Sly Scenes Picture a California Engulfed in Civil War

History paintings have been out of fashion for centuries, but Sandow Birk is single-handedly reviving the genre, in a manner of speaking, with a terrific body of tongue-in-cheek paintings that transplant the stylistic conventions of classical battle portraiture to the streets of contemporary Los Angeles.

“In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias,” Birk’s latest exhibition at Koplin Gallery, is undoubtedly his best yet. Chronicling a fictional civil war between Northern and Southern California, Birk’s richly rendered oil and acrylic paintings (along with a model ship, a sculpted terrain map and a dynamite group of faux political posters) are contextualized by a set of wall labels that detail the historical significance of each work on view. These labels (which, among other things, criticize the artist for his lack of imagination as a portraitist) subtly undermine the authoritarian nature of history exhibitions, while poking fun at the parched prose of museum documentation.

The corporate-sponsored ground war between “Fog Town” and “Smog Town” takes place in the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, from the Sepulveda Pass to Telegraph Hill. The brand-new Getty Center burns to the ground (a sly rejoinder, perhaps, to Edward Ruscha’s “The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire,” 1965-68), while revolutionary rappers in pink-plumed cowboy hats take to the streets on horseback, backed by a posse of streetwise soldiers: surfers, skate punks, urban cowboys, gangbangers and gardeners, many of whom wave banners emblazoned with slogans like “Pass or Don’t Pay” and ‘Free ATM!” Bloodstained laptop computers litter these battle scenes like so many severed limbs. When reinforcement troops are needed, military leaders call on Hollywood to provide more extras.

Providing stylistic inspiration for Birk’s deadpan parodies are battle portraits by French neoclassical and Romantic painters like Eugene Delacroix, Antoine-Jean Gros, Theodore Gericault and, especially, Jacques Louis David (Birk’s “Portrait of Colonel Don Ho Park,” 1998, recalls David’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” 1800).

Birk’s paintings also skewer the vanitas of California politics: the pointless cultural rivalry between the northern and southern halves of our state and the lingering resentment over the Owens Valley water wars, as well as the often-acrimonious San Fernando Valley secession movement and the recently passed (and bitterly contested) leaf-blower ordinance.

Like all good satirists, Birk’s underlying intentions are quite serious. The bloody conflagrations he portrays implicitly acknowledge the ways in which long-simmering tensions can eventually rip communities apart. Significantly, the specific reasons for the war are never outlined, nor is the conflict’s ultimate outcome revealed. Birk’s half-terrifying, half-absurd scenarios are eerie reminders of Southern California’s ongoing flirtation with apocalypse. They also presage a bloodier and even more surreal future: a revolution that not only will be televised, but will also be cybercast, sponsored by Visa and Pepsi, and made into a TV movie of the week.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 North Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 657-9843, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Elusive Moments: It’s virtually impossible to take in John Pearson’s remarkable color photographs with one passing glance; if you don’t look at his enigmatic images a second and even a third time, you’re likely to miss the point entirely.

Pearson’s conceptually based photographs at UberMain have a casual and exploratory feel. They ask deceptively simple questions about the complicated ways in which we perceive the world around us. We’re given fleeting glimpses of transitory processes and cyclical movements, like the thin rivulets of hot sauce that, like bloody tears, drip slowly down a man’s cheeks, or the undulating patterns that appear and recede as the frothy lip of the ocean’s tide licks away at the shore.

Pearson cut out captioned photographs of celebrities, sports figures, war zones and crime victims from several years’ worth of newspapers, arranged them on a hardwood surface and photographed the resulting compositions. An entire room has been wallpapered with these photocollages, offering a punning commentary on the current frenzy for “wall-to-wall” news coverage.

Another series of photographs charts the path of a nearly invisible cluster of soap bubbles as they drift lazily through an open window and across a room. Elsewhere, bleary suitcases wheel drunkenly around a revolving baggage-claim carousel. Images like these would be almost dreamlike, if they weren’t so downright ordinary. Then again, the ordinary world has always provided us with the base materials for our dreams. Like soap bubbles (and dreams), Pearson’s images elude our touch; we’re left to marvel at the clarity with which he perceives the transient nature of his surroundings.

* UberMain, 560 S. Main St. No. 3 (in the Santa Fe Building), Los Angeles, (213) 624-6525, through Oct. 30. Open Fridays and Saturdays, 1-5 p.m.

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Ordinary People: “Working Lives,” a small but immensely satisfying exhibition of paintings, drawings and preparatory studies by muralist Eva Cockcroft, offers a rare opportunity to view a decade and a half’s worth of work by a key figure in the mural movement. The Venice Beach-based Cockcroft portrays the kinetic world swirling right outside her door, often layering her canvases with competing planes of frenetic visual activity that seem to fight for your attention.

On view at A Shenere Velt Gallery, a no-frills but welcoming community space in the Pico-Robertson area, Cockcroft’s vibrant portraits of thriving neighborhood street scenes showcase her ongoing commitment to the experience of ordinary working people. Cockcroft’s large, inviting paintings throb with color and motion; there’s something happening in nearly every inch of these generous canvases.

In her Venice Beach portraits, boardwalk vendors hawk churros, sunglasses, baseball caps or brightly patterned beachwear, while roller-bladers, joggers, Muscle Beach weightlifters and weekend shoppers come to soak up the sun and gawk at the kaleidoscope of clashing hues and pulsating energy that makes Venice Beach a favorite hangout for locals and tourists alike.

Although her interests clearly lie with those whose often tedious labor makes other people’s leisure possible, Cockcroft never resorts to didacticism or melodrama to up the emotional ante, just as she refuses to romanticize or sentimentalize the prosaic. Instead, Cockcroft assumes that her subjects are innately valuable, that they are an integral, if often invisible, part of the overall system. Her portraits remind us that people need not be heroic, nor even particularly remarkable, to be worthy of representation.

* A Shenere Velt Gallery of the Workman’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, 1525 S. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 552-2007, through Nov. 2. Open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, closed Saturdays and Sundays.

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Driven: The fluid mental meanderings evoked by freeway travel are the featured attraction in Shirley Irons’ “Road Show,” an exhibition of photocollaged landscapes and small-scale paintings at Gallery Luisotti. Irons photographs freeways from the automobile driver’s point of view, takes the developed prints and rips them in half, reconfiguring the different portions into rough-hewn collages. The fragments are permanently sutured together when Irons photographs the collage and mounts the resulting chromogenic print between sheets of aluminum and plexiglass. The resulting views, like the vista seen through the driver’s windshield, can be jarring, mesmerizing, or monotonous, and are sometimes all three at once.

This recombinatory technique allows the New York-based Irons to “cut” across time and space, creating mental landscapes out of physical ones. She juxtaposes smeary fields of car headlights at night with the washed-out remains of an overcast day, or places a brightly lit patch of Southern California freeway alongside a nondescript parking lot, as if the driver had already mentally arrived at her destination.

The problem is that the grainy print quality and desaturated color in these determinedly anti-sensual photographs emphasizes cognitive processes over unconscious maneuverings. This doesn’t always serve Irons’ desire to explore the “alpha-like” state of driving, one which is, presumably, inchoate and suffused with fantasy. Irons is most successful when she allows her photocollages to swerve toward a more sensuous abstraction, a place where we’re no longer certain where the mind ends and the space beyond the windshield begins.

* Gallery Luisotti, 2525 Michigan Ave. No. A2, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Nov. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.