Power of illusion, desire

Kahn and Selesnick’s entrancing new series of photographs, “City of Salt,” clearly isn’t set in the present or in the immediate vicinity. But the stories it tells in words and pictures are familiar. Using the intensified language of myth, the work chronicles the eternal human quest for the secrets of existence, the treasures of the Earth, power, and glory. These ends remain, of course, elusive. That mixed blessing, fundamental to the story of humankind and its aspirations, invests Kahn and Selesnick’s stagy work with real poignancy.

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick have worked together for more than a decade as photographic storytellers. Their previous work in L.A. was an elaborate, sepia-toned historical fiction that presented itself, coyly, as documentary evidence of a mid-20th century expedition. The new series, of which only a part is shown here, sheds the pretense of being old while still adopting a tone and a look vaguely from the past.

The images are panoramic (most are 8 inches high and about 3 feet wide), digital laser prints in pale, muted tones. Even without regarding the companion texts, the pictures read as epic in nature, full of travelers on lonely, heroic journeys. In one image, a man surfaces in a small, isolated pond. With just his head above water, he blows into a long, curved horn (identified in the text as the “trumpet of creation”). In another, men in slightly old-fashioned business attire writhe upon marshy ground, presided over by a daunting, helmeted demon, each of his four arms clasping a weapon. The photographs don’t cohere into a single narrative, but are bound by consistent flavor and imagery: pelts, turbans, and a landscape of sand and bog, relentless in its expanse.

Like the moralistic photographic tableaux of 19th century photographer Oscar Rejlander, Kahn and Selesnick’s work is threaded through with lessons. “City of Salt,” both the series and the individual photograph by that title, are meditations on the power of illusion and desire, the vanity of our pursuits, and the lure of the forbidden. The city pictured is a dense accretion of small domed and spiral-topped structures built on a ground of gritty white salt. It was built, so the story goes, by a king who intended it to be his funerary monument, but he visits the place one night and loses his bearings. Is he dead, he wonders? Is this what he wanted, he asks himself, bringing the parable home, to wander for eternity in a city of his own illusions?

Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 937-5974, through Oct. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Spinning stories in our minds

In the back room at Rose Gallery hangs a game in pictures, devised by British photographer Martin Parr. It consists of two sets of portraits, one of young women, and the other of young men. For the original version of the game Parr made in 1972, he pasted these pictures onto wooden blocks, “Love Cubes,” that were then supposed to be paired according to who might go with whom.

What do we have to go by in this guessing game? Just what’s revealed by the appearances of these men and women: their clothing, hairstyle and posture. From there, our minds spin narratives. A third set of photographs hanging here shows the couples paired off, so we can check the accuracy of our presumptions.

The rest of this mildly amusing, mildly discomfiting show contains work from different series of the past 30 years, all of it operating on the same premise: How people present themselves is key in revealing who they are -- and is entertaining, to boot.

This is especially true of Parr’s 1992 photographs, “Signs of the Times,” which are stills from a television series about the relationship people have with their domestic interiors. Captions drive home the point that Parr had little interest in such relationships if they were healthy, caring only if they were absurd, laughable, pathetic. In one photograph, for instance, a woman appears seated on her couch in an interior busy with competing patterns. Her quote: “When I looked at the wallpaper and the wallpaper looked at me we instantly fell in love.”

Parr shoots in a cool, straightforward manner, allowing the vulgarities of middle-class taste to reveal themselves as obvious. He certainly mocks his subjects, and he can be mercilessly acute. What passes as humanism in his work is more of a condescending sympathy for the aesthetically challenged.

Parr shares this turf with Americans Garry Winogrand, Bill Owens and others, but he’s been the dominant snide voice in Britain since the ‘70s. A series of images made in Ireland in the early ‘80s tweaks the crisp, dispassionate style of New Topographic photography by adding a visual punch line. One picture shows a suburban house viewed straight-on. In the foreground stands a plaster poodle -- fearsome sentinel guarding the gate. His “Last Resort” shots of seaside tourists in New Brighton elicit a louder snort. Several of them here focus on food: sour-faced customers at a grungy snack counter, kids whose ice cream cones drip like glue over their hands and legs. Parr’s images of people eating expose us most starkly for what we are: animals presuming a higher rung on the evolutionary ladder.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Images on brink of disintegration

The tenuousness in Patrick Graham’s work is not easy at first to embrace. His images feel on the brink -- not of crystallization but of disintegration. The paper is torn; the words are smudged; the thoughts, when legible, express doubt, fear, vulnerability. Slowly, slowly, it sinks in that Graham’s gently tortured surfaces are apt analogues of emotional experience. Indeterminacy is the broad foundation from which we operate, punctuated by peaks of clarity and valleys of impossibility and despair.

Graham’s extraordinary work at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts is a diary of the struggle of its own making. Although there are large, vigorously worked canvases here as well, Graham’s mixed-media works on paper prevail in both number and impact. Each is a layered thing, made of blue-gray drawing paper, usually torn and often wrinkled, adhered to a larger surface of mat board. Graham writes, draws and paints on both surfaces, sometimes attaching other notes and scraps.

These works on paper chronicle the artist’s challenges and concerns in rendering meaning out of what’s given in art and life. In one piece, he has written what appears to be these words across torn strips of lined notebook paper, then smeared them to near-illegibility: “all this stuff comes in and without coding or analysing it, it [plays?] for and against my wish, desire ... longing to make something beautiful.”

Much of the “stuff” that Graham processes in his work is art historical. Interpretations of the odalisque recur here, echoing Ingres’ lovely image but also spinning off into coarser, more animal forms. Representations of religious subjects thread their way through the work as well, from the Pieta to the Resurrection. Graham’s personal history is more “stuff” he’s had to contend with, from his early facility as a draftsman -- which imposed on him the concomitant burden of potential -- to his troubles with alcohol, and his reckoning with the conditions of politics and faith in his native Ireland.

He had to let go his “glossy gifts,” as he once called his technical skills, before he could pursue deeper truths in his work. External likeness is of little consequence in work as interior as Graham’s. He is after something more elusive, and reaches it: an ability, through minimal, graceful means, to render the body’s fluidity, its weight when dead, and its lightness when lifted by wings and divine breath.

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-5222, through Nov. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Periscopic view bends reality

“Being Ernest Shackleton” is a clever installation that begins with the Antarctic explorer as its theme, but ends up with more to say about the dynamics of theatrical illusion and the power of mediated reality. Collaborators Jim Ovelmen and Mark Jones have built a stage set of sorts on the roof of London Street Projects. A ship’s mast, a winch and jagged-edged Styrofoam panels transform the rooftop into a scene evocative of Shackleton’s harrowing expedition.

But it’s the translation of this humble mess into a seamless video image that does the trick. Ovelmen and Jones have mounted a video camera on the roof, atop a thick, gray pole that descends into the gallery below. The pole’s handles allow it to be turned like a periscope, just short of 360 degrees. Turning it controls the view the camera sends to a large circular screen on the gallery’s back wall.

The monochrome video image smooths out the installation’s rough edges, homogenizing its textures into one convincing, filmic veneer. This hardly comes as a revelation in a city famous for putting glorified reality on screen, but the installation has a playful charm that enlivens even this familiar transformation.

Also, it’s a transformation that we can witness both sides of, by sneaking a peek of the roof after seeing it on screen, or by shifting the periscope’s view past the contrived set to the edge of the roof and beyond. The periscope becomes what Ovelmen calls a “legitimized peephole” for the permission it grants us to survey distant, exotic worlds at our private leisure.

London Street Projects, 2924 Bellevue Ave., (213) 413-1210, through Oct. 26. Open Saturdays and by appointment.