Homeless Chronicles : Show offers diverse images of people who lack life’s basics.

On one level, homelessness has become a buzz word that tends to trigger both compassion and suspicion. The word and its underlying meaning can also serve as a powerful metaphor for alienated states of mind beyond physical privations.

To the credit of the current group show at the Lankershim Arts Center, called “Out of Place,” both aspects come into play.

Photojournalist Ann Marie Rousseau, noted for her work chronicling the plight of the homeless, juried the show from members of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, which makes its gallery home base here. The resulting selection is carefully diverse in scope and direction, neither burrowing into the gritty specifics nor languishing in the safe harbor of symbolism to any excess.

Jeanne Andersen’s plainly titled “Homeless” draws on the stark, ragged-edge quality of her lithography to accent the theme of alienation, as depicted in a woman and her shopping-cart home in anonymous silhouette. In Nomi Silverman’s “Queue,” a line of homeless people suggests a moment of order or structure in an otherwise all-too amorphous life of aimless need.

The link to the central theme isn’t always obvious, as with James Munce’s finely rendered images of the atmosphere inside a church. In some way, his work deals with the artifacts of faith, the apparatuses of hope rather than the precious stuff itself.

Judith Anderson minces no sentiments in “Bone Woman,” a highly detailed image of a desiccated nude woman amid scattered bones. The figure seems on the brink of death, a cautionary scenario about life without the necessities of basic sustenance.

Not all the work is so explicit. Joyce Weiss’ “The Scream” is painted in a vivid neo-Expressionist style. Stray words or block letters swimming like abstract graffiti around faces that split the difference between primitive and modernist drawing. Another image harking back to German Expressionist influence is David Rose’s linocut “War Widow.” Sentimental in an affecting way, the image conveys the desolation of a widow in bold lines and mythic edginess, echoing Kathe Kollwitz.

“Spirit House” by Renee Amital presents a simple, generic image of a house afloat in ambiguous surroundings. It appears in the form of an archetypal ideal longed for but never quite attained.

BE THERE

“Out of Place,” through Nov. 27 at the Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Gallery hours: Thursday-Sunday, 2-5 p.m. (818) 752-2682.