Orderly system, hidden messages

“Uneasy lies the dead” is both the title of one of David Bunn’s new works at the Angles Gallery and a basic premise of his enterprise of the last dozen years. In 1990, he acquired the Los Angeles Central Library’s card catalog, which had been replaced by a digital database. The 2 million well-fingered cards have, since then, served as the raw material of his art. Corpse, archive, ruin -- the card catalog is dead, but it lies uneasy.

As an instrument of exploration, the catalog remains very much alive. To Bunn, it rustles and whispers with possibility. It has multiple histories to tell -- of its making, of its use by the community and, more broadly, of the classification of knowledge.

For his installations, books and readings, Bunn has extracted from what is given, conjuring the catalog’s own voice as if he were the medium at a seance. He has scrutinized book titles, category headings, typewriter fonts and handwritten notations on the cards. Now, he is taking a closer look at random -- and not so random -- marks that appear on the cards.

What do they look like, close up, and what might they mean, if anything? Are there significant, telling correspondences between the stray marks and the particular cards they’re on?

By calling this body of work “Subliminal Messages,” Bunn presupposes the answer. With tongue in cheek but with extreme deliberation, he seeks out correspondences. And he goes looking for those subtle signs in sections of the catalog that inherently legitimize such a quest -- within categories relating to the occult, magic, psychical research, religious psychology and secret societies.

He heads for themes like art, where inference is standard practice, and utopia, where alternate realities are the name of the game. What Bunn has found doesn’t look like much at first -- nor, for that matter, after prolonged inspection. He’s extracted cards with errant markings and tears, digitally scanned them, then made Iris prints of the marked portions. In the show, the original cards hang next to the prints with their blown-up details.

A card headed “Masterpieces in colour” bears a few dark blots along its upper edge. In the print, hung upside down, these deep violet stains hug the bottom edge like chunky stalagmites, the largest emitting a paler wisp of purple.

The card headed “Evil eye” has an innocuous blue stain on its upper right corner, probably from wet ink on a fingertip. Greatly enlarged, it suggests a solemn profile or perhaps a mutant skull. The “Vampire” card has a tiny red dash on it, ripe for association with a puncture wound.

There are also a few odd entries, additions to the card catalog that throw off the well-ordered system.

One is an art intervention of its own, a little square paper with a heart design on one side and a message on the other: a reminder to the public to support living artists. The inserts appeared multiple times among cards categorized under art.

Mostly, the connections Bunn asserts feel vague, underwhelming. They stretch too far and deliver too little. The beauty of his earlier work using the card catalog was in the fecundity it revealed, the generous poetry that spilled out when the tap was well situated.

The charm and accessibility of that work drop off considerably here. There’s still more life left in that dead body, but this vein’s been tapped out.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through May 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Communism’s faded glory

At the Craig Krull Gallery, Andrew Moore follows up his two absorbing shows of large color photographs from Cuba with an equally compelling set of recent images from Russia. Here, as in the previous work, the scene is one of lapsed grandeur.

The pictures sum up the political phenomenon of communism’s fall with all the immediacy of an editorial cartoon and the concision of poetry. They are also consistently, deliciously beautiful.

In one gorgeous and poignant image, Moore shows the interior of an ornate theater with elaborately carved balconies. Part of the ceiling has collapsed or been removed, allowing a concentrated beam of sunlight, like a spotlight, to pour through the abandoned site and warm the thick layer of plaster dust and wood scraps on the floor.

Next to this picture is another, equally affecting. “Model, Akademy of Fine Arts” reads like a portrait of Mother Russia fallen upon extremely hard times. The model, a middle-aged woman in an odd get-up of worn, ruffled satin skirt and awkward red headband, sits next to a wall pinned with shabby fabrics and a tattered dress. Everything in the setup is stained and frayed, the very definition of decay.

Each of Moore’s photographs speaks forcefully of faded glory, not least an image of a rusted train derailed and stalled in a sandbank. A few pictures -- of an opera house interior and a massive ship -- hint of power retained or at least restored.

Moore might be accused of playing to cliches. But instead, he engages them thoughtfully, forcefully, producing images that are reductive but dense with detail, generously charged with specificity and drama.

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Saturday.

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The value of accessorizing

Victoria Gitman’s first solo show on the West Coast, at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, introduces a marvelous talent. The young painter, born in Argentina and living in Miami, has ample skill and understated intelligence at her disposal.

Working small in oil on board, Gitman paints vintage accessories -- beaded purses, filigree pins -- and women, the latter copied from well-known portraits of the Renaissance on up. In the paintings of jewelry and purses, especially, she demonstrates exquisite technical finesse.

Each bead looks convincingly like a pearly orb reflecting a tiny glint of light. The small metal balls of the purses’ clasps mirror the artist and her windowed surroundings in miniature, in a quiet throwback to the use of convex mirrors in Renaissance portraits.

Each of the objects appears against a drab, neutral ground that sets off its material splendor but hints of taxonomic sterility. Gitman speaks plainly, as if presenting evidence, but her meticulous focus on subjects that are themselves products of intense labor endows the paintings with a kind of inner resonance.

Something similar occurs in the paintings of women -- renderings of postcard reproductions of famous portraits. Again, Gitman shows off her own skill, but she speaks through the skill of another. All of her paintings have something of the homage about them.

They honor the crafts of beading, jewelry-making and painting while wryly equating beautifying objects with the women who wear them. Both are on display, to be admired and at least metaphorically possessed.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through April 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Mixing the petty and provocative

There’s no such thing as fresh leftovers. That’s partly what bogs down the show at the Project, “Notes on Renewed Appropriationisms.” The jargon-laden rationale for the show is but another way of labeling the material “New and Improved!” It doesn’t necessarily make it so.

The strategy of recycling images already ensconced in the collective consciousness has, itself, a retro feel to it, having dominated the art scene in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Much of that work was jarring at the time, if a bit thin (think Sherrie Levine’s re-photographic project or Haim Steinbach’s rehash of Duchamp’s “readymades”). It would take substantial wit, beauty or audacity to redeem the strategy a generation later.

None of the work in this show manages that feat, though a few of the efforts sustain interest. Kelley Walker’s pieces exploit a radical shift of context to upset conventional hierarchies and categories of influence. The artist drapes skeins of colored toothpaste over a photograph of a civil rights-era race riot and the sexy cover of a men’s magazine. The petty and the provocative mingle uneasily.

Seth Price takes a video montage that was one part of a 1985 Martha Rosler installation and presents it as a free-standing work under his name -- deliberately courting confusion, as he states in correspondence with Rosler reprinted in a small accompanying book: “is it your piece, my piece, where’s the piece.”

Where’s the piece, indeed.

Siemon Allen is represented by large reproductions of Tintin comics with the dialogue obscured. Wade Guyton shows pages from art books with geometric patterns overlaid. Mathieu Mercier builds Neo-Constructivist sculptures from toothpaste cartons and trash bag boxes.

Anton Vinokle presents a photo mural of a Metro station building in Mexico City that he painted red, and Ellen Harvey coyly mixes painted and photographed versions of building surfaces with the real thing. Throughout, things typically considered significant (social documentary photographs, art reproductions) are rendered secondary, and mundane images and objects are elevated in stature.

It’s not as productively destabilizing as it might be -- or as it once was.

The Project, 962B E. 4th St., (213) 620-0692, through April 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.