For the Record: A Warped History Dedicated to Vinyl

“Deep Down I Don’t Believe in Hymns,” Dario Robleto’s exhibition of recent work at ACME, plunges dauntlessly into the fetishism that’s grown up around the vinyl record since the coming of the digital age. With the restless vitality of a deejay, the obsessive erudition of a record collector and the detached curiosity of a chemist, Robleto does just about everything one can do to records without playing them: He shreds them, slices them, melts them, molds them and fossilizes them, all in the service of an obscure and vaguely Victorian system of alchemy.

The largest piece in the show is “The Diva Surgery,” a glass-case laboratory crowded with a macabre assortment of containers and instruments (a lab burner, a glass breast pump, a tracheal extractor and “vintage surgical equipment,” to name a few). It features a downright bizarre collection of materials, including not only vinyl and audio tape, but sulfur, carbon, amino acids, crushed cubic zirconium, Novocain, sugar, honey, ocean water, oil, hummingbird and butterfly nectar, beeswax and polyester resin.

Robleto blends these substances in sterile jars and beakers to form compounds such as “Low End Boom,” “Honey Vocals,” “Vocal Dissolution” and “Sing Me to Sleep Mix,” which presumably stimulate reactions with the saffron-like threads of shredded vinyl--distilled diva-ness--that wait in dozens of tiny glass vials with labels such as “Peggy,” “Bessy,” “Patsy,” “Shirley,” “Ella” and “Edith.” This chemist, in other words, is a disc jockey.

The remaining works are less elaborate but equally clever. In “Dusty in Stasis (Dusty Come Back),” Robleto preserves fragments of a Dusty Springfield record in what is apparently hand-ground prehistoric amber. In “Falsetto Can Be a Weapon,” he transfigures records into tools of defense and destruction: The Carpenters’ “Hurting Each Other” becomes an arrow, Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” a spear, and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” a tomahawk.

A series of paper collages called “Chemistry in the Church” extends the scientific motif into the realm of Christian music to produce covers for fictional albums such as “Organ Favorites of the Lutheran Lunacy,” “Holy Roman Inquiry on Nanotechnology” and “Vicars for the De-Romanticization of Astronomy.”

The only material that this intelligent, conceptually thorough exhibition lacks, it seems, is sound. Or does it? Its meticulously labeled artifacts conjure voices in the memory, generating a lively internal soundtrack. One can’t help but wonder how much of this music emanates from the vinyl itself.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through Feb. 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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An Intimate Trip to Dreamland

Callum Morton’s “The Big Sleep: A Bad Dream and a Wet Dream,” the centerpiece of his exhibition at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, consists of two small twin beds installed about 6 feet above the floor on opposite walls of the gallery, like bunks in a dormitory. Sheets and thick wool blankets conceal a lump on each bed about the size of a preadolescent boy.

It’s a convincing enough arrangement to make one stop and watch for movement beneath the blankets. Instead of tossing and turning, however, the invisible bodies produce sound: a short symphony of strained, uncomfortable groans every minute or two. As the work’s title indicates, one set of groans springs from fear and the other from rapture, but they’re indistinguishable to the listener.

Like Morton’s earlier architectural installations, which re-created the exterior walls of other buildings inside the space of a gallery, “The Big Sleep” establishes a compelling interplay of presence and absence, interior and exterior, proximity and distance. It draws viewers into the intimate, voyeuristic space of a bedroom only to exclude them from the boys’ noisy interior worlds, leaving one with an unpleasant blend of guilt (for intruding) and disappointment (for not having seen more).

Also on view are digital prints from the series “Local and/or General,” a collaboration with a group called UDL, which includes Morton, Nick Hubicki and Sean Elstob. Each of these flat, colorful images depicts an iconic modernist home transformed into a familiar retail franchise, such as Home Depot and 7-Eleven.

Although commendably succinct, both bodies of work suffer from a nagging sense of conceptual frugality. The central idea upon which each hinges, while clever, fails to lead the viewer very far beyond an initial nod or chuckle, and the spare visual style fails to pick up the slack. In an effort to keep the work fashionably svelte, it seems Morton has drained it of any potentially messy significance--which is somewhat ironic, considering the subject of “The Big Sleep.” There is certainly no shortage of colorful material surging through the minds of his hidden protagonists; one wishes he had followed them a little further into it.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 525-1755, through Feb. 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Sweet Nostalgia Projected Onto Metal

Almond Zigmund’s recent photographs at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects--colorful, abstract compositions--feel like a summer ride along the coast in a vintage convertible. You’re back in high school riding with a college boy (or girl) you met over milkshakes at a snack bar, and for a moment everything in the world feels perfect. The air is sweet, the sky is clear, the sun is warm and you’re radiant.

The colors are pure nostalgic pleasure: sherbet orange, lemon yellow, lavender, sea green, coral, teal. They cut distinct, monochromatic swaths across the gracefully balanced compositions, like flattened elements of a landscape or unidentifiable details of a customized car. Occasional patches of upholstery-like floral patterns enliven the balance and lend the work a retro spin.

Digital images printed on aluminum, the works are not recognizably photographic, but seem rather like airbrushed paintings. The tones have a sweet, shallow, plastic quality that encourages a beach party vibe but is, on closer inspection, significantly more delicate than your standard issue surfboard.

Also on view are several discreet, vinyl-covered wall sculptures: slender, three-limbed forms that cling to the corners of the room like a very pretty species of mold. Like the photographs, these works flirt with a nostalgic and relatively banal aesthetic--they call to mind the rec rooms of a 1970s-era childhood--but ultimately infuse it with a contemporary complexity.

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Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 933-2117, through Feb. 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.