex of relationships has been plainly spelled out, but the resonance of meaning finally eludes any rational system of explanation.

The show also includes eight small sculptures affixed to the gallery walls, most of them just below chest height. Variations on a theme, each of Morrow’s wall sculptures is a small wooden shelf, 4 1/4 inches wide and 3 1/2 inches deep. All but one are painted flat black.

Like the floor sculptures, the wall works demand intimate, up-close viewing. Sometimes the shelf’s surface is carefully incised with geometric lines, sometimes it’s wholly or partly painted a soft and earthy green.

Little planes, cubes and blocks made from cardboard are affixed to one of the shelf’s five exposed sides--clustered on top like a skyline, suspended below like a stalactite, precariously attached to an edge. The sixth side, which is where the sculpture attaches to the wall, thus lays claim to the entire gallery room as an essential element in its quirky little essay on the dynamics of architectural space.

If the floor sculptures recall floor plans, the wall sculptures are akin to architectural models. But neither floor plans nor models can articulate a true experience of space, limited as they are to functioning as illustrations of an absent place. Morrow’s provocative sculpture, with its roots deep in Minimalist art, communicates a highly specific language of space, and it manages to speak in a wholly original voice.

* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through April 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cultivated Randomness: Patrick Nickell’s lovely pencil drawings seem like gentle memorials to a passing world, a world formed through an intricate fusion of nature and industry. All vertical, they occupy a newly familiar territory in the Postmodern nether land, somewhere between representation and abstraction.

Visually the images at Kohn Turner Gallery recall seaweed, vines, thickets and brambles, as well as the decorative, man-made counterparts of organic plant life that get rendered in wrought iron and lace. Likewise, the overall shapes of the tightly packed pictures bring to mind amoebas, hives, wreaths, trellises and ponds. Yet none are descriptive of any particular phylum of plant or any specific garden gate.

Instead the compositions feel utterly random, as if the drawings had been doodled into existence. There’s no telling where Nickell began to draw and where he ended, and no singular focus can be identified. Your eye just jumps into the fray and begins to follow the contours of a seemingly haphazard pattern. The path can be circuitous and lead to countless other avenues, or it can be a blunt dead end.

For all that, Nickell has carefully orchestrated these pictures. He distributes flat gradations of graphite gray to infuse his linear patterns with a seductive illusion of depth and airy openness. Sometimes the graphite is dense and black, the pencil having practically engraved the paper; elsewhere it’s so spare the silver tracery skims lightly across the surface. Between the unmistakable assertion of casual randomness and an obviously careful sense of composition, the best of these uncanny drawings have the buoyant feel of wandering thoughts interrupted by small epiphanies.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-3469, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fashionable Designs: A kind of post-slacker Surrealism marks the seven new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Keith Mayerson. Collectively titled “Monty’s Dream: The Sleeper in the Valley,” their unusually inventive, nonlinear narratives are composed from a distinctive fusion of erotic stimulation, political cynicism and science-fiction dreaminess, all accented by a cheerful embrace of pop commerce and a hovering specter of death. The vulgar energy of Mayerson’s enterprise keeps things hopping, even though the small main room at Richard Telles Fine Art is overstuffed with too many large canvases (each is 5 by 7 feet).

In the two strongest works--”Detail 2” and “Detail 3”--a lurid palette of high-keyed pastels and acidic yellows and greens is played against large expanses of bright, white canvas. Colorful renderings of nerdy faces, cartoonish ghosts, growling dogs, gesturing hands, pools of water and more are interrupted with bits of writing. Obdurately making fun of academic art-and-text works, the writing styles recall graffiti, ‘zines, advertising type and penmanship class.

Mayerson’s paintings aggressively court a hip, up-to-the-minute fashionability. (The color scheme alone speaks of an intense fashion-consciousness.) That’s part of their strength, however, because pretensions about the exaltation of timeless values are traded in for an edgy commitment to evanescent uncertainty, which is fashion’s drive shaft. The result is a body of unusually hopeful paintings, less concerned with making authoritative statements than with preparing a field that is ready for civilized discourse.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.