Wry View of Suburbia’s Bland Sameness

America as social dystopia has become almost as familiar a theme in late 20th century art as America the natural utopia was in the late 19th. Jane Dickson, whose intriguing recent paintings are on view at Sandroni Rey Gallery, is preoccupied with “the spoiled view.” In earlier work, she gazed down at gritty, nighttime street life from her former studio overlooking Times Square, or she peered into others’ windows to record the lone figures staring back at her. Her new paintings veer away from life on the edge to focus on the dead center. Suburbia, in all of its bland ubiquity, gets what it deserves in Dickson’s disquieting, gently ironic work.

Painting directly onto carpet or artificial turf gives Dickson’s work an immediate novelty, but such gimmickry usually has all the lasting appeal of a trick candle that sparks up again and again in exactly the same way until it’s no longer amusing. Here, however, the use of carpet and turf ultimately compounds the quiet power of Dickson’s vision by fully, literally integrating surface and content.

Synthetic, machine-woven carpet makes a fitting foundation for views of generic tract homes that are commonly filled with the stuff. Comfort and convenience define the suburban American dream, not character. The snug uniformity that Dickson evokes in her iconic portraits of houses has its appeal, but it also has a price: It comes at the expense of soul.

The bumpy surfaces Dickson works on cause the contours of her images to disintegrate in a way that’s reminiscent of the grainy quality of bad television reception. TV sets gleam from a few of the paintings here, beckoning a visitor inside in one, and mesmerizing a child into her own private reverie in another. They serve at once as comfort, temptation, solace. Such still, psychologically charged spaces, articulated in dramatic contrasts of light and dark, invite comparison to Edward Hopper, but Dickson’s work also has some of the cool horror of Lewis Baltz’s photographs of office parks.

A third group of paintings, representing circus scenes and painted on the conventional support of stretched linen, comes as something of a redemption after the works on carpet and AstroTurf. Circus culture has its glamorous and its seedy sides, and Dickson opts for the brightly appealing and innocent. In an image diametrically opposed to the stifling conformity of suburbia, she paints a trapeze artist swinging through space as freely and gracefully as a bird. The bold stripes of the tent buckle sweetly behind her, like lips puckered for a kiss.

The circus may be an American institution, but joining it has become emblematic of the desire to break free from conventional life, to escape from the world housed in the bland boxes of Dickson’s other paintings. Cumulatively, Dickson’s work ends up being more complicated than a mirror reflecting our acculturated desires. It functions instead like a prism, delivering several views of several different American dreams.

* Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through June 5. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

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In Concept: Considering that Jennifer Bornstein’s work presumes to be about place--in memory, imagination and reality--it’s dismaying to conclude of her current show at Blum & Poe Gallery that there’s no there there. A young L.A. artist, Bornstein aligns herself with a currently hip, Conceptually driven practice of photography, but it would take quite a generous scraping together of the inconsequential elements here to muster up anything quite as substantive as a concept.

In the main room, Bornstein has erected a wall with plywood viewing platforms a few inches high and extending from either side. On one side of the wall hang three color photographs that follow the conventional format of family pictures, with the artist and one or two others in friendly contact and in neutral outdoor settings.

On the opposite side, Bornstein projects a short film composed of individual shots of those different settings: a paved path through a grassy park, grass bordered by palm trees, an expanse of rocks, and so on. Because the camera never moves within each shot, the film plays like a tedious slide show, and none of the components of the installation reward attention.

Another short (and equally banal) film, projected in the gallery’s back room through a gratuitous wood and mirror periscope device, shows numerous colored yin/yang symbols grouping, twirling and dispersing.

The only work here that shows evidence of a creative pulse is Bornstein’s slender book, titled “Documentation of Events That May Not Have Taken Place.” Finally, something for the mind and the eye to latch on to, a brief narrative of the artist’s experience as an assistant to a photographer (Sophie Calle, who goes unnamed), who documents other people’s possessions. Bornstein accompanies her text with photographs of, presumably, her employer’s possessions, and her short tale engages just enough irony, tension and deadpan humor to prove her capable of far more than she delivers in this show.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through May 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Roadside Attractions: Graciela Iturbide credits the patriarch of Mexican photography, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, with instilling in her a conscientiousness about her own country. Since working as his assistant nearly 30 years ago, Iturbide has created a body of work remarkable for its intimacy with several different cultures within Mexico, their ceremonial traditions and daily practices. In her current show at the Gallery of Contemporary Photography, Iturbide has shifted locales--to the American South--and by extension, her mode of registering its character.

Typically, she envelops herself in the community she photographs; these pictures result from a road trip, a brief pass-through in 1997. Many are titled with highway numbers and pairs of place names that straddle the site of the image, as in “Highway 61: From Memphis, Tennessee, to Clarksdale, Mississippi.” Intimacy, then, is hardly a defining characteristic.

Instead, Iturbide eyes the places she passes from a physical distance, as well as a psychological remove. Though the “Flatlands” photographs don’t penetrate to the soul of a place or a people, they have tremendous formal integrity and quiet, studied grace.

Iturbide layers textures and translucencies beautifully in these unpeopled images, much as the traditional and the contemporary, the spirit and the flesh are conflated in her chronicles of Mexico’s indigenous cultures. A dense filigree of vines squeezes the walls of a roadside shack. A nest of dried ivy blots out the words on a road sign with its own indecipherable calligraphic tangle. Telephone wires stripe the sky; birds pepper it. Her own shadow stains a grassy field.

A few of Iturbide’s classic images appear here, too, and a fine suite of recent images from India, enough to remind that her photographs of the American South are elegantly designed sets, but not the real drama. They are not destinations in themselves, but attractive diversions along the way.

* Gallery of Contemporary Photography, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Up and Down: Michael Stolzer’s luminous “Heaven and Earth” paintings are the standouts in an otherwise only mildly satisfying three-person show at Louis Stern Fine Arts. Landscapes distilled to a low horizon and occasional silhouetted trees, Stolzer’s paintings feel like dense dramas played out solely in terms of darkness and light.

Painted in oil and alkyd on wood, their streaked and dripped honey-gold skies conjure the intensity and uncontrollability of natural phenomena, such as fire. The wood-grain pattern of the panels seems to contribute to the fluidity of the skies, which, at their loosest, look like brushed-on photo-emulsion or layers of varnish. The extremity of their darkness and the intensity of their light lift these images beyond representation to the level of metaphor.

Allen Hirsch paints urban views that get bogged down by the weight of their own heavily textured surfaces. His “Brooklyn” shows an uncharacteristically light touch, harmonizing cool shadows on one side of a quiet street and the warm light of dawn or afternoon on the other. More typically, Hirsch wields a leaden palette knife and suffocates the charm of his observations beneath muddied layers of paint.

Dan Abramson’s “lost paper” collages--made by a transfer process rather than gluing--read like nostalgia-infused pages of a collective scrapbook. Familiar cultural icons appear (the writer Solzhenitsyn, the painter Gorky, the financier J.P. Morgan), along with bean can labels, shopping lists, travel advertisements and old photographs of buildings, streets and movie theaters.

Abramson builds slight constellations of meaning within each image. “Magic,” for instance, pairs the stenciled word “abracadabra” with the label from a package of Prozac. Though hardly profound, these collages effectively evoke the texture of memory, its eroded edges and amusing, associative logic.

* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-0147, through May 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.