On holiday with some very interesting characters

Before Las Vegas brought ancient Egypt, Renaissance Italy and modern Paris to the Strip, Billy Butlin brought Polynesian beaches, Space Age monorails and medieval villages to the English working class. From just after World War II to the mid-1970s, the savvy businessman’s chain of holiday camps served up a terrifically tacky version of upper-crust leisure.

To advertise his groundbreaking fusion of tourism and entertainment, Butlin hired the John Hinde Photography Studio to produce color transparencies for a series of postcards showing the camps at their best. Hinde’s specialties were sumptuous color, art-directed compositions and crystal-clear printing. His big innovation for the Butlin job was to shoot actual campers rather than professional models.

At Rose Gallery, 17 vivid photographs made from these transparencies are on display in an exhibition organized by photographer Martin Parr. Titled after the camps’ slogan, “Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight” (a line Butlin stole from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), the fascinating show provides much more than delight. Along with its richly nuanced depiction of common folk enacting fantasies of aristocratic privilege, it delivers a powerful critique of much contemporary photography.

Compared with postcards, the photographs are huge. But compared with standard gallery fare, their dimensions are humble. Most measure about 2 feet on a side and a few stretch to just over 4. Although they were shot by a trio of photographers -- Elmar Ludwig, Edmund Nagele and David Noble -- the three so dutifully followed Hinde’s house style that it’s difficult to tell their work apart.

Such modesty is nowhere to be found in the decor of the camps’ lounges, bars, ballrooms, cafes and arcades. Every bit of each room is jampacked with a visually cacophonous mishmash of plastic props, cheesy ornaments, lavish light fixtures and eye-popping patterns on polyester fabrics.

But the people in the pictures steal the show. Young and old, wearing everything from suits to swim trunks, knee socks to knee-high vinyl boots, the holiday campers are as individualistic as any of Dickens’ characters.

Their expressions and body language speak volumes about the relationship between pleasure and posing, or self-consciousness and losing yourself in the moment. Many stare straight into the camera. More look awkward, as if they’re not sure what they’re supposed to be doing. Nevertheless, none is made fun of. And no one is unaware of the extraordinary artificiality of the sham they’re acting out.

Unlike a lot of contemporary photography, which tends to run between icy detachment and claustrophobic navel-gazing, the pictures by these three journeymen show how complicated pleasure is.

Rose Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through July 12. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Far-out tales on a puppet scale

Wendell Gladstone is a Los Angeles artist whose hometown debut follows three solo shows in New York. That’s not how most graduates of L.A. art schools start their careers (the 31-year-old got his master of fine arts degree from Claremont Graduate University in 1998). But standard operating procedure has never been Gladstone’s strong suit.

At Roberts & Tilton Gallery, he combines painting, sculpture and knitting in puppet-scale tableaux that tell a cyclical story of innocence and experience, death and regeneration. Comic books, digital graphics, computer games, hard-edge abstraction, Hollywood props and Saturday-afternoon crafts are only some of the sources Gladstone mixes and matches. The best thing about his voracious art is its weaving together of logic and intuition.

In the main space, four super-sized dioramas are positioned against each of the four walls. All include a creamy white form that resembles a cross between a desert island and a tiny iceberg. On each of these sculpted pedestals stand various members of Gladstone’s cast of characters: a melancholy boy, a dead octopus, three brown dogs and a pensive old man. All are about the size of the decorative gnomes that populate suburban gardens all over America.

Behind Gladstone’s statuettes hang bare canvases on which he has painted color-coded symbols that mirror the events in front of them and complicate the narratives by adding essential details.

The canvases are physically linked to the figures with strands of yarn that recall umbilical cords. One has been woven into a fishnet. Another resembles a spider web. The others are red and brown. Their positions identify them as rivulets of blood and excrement, both of which flow freely in all four.

PlayStation meets the Stations of the Cross in Gladstone’s far-out story of a fisherman’s son whose guilt about killing a fleshy pink octopus leads him to feed it to a trio of hellhounds. After gobbling up the octopus, the dogs continue with the boy’s plump toes, eventually devouring him entirely. His spirit comes back as a peg-legged old man of the sea, whose revenge results in melancholy. This loops viewers back to the story’s beginning, with the sad little fisherman.

In Gladstone’s art, Christian myths and Freudian fantasies are filtered through the multileveled worlds of computer games. In all these systems, the rules that govern one level do not hold true on another, although the logic at work on one often echoes in the next, haunting it with a ghostly presence. Clear-eyed science gives way to trippy poetry.

In a side gallery, Gladstone’s two newest works begin to tell a tale of killer snowflakes, blind snow dogs and arctic seagulls that drink blood and excrete footprints. Where he will take the story is anyone’s guess. All that’s certain is that you won’t want to miss it.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 549-0223, through July 3. Closed Sunday and Mondays.

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A cool jolt from a familiar image

It’s hard to imagine an image of Cary Grant causing much of a stir in this day and age. After so many stills from so many movies and a cottage industry of publicity photos and paparazzi shots, you’d think there’d be nothing left to show of the star. But Kurt Kauper’s three full-length portraits at Acme Gallery prove otherwise.

It’s startling to step through the door and see a larger-than-life-size rendition of the debonair legend striding toward you, buck naked, a welcoming smile on his face and his hand extended as if to shake yours.

Turn right, and there he is again, wearing only a wristwatch, his right hand resting on a jauntily pitched hip and his left elbow leaning on the mantel of a fireplace in which a big log burns brightly, its flames rising to the middle of his muscular thighs.

Spin around and see Grant perched on a divan in a beach house. Sitting cross-legged, with all his fingertips touching one another, he would look like a trim and tanned version of the Buddha if his smile were more beatific and less strained.

Kauper’s extraordinarily detailed paintings invert common dreams, in which you find yourself going through the day without your clothing. So convincing is his painterly illusionism that you feel like the only person at a nudist colony -- out of place, prudish and nosy. Only worse, because you’re intruding into a classy actor’s private world.

After the initial jolt of the paintings wears off, their weirdness intensifies. The fun of seeing every inch of Grant’s taut physique, on both sides of his goofy tan lines, gives way to a psychological kick that includes but is not limited to sexual attraction.

There’s not a lot of eroticism simmering in Kauper’s uncanny images. Their style is cool and precise. The atmosphere has more in common with a doctor’s appointment than a hot date. And ordinary voyeurism doesn’t take you very far into these deliciously twisted pictures, which require a viewer’s active participation but never let you think that you’re in control.

The slippery nature of masculine identity is one of Kauper’s favorite themes, particularly the ways power and authority manifest themselves in human bodies and shape our perceptions of one another.

In a side gallery, two portraits of hockey players, dressed in their team uniforms, zero in on other aspects of role-playing and performance.

Based on 1970s collector’s cards, Kauper’s athletes embody the awkwardness of adolescents, of unformed young men who are trying on attitudes and stances as if they were protective uniforms.

At once corny and compelling, Kauper’s two new bodies of work push viewers just beyond the comfort zone, where deeply ambivalent emotions charge every gesture and detail with mystery and significance.

Acme Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The architecture of ceramics

A jewel of an exhibition at Frank Lloyd Gallery pairs George E. Ohr (1857-1918) and Frank Gehry, two masters of asymmetry whose works have radically altered their respective disciplines: ceramics and architecture.

In his day, the flamboyant Mississippian Ohr dubbed himself “the mad potter of Biloxi.” At one point, his antics landed him in a courtroom, where he was subjected to a sanity trial over a property dispute. He won, but his high opinion of his artistry was not shared by his contemporaries. Ohr’s exquisitely crafted and wildly glazed vessels broke every rule the Arts and Crafts movement had established for pottery.

Rather than making sensible things that were sturdy and useful, he created loopy bowls, pots and vases as delicate as eggshells. Rather than following the dictates of idealized geometry and classic proportions, he used clay to evince the tug of gravity or to defy it. And rather than glazing pretty images or refined designs on his works, he mixed glazes like a nutty alchemist, causing layers to blister, bubble and spot -- as if the chemical reactions were out of control and the vessels had taken on lives of their own.

Eccentricity and dynamism characterize the 16 works on display. All are small. Some are tiny.

A dimpled teapot looks like an inflatable golf ball that needs a little more air. Two slug-like forms worm their way across the honey-colored surface of a sensuous vase. A top-heavy, two-handled cup resembles an upside-down sports trophy. Its buxom form makes a Coke bottle’s sexy silhouette look chaste.

In the back gallery, two bowls evoke the fragility of flower petals. Two others are a bit more menacing, their lips mimicking a saw’s blade or gear’s teeth. One appears to be made of lava, and the other has the patina of a meteorite.

Today, Gehry’s reputation is nothing like Ohr’s was 100 years ago. He’s the most famous architect in the world. More important, his signature works demonstrate that original visions, and true idiosyncrasy, are in no way opposed to profound generosity. No matter how much fun Gehry appears to be having in his designs, his finished buildings give visitors even greater pleasures. At their best, they make you feel as if they were put up just for you -- and everyone else who falls in love with their soaring forms.

Three freely drawn sketches and five photographs of architectural models give visitors an idea of Gehry’s design for a museum for Ohr’s works that is under construction in Biloxi. It’s a match made in heaven.

Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through July 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.