Prints Charming

The friendly gallery space on the first floor of the Lankershim Art Center is a home base for the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, which presents members’ work throughout the year. But printmakers need love and margin for creative stretching too--like any artists.

Take, for example, the current exhibition here, “Contemporaries 12.” It flaunts much more than just the printmakers’ medium, yet somehow the divergent pieces cohere into a show in which the theme is the way creativity can redefine itself and transcend its tools.

Curator Jean Burg’s own works on view depart the furthest from printmaking, giving a kind of creative license for others in the show. Burg’s brightly colored three-dimensional relief sculpture, “Coba,” is made from an odd industrial plastic material, painted with acrylic and assembled into wavy bands that jut from the wall with panache. It’s like a kinder, more organic variation of Frank Stella’s sculptural entanglements.

Renee Amitai shows both a small monoprint, “Reve d’Evasion,” and, for contrast, two large abstract oil paintings limited to a harsh palette of red and black. These canvases are full of slashing gestures and bursts of visual energy, in which the stark colors vie for dominance and charge the air.

Another artist veering in different directions is Preston Craig, who shows both a computer-generated print and the acrylic painting “Of Such We Are Made,” with floral imagery and allusions to forces of nature and innocent beauty.

The complement of print works in the show is hardly bound by a similar outlook or style. A nice, loose figurative approach lends a floppy charm to Masha Schweitzer’s “Still Life With Mexican Toy,” while Barbara Salanitro’s “Transformation Series” presents variations and mosaic-like repetitions, with apologies to Warhol, on the theme of mannequin heads.

References to local calamities include Dona Geib’s “Malibu Fire,” a digital inkjet piece with incendiary, semiabstracted light as its subject, and Joy Chapman’s “Seismicity.” In yet another distinct corner of this definitively diverse exhibition, John Greco’s “Around Midnight” boasts a disarming simplicity and apparent naivete. In this triptych, things go bump, and seek form, in the night.

* “Contemporaries 12,” through May 25 at Lankershim Art Center Gallery, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. 3-6:30 p.m., Thurs.-Sat.; (818) 752-2682.

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Ghostly Grace: Out at the Village Square Gallery in Montrose, a two-person show aspires to a balance between two and three dimensionality and between stark reportage and fanciful sculptural inventions. Somewhere in the middle, they meet--or at least peacefully coexist.

Photographer William Rehm’s black-and-white photography works best when he explores his intrigue with things antique and dilapidated. He seeks ghostly beauty in the trash heap, in stark landscapes and in forgotten towns. The where of his images is as important as the what.

He has a good eye for found beauty, in sometimes unexpected places. Stacked wood in Ojai, a heap of battered rusty cans in Rhyolite, Nev., or the chiaroscuro-like dance of shadows on craggy rock formations in Arches National Park, Utah, make for striking imagery.

On the gallery floor, Andrea Wood shows something completely different. Her mixed-media constructions are lighthearted and almost cartoony. Colors are loud and cheery, decorations come in goopy, puzzle piece-like shapes and the wood structures themselves evoke a refreshing frothiness, like furniture of ambiguous usage, from another planet, perhaps.

* William Rehm and Andrea Wood, through May 30 at Village Square Gallery, 2418 Honolulu Ave. Suite C, Montrose. 1-5 p.m., Thurs.-Sat., (818) 541-9952.