On the underbelly of the zeitgeist

Feeling anxious? Local hardware store sold out of duct tape and plastic wrap? Do you smell fumes?

There’s a show for you.

“I See a Darkness” convenes eight emerging American, Canadian and British artists who burrow into the blackness that occupies a corner of every human soul. The title comes from a melancholic 1999 song (and album) by Bonnie Prince Billy, a.k.a. Palace and, before that, Will Oldham. The tone is set at the front desk of Blum & Poe by two large prints -- first, Adam McEwen’s fictitious newspaper obituary for Malcolm McLaren, which kills off the British punk impresario, and next, a loony literary death rant by Steven Shearer, which typifies the poetry of paranoia.

Then things get bleak. McEwen’s “Sorry, We’re Dead” is a black-and-silver word painting whose familiar graphic style -- “sorry” in jaunty script, to set it off emotionally -- identifies this as a common shop window sign of the “Sorry, We’re Closed” variety. Its grim explanation of why the store is closed today suggests the crimes of commerce; meanwhile the black-and-silver reference to Andy Warhol alludes to the mortality of art in our post-Pop world.

A three-panel pencil drawing by Julian Hoeber offers “still-life portraits” -- a face whose eye is obscured by a cocaine spoon, a polished police pistol and a $2 bill featuring the bust of Thomas Jefferson, wryly identified as a heroic revolutionary. Its self-mocking title names as inspiration the Baader-Meinhof gang, a failed 1970s German terrorist group.

Nigel Cooke’s little oil painting “Cryptosunset” is Giorgione on acid -- a shadowy, fantastic landscape where an eye in the sky sends a jagged lightning bolt earthward. Chris Vassell picks up its hallucinogenic pitch in a cluster of stylistically different watercolors, where a hippie and a guru glow in a radiant landscape and a skull-faced Bigfoot emerges from a purple cloud.

A brief 1999 video by Slater Bradley follows a sweet young girl arriving at an impromptu Manhattan street memorial to John F. Kennedy Jr. Nothing much happens as we follow the girl’s innocent gesture of adding a flower to the pile. But the video is looped; its relentless repetition slowly transforms a plain documentary into the unwholesome meandering of a child stalker. As our voyeurism ricochets off public memories of much-photographed little John-John, the camera becomes ominous. Incessant media recitation reveals yet conceals, informs yet disables.

Finally, five short videos by Aida Ruilova feature manic editing, claustrophobic camera work and fingers-on-blackboard sound, all at the service of creating nearly abstract, pitch-perfect tone poems of private dread and personal dysfunction. With Bradley’s video, they’re the show’s strongest works.

“I See a Darkness” is post-Goth and neo-punk in spirit. It includes a good bit of work that, on its own, would likely feel thin. Collectively, though, the show’s resonance for this particular moment is acute.

Blum & Poe, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through March 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Nature, culture frozen in struggle

In a gallery handout, Dallas-based critic Charles Dee Mitchell describes Eric Swenson’s sculptural style as “creepy realism,” and based on the few examples I’ve seen by the 30-year-old Texan, that’s exactly right. It certainly pertains to the extraordinary single work in the UCLA Hammer Museum’s Project Gallery.

This untitled sculpture is riveting. Made in 2001 from polyurethane resin and acrylic paint, it shows a pristine white deer standing on a large Persian rug. The young buck -- legs splayed, rear end up, head down and antlers on the elegant carpet -- is rubbing the soft velvet covering off his new antlers. Nature’s season for shedding velvet would be fall, and the rug’s intricate floral pattern, rendered in deep green and golden brown hues, exudes an appropriately autumnal feel.

The deer is frozen in preparation for mature rituals of combat, mating and survival -- but something strange has happened. At the places where his antlers have rubbed the rug, the elaborate pattern has blurred. In the exchange between nature and culture, the design goes out of focus.

Something at once dire and liberating characterizes the give and take -- and something poignant too. Swenson shows a moment of extreme animal vulnerability, but the exquisite refinement of its rendering is consoling.

The sculpture is a marvel of fabricated artifice. The cast-resin deer is acutely observed, yet its slender fragility and blank whiteness transform it into an icy doppelganger.

Ditto the rug. The 7-by-11-foot carpet was made by casting an actual rug in resin; the floral pattern in the original was photographed, scanned into a computer and inkjet-printed onto the cast. The result is a magic carpet embalmed.

Culture, in Swenson’s capable hands, is an age-old field in which animal instincts are courted, copied, held at bay and struggling to be set free. His sculpture crystallizes the melee.

UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through May 4. Closed Monday.

Foam that’s packed with allusions

For her second solo show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Shirley Tse has taken her interest in plastic as the quintessential modern material and pumped it up to environmental scale. A few conventional sculptures made from plastic occupy the small room, but a monumental work is out front.

“Shelf Life” blocks your entry to the gallery’s formidable main room. Constructed from about 20 enormous blocks of white, high-density packing foam, the sculpture turns out to be a platform on which you are encouraged to climb. (No shoes allowed; booties are provided.) Mount the stairs carved into the sculpture and the foam gives slightly beneath your feet -- creaking, squeaking and groaning in ways that do not enhance pedestrian confidence.

The platform is divided into one large area, shaped like the clubs in a deck of cards, then a long S-shaped “tail” and, finally, a small pod at the end. The sculpture’s overall shape is something like a cross between a virus and a space station, a sperm and a sperm whale. Micro and macro mix.

Tse has carved spare, usually shallow, always enigmatic shapes into the polystyrene. Visually, they read as memories of mundane objects that might once have been packed in the plastic, or as rare, alien hieroglyphs. Like micro and macro, old and new and common and cryptic intermingle.

Embedded in the platform are four indentations whose hue recalls an old-fashioned, flesh-colored Crayola crayon. (They seem prosthetic.) Two indentations are hard plastic, one is soft foam and one includes both. The soft areas hold the contour of your footprints for a moment before erasing your tracks. The hard ones are like individual hot tubs, into which you can clamber. They evoke transience and pleasure.

“Shelf Life” is a mixed success. Tse gets impressive layers of allusion from minimal materials and small maneuvers. But the title’s witty pun eventually doubles back on the work, which doesn’t offer much resonance once you’ve walked away.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through March 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Animals mugging for the camera

There is no earthly reason that Tim Ebner’s animal paintings should be so captivating. But they are -- and not because Ebner is a gifted naturalist, but because he’s a gifted un-naturalist. The lions and tigers in several new works at Rosamund Felsen Gallery are abstract in the way things like energy, spirit and liveliness are abstract. He paints his creatures in a realist style, but their contexts shift our interpretation.

The large canvases in the front gallery continue a direction from Ebner’s last solo show, three years ago. Animals cavort in the surf at the beach -- Mr. and Mrs. Lion on vacation, the Tiger family on holiday, mugging for the folks back home as if in tourist snapshots. The subtle compositions project an air of recognizable human play, but absent the condescension that accompanies anthropomorphic tricks like putting party hats on dogs or pantaloons on a monkey.

The most compelling paintings are the four in the rear gallery, where the life-size animals are painted within lush fields of pure vivid color -- mottled cerulean, bright crimson, deep sapphire. Their fur quietly reflects these atmospheric colors (or their complementary hues), smuggling violet, greens and chrome-yellow into the bejeweled mix. One result is a celebratory sense of consecration. Another is the invocation of purely visual power, which envelops these creatures like a force field.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through March 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.