Ghosts dwell in ‘Trailer’

From the moment the screen door squeaks open at Michael McMillen’s new installation at L.A. Louver Gallery, the body is hooked and the mind eagerly follows. McMillen is brilliant at transforming passive viewers into complicit participants. It all starts at that screen door.

Pull it toward you, and that squeak may as well be a trumpet blast, announcing your arrival in a vaguely familiar past. The gallery walls have been painted the indigo of a night sky. A small, strange painting of buildings deluged by waves hangs in a pool of light on one wall. A traveler’s trunk, cast in bronze, sits on the floor nearby.

What you see at the far end of the gallery affirms that a threshold has been crossed. You’ve entered a captivating space that compresses the poetic and the palpable, the metaphoric and the mundane.

Hugging the back corner of the gallery is the “Red Trailer Motel” -- or at least a section of it that convincingly evokes a larger structure. The walls of corrugated metal, much of it rusted, scraped or flaking, make the building look shoddy, perhaps abandoned. Its landscaped by detritus -- old tires and fragments of furniture, tumbleweeds and gas cans -- reinforcing the impression that no one inhabits this structure but ghosts.

Yet the light over the office door still glows, and something is flickering behind one of the motel room doors. A carpet of stones crunches underfoot as you approach the building, the brittle sound countered by occasional wafts of harmonica or piano. McMillen counts on the trusty voyeuristic impulse, luring us to lens-covered eyeholes on the motel’s three numbered doors. The views within appear continuous with the scale of the exterior structure, though logic insists that the interiors are miniatures.

They’re meticulously crafted, but illusion is less the goal than the delivery system for a provocative emotional encounter. Each of the interiors does appear abandoned, its walls sallow and its broken furniture strewn about. But in each there is also some movement, a presence that hints at McMillen’s more subversive, poetic intent.

Looking beyond the disheveled mess of one of the rooms -- loose wires hanging from the ceiling, broken bedsprings on the musty floor -- you can see out the back door, not to a hallway or courtyard but to a few live goldfish twitching back and forth. All sense of scale and continuity is interrupted again in the next room, where empty bottles frame a screen. Its showing a short film called “Motel (Under the World),” a montage of found and new footage with quick cuts of wagging fingers, sinking boats, old signs, old machinery, Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, and a man with a wooden contraption over his head.

A related installation in the adjacent gallery has mesmerizing qualities of its own, again having to do with creating a sense of atmosphere and place.

In the “Red Trailer Motel,” thousands of details integrate seamlessly to achieve a feeling of textural and -- more important -- emotional authenticity. Little narratives unfurl from such minute elements as a scrap of yarn knotted around the screen door handle. A broader cultural history of the West might be spun from the presence of miner’s trunks stacked by the office door, a wall sign pointing to a UFO landing site, and myriad other indicators of desperate yearning for salvation or escape.

McMillen, an L.A. native and longtime stalwart of the art scene, extends the tradition of assemblage tableaux exemplified by Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. (Their 1982-83 “Pericord Apts.” is a clear precedent.) But the practice of evoking a world in abbreviated form extends beyond Kienholz to Joseph Cornell and, centuries further back, to the making of miniature theaters and cabinets of curiosities. Like its precursors, McMillen’s work fuses illusion, experience and memory. Part archive, part fiction, the “Red Trailer Motel” is all magic.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Jan. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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From the extreme to everyday life

Ed Templeton was born in Orange County in 1972 and is still growing up there. A skateboarder and self-taught artist, he chronicles his exploits and those of his friends in hundreds of photographs, paintings and writings that slather the walls at Roberts & Tilton Gallery. The installation -- on walls painted with dripping clouds or paneled in wood -- is overwhelming, seductive, repellent, indulgent, tough, tender and very raw.

Templeton calls this extrusion “The Prevailing Nothing,” referring to generic suburbia, the mainstream American dream that, he scrawls on one of the prints, has been forced down his throat. Within this bland milieu, Templeton and his young skating friends scratch and fondle their way toward their own kind of meaning -- a life with sharper edges, less control. A life whose juices don’t just course neatly within, but splatter about spontaneously. Blood and semen lubricate many a scene here.

This diaristic flow encompasses everyday moments (people sitting around smoking), and moments of greater extremity (sex atop a television set, a damaging skateboard fall). We’ve seen this before in Nan Goldin’s proto-reality show, an autobiographical and somewhat tiresome photo-chronicle from the 1970s and 1980s, in which lives are turned inside out to expose the muck and despair that drive them. There’s also more than a trace of Larry Clark.

Throw in the influence of cartoons, graffiti, outsider art and Raymond Pettibon, and you get Templeton’s extravaganza of earnestness. What he exposes behind the so-called “Orange Curtain” is rarely pretty. But in its vulnerability, contempt, love, pain and humor, it’s real and undeniably powerful.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 549-0223, through Dec. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Commentary’s hip guise falls short

Irony abounds in Su-en Wong’s new works at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, but it doesn’t give the art much depth. Instead, the irony boomerangs -- and ends up coming at the art’s own expense.

Wong works on panels, combining large, opaque fields of solid color with handsomely drawn images in colored pencil. Into her scenes of earthly paradise, she’s sprinkled multiple nudes, all in her own image. The young women twine their legs around hanging vines and soak in a luscious lagoon. The overripe splendor of the environments is matched by a fairy-tale scale; the women are small, no bigger than a frog or a flower.

Sweet, alluring and available, the figures conform to a sexual stereotype of Asian women -- or, do they mock it? Like so much work that purports to critique the commodity status of art -- while playing right into it -- Wong ostensibly confronts stereotypes. But really she just repeats them, exploiting them under the guise of hip, ironic commentary.

Born in Singapore and living in New York, she makes herself the vehicle of this investigation into preassigned roles, but she ends up illustrating those roles rather than interpreting them. All the self-portraits combined don’t add up to a genuine, authentic self.

Throughout, she plays with the theme of innocence in biblical terms, setting one of her selves among serpents and titling one of the panels “Eve Green.” The sin these works succumb to most -- witness the figure lounging on a rock wall, reading Artforum -- is affectation.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Significant work on insignificance

Marina Moevs’ paintings remind us of what we already know but prefer not to dwell on: that our safety on this Earth is precarious, that nature’s force can mean everything to us, but that we register as nothing to it.

The paintings at Koplin Del Rio Gallery are undeniably beautiful, but it’s a complex beauty, threaded through with violence and destruction. Storms build with ominous force on the horizon. Homes are reduced to splinters. After the recent Southern California fires, Moevs’ “Fire III” touches an especially raw nerve.

A large, lushly rendered oil, it depicts a street that curves uphill toward houses and trees in flames. The fire burns white in places and shades the sky that all-too-familiar reddish-gray and dense, acid black.

Like most of the paintings here, this one positions us as immediate witnesses, as if encountering this scene upon returning home. Like the best of the group, it’s large enough (78-by-48 inches) to feel encompassing.

In “Across the Street” the storm danger has passed, leaving one picture-perfect suburban home compromised and its neighbor devastated. Again, Moevs situates us as observers on the safe side of disaster, but close enough to feel its reverberations personally.

Wreckage crisscrosses the street like a scattering of toothpicks, extending to our own feet. Here, in this exhausted, shocked silence, vulnerability makes room for awe.

Koplin Del Rio Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through Dec. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.