Humble Rug Made Lofty by Leachman

Kristin Leachman isn’t the only artist who feminizes the hard edges of the Minimalist grid, but she does so with an earnestness unusual among her peers. Leachman’s vibrantly beautiful paintings at Newspace appear from a distance to be hooked and braided rugs hanging on the wall. Painted “braided” stripes of color meander down each panel in a consistent pattern, but with all the lumpy irregularity of plaited yarn or fabric. It’s a gentle homage to the handworked rug, and Leachman weaves into it a quiet nostalgia that feels refreshingly free of irony.

Two of the three large paintings hanging in the main gallery--”Rhyme and Reason” and “Bird in Hand”--bear titles that bring to mind the truisms on needlework samplers. The third, “Field and Stream,” conjures another slice of mainstream Americana, through a luminous, shimmering orchestra of color. Like variegated yarn, the colors braided into rows in the painting continually vary in intensity, creating a seductive, ever-shifting surface.

Leachman’s pencil drawings also evoke the padded softness of braided rugs, but more ambiguously. The individual pencil lines double as strands of hair, transforming the rug surface into a poetically inspired field of braided tresses. Leachman’s technique is meticulous and exquisite. In a few of the drawings, it reveals itself in areas where the pattern is outlined but not filled in or fleshed out. The predictability of the pattern offers the reassurance of the known, the familiar, while the nuance in Leachman’s own touch lifts the process into a higher realm.

Process itself is key to meaning here. Leachman hints as much by titling many of the works with a month or time of day, reinforcing the link between the doing of the work and its ultimate being. In translating the humble, repetitive action of braiding and hooking rugs into the medium of painting, Leachman shifts the terms of the works’ reception considerably, from domestic setting to rarefied art site, from the floor to the wall. But the transcendent, meditative potential of the repetitive act remains the same, binding her work in spirit to artists like Ann Hamilton or Agnes Martin. Like them, Leachman renders the humble sublime.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-1120, through May 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cameron Jamie’s photographs and drawings at Richard Telles Gallery wrestle with weighty themes of sex, violence, death, artifice--and the not-so-weighty theme of wrestling itself. They don’t bear the weight well. The best that can be said about them is that they lack pretense and occasionally muster up a glimmer of perverse charm.

Jamie, a young L.A. artist in his first solo show here, appears in many of the small snapshots that he assembles in grids and strips. He wears a mask with garish red lips, a black fluffy wig and white, full-body long underwear that opens from time to time to reveal an artificially padded posterior. The theatrical get-up puts him on par with his wrestling partner, a Michael Jackson impersonator, who pins him to the floor and pulls his hair as they grope and grab in an erotically tinged tussle on the carpet.

This is “apartment wrestling,” a domestic version of the sport that Jamie affectionately defines as “purely a form of theater that insults your intelligence.” In his photographic works, Jamie intersperses snapshots from such bouts with pictures of staged death scenes, haunted-house style, as well as images of cats, which one has to pity for getting mixed up in all of this.

Influenced by masked and costumed Mexican wrestlers, who enjoy near-mythic status in their culture, and the low-budget rawness of American public-access television, Jamie turns out work that pushes provocative buttons with absolute clumsiness and puerile humor. His doodle-like drawings, sometimes peppered with violent quotes from pro wrestlers, are no better.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through May 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Ron Pippin calls his current show at Sherry Frumkin Gallery “Archives and Armor,” and through his intriguing work we come to see how those two different things share a common purpose: to protect life. Pippin’s work dances around that impulse and occasionally penetrates it with great poignancy. His is an accretive sensibility, hungry to gather and retain objects that resonate with use and experience, from feathers, bones and old photographs to dried-out tea bags and bronzed baby shoes.

Pippin makes books that don’t open but whose covers bear talismans like butterflies and lizard skins, and whose edges are crowded with tabs and markers, assuring that material of great significance lies bound within. He takes taxidermied animals and compensates for their vulnerability by supplying them with prosthetic devices, strapping crutches on a dog, a metal beak on a rabbit. Odd, disturbing and a bit too heavy-handed, the sculptures nevertheless haunt the gallery with the presence of expired lives.

Just what does a life add up to? Pippin’s trunks and archive boxes don’t suggest answers as much as different ways to approach the question. The trunks, in their dense display of paraphernalia (one features, among hundreds of objects, a shaving brush, vials of blood-red liquid, church vestments, numerical lists, old photographs, an enshrined goblet, a pair of white gloves) must be surrendered to as much as studied. They are overwhelmingly rich in clues to a mystery that from the start is clearly unsolvable.

A series of glass cases containing bundles of old papers suggests a rational, even taxonomic approach to defining a life. One case holds three distinct piles, labeled “Acts of Courage,” “Acts of Faith” and “Acts of Grace.” The papers, yellowed and brittle, can’t be read, since they are stacked, but protruding fragments show printed musical scores and product information, not a personal manuscript of any kind.

Pippin has worked before with mythic and religious subjects, and here, it’s as if he’s stripped away such belief systems to expose the utter fragility and transience of our lives. These cases and trunks mirror our efforts to save what we’ve done, who we are, what we’re made of. It’s a futile impulse, but irresistible. We might be able to reconcile ourselves to the ravages of time, but never to the erosive power of apathy.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through April 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Jimmy Ong comes from Singapore, was trained in the U.S., France and Italy, and lives in New York. In his commanding recent drawings at Dagmar/China Cultural Arts Gallery, Ong stages both real and metaphoric encounters between two people in a style that fuses muscularity and calligraphic musicality, fusing the divergent traditions that he’s absorbed.

The figures, slightly larger than life size in the drawings, are rendered in charcoal with a vital sense of line and palpable mass. Ong’s technical prowess shines particularly in his images of seamstresses stitching or measuring, for the women work not on fabric but on the skin of another human--a human form divested of weight and life. In “So and So,” the figure being sewn folds in on itself in a deflated heap, overflowing the seamstress’ lap. In another, it is splayed out across the ground, limp and benign.

Ong takes an understated approach to the narrative possibilities here, yet the images are quietly suggestive. He represents those with the needles and tape as female and the work at hand as male though, throughout, the figures are largely androgynous, even though nude. The woman consistently acts upon the man, yet she assumes her power with mild equanimity and expressionless calm. She may be his creator--as “Stitching Deity” suggests--but her meditative engagement with her work endows equal status to them both.

* Dagmar/China Cultural Arts Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-5686. Closed Mondays.