The city of L.A., gauzy but familiar

The photographs in Myung Hwan Lim’s “Drifting Into City” series are each the product of a 24-minute exposure, taken from the back window of the artist’s car while repeatedly circling a city block in Koreatown. The resulting images are indistinct but familiar, with faint fragments of recognizable scenery -- cars, buildings, palm trees, clouds -- swept into a blur of motion and bathed in the soft, pink Southern California light.

They’re eloquent cityscapes and curiously accurate. This is, in large part, how L.A. looks: a vast roadside blur stretching between all those familiar neighborhoods in which you regularly park your car.

The works, two of which appear in the group show “Itineraries” at Gallery Luisotti, epitomize the premise of this thoughtfully assembled exhibition. It presents Los Angeles as “a landscape of commuting individuals,” an intricate map of crisscrossing personal narratives. The essence of the city, it suggests, lies not in any particular place but in the subjective sensation of moving through.

Each of the nine artists represented offers a slightly different take on this sensation, and it is to curator Chris Balaschak’s credit that no one contribution feels repetitive or superfluous, but instead neatly balanced against every other.

Edgar Arceneaux’s “107th St. Watts,” an accordion-shaped book containing a continuous, panoramic view of the neighborhood surrounding Watts Towers, is a self-consciously political nod toward a major precedent for all the work in the exhibition: Ed Ruscha’s 1966 “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” and other photo works.

The gritty, performative tone of Shannon Ebner’s “On the Way to Paradise” (2004) also harks back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. The images, however -- 10 small black-and-white photographs of individuals somewhere in the city, most moving dauntingly toward the viewer, their T-shirts cumulatively spelling “SELF IGNITE” -- reflect contemporary fears regarding the relationship of the body to public space.

Andrew Freeman’s “Part of a Part” -- several handsome black-and-white prints with a rambling bit of text -- and Albert Ortega and Stephen Hilger’s “La Cosa Azul” (2004) -- a too-often-banal video and sound installation that meanders through the neighborhoods around Dodger Stadium -- both explore L.A. through its visible details. Kerry Tribe delves into subjective perceptions of the city in his “North Is West / South Is East,” a book of hand-drawn maps, most humorously inaccurate, that the artist solicited from strangers who’d just arrived at LAX.

Hilger strikes a satisfying balance between banal and poetic in another photograph depicting the service alley of a residential neighborhood in Beverly Hills, flooded with a soft white light.

In Christina Ray’s “Street Parking in Los Angeles,” the artist traces her father’s path through the city, producing a series of lively drawings based on information collected in an absurdly detailed daily parking log. It also is on display, in the form of an artist’s book.

Arthur Ou’s series “Notes From Father” (2004) is another collaboration wherein the artist solicited his father’s grammatically loose and vaguely philosophical comments regarding the artist’s own images of various Monterey Park locales, then inscribed them across the photographs in cut-out block letters. The result is a poignant sort of poetry that reminds one of how many lessons L.A. has to teach.

As one image of a scissor lift in front of a grocery store advises, for example: “Only through the ladder can reach the high point people must learn from books other culture and always absorb new knowledge so can reach the high point in their life.”

Gallery Luisotti, 2525 Michigan Ave., A2, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Aug. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A print-off in one kind of ink

Uniting the 31 works in “Ultrachrome,” a group exhibition at Carl Berg Gallery, is a technical detail that would be easy to miss were it not specified in the show’s title: Each is a digital image printed in Epson UltraChrome ink, a pigment-based ink renowned for its color range and archival longevity.

The result, although not officially sanctioned by Epson, feels a little like a Pillsbury Bake-Off, where the intention is to publicize the tremendous array of things one can accomplish with a bag of all-purpose flour. There are prints that look just like traditional photographs, prints that look like lithographs, prints that look like drawings, prints that look like collage, and even one print that approximates stained glass.

In the end, the timeworn truth prevails that interesting work is interesting and uninteresting work is uninteresting, whatever the technology. There are both sorts here.

Among the highlights are Jody Zellen’s “Urban Chaos” (2004), a lively, translucent window mural; Laura Parker’s “Pot Bottoms #1 and #2” (2004), photographs that present the mottled undersides of everyday cooking pots in such a way as to resemble pre-Columbian amulets; and Kyungmi Shin’s “Beach,” a day-at-the-beach photograph in which all the bodies have been eerily cut out. Dianna Cohen is represented by a characteristically lovely collage of quilted plastic bags, part photographic and part real (it’s a challenge to tell the difference), and Hillary Mushkin by “YOU ARE HERE,” a structurally confusing but visually dazzling image involving clouds, distant figures and some sort of landmass.

Several of the most striking photographs, such as Katrin Korfmann’s “Pink Wall” and a pair of untitled images by Rudy Vega of bare treetops against a wintry white sky, prompt one to wonder whether a big, lush Cibachrome wouldn’t be more satisfying -- digitally rendered images have a shallower, more plastic feel -- but the difference is admittedly less apparent as the technology advances.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 931-6060, through Aug. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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In transition to artistic maturity

“Shift,” at Acuna-Hansen Gallery, is a handsome and mostly satisfying exhibition of work concerned with what the press release calls transitional states of being. Because all of the 10 artists involved are current or recent MFA students, all affiliated with UC San Diego, the theme takes on a perhaps unintended double meaning: This is work that seems not only about but also in transition, still on its way to maturity.

None of the dozen or so works is entirely without interest, although some are more refined than others. There are a number of memorable moments in Jorge Nava’s video “Latino Pride,” for example -- including one exquisite slow-motion shot of a young man being pulled from a chain link fence into a crowd -- but they’re buried in a hyperactive melange that could have been trimmed by half. Ian Patrick’s cast foam sculpture “Soft Off” has a lovely form but a somewhat dingy surface, leaving one to wonder what he might have achieved in a higher-quality medium.

Malisa Humphrey’s watercolor “Summer of the Slut” is curiously endearing despite a distracting sloppiness. Isabelle Gerard’s two works -- a face mask fashioned of plaid flannel and a segment of blue-on-white print wallpaper featuring weirdly deformed forest animals -- are flawlessly crafted but ambiguous in intent.

Several of the works are rough but just plain funny, such as Alan Calpe’s animated video “After You’ve Gone,” an egregiously off-key Busby Berkeley-like ode to lost love, and Kia Neill’s “Buffalo Geyser,” which is pretty much what it sounds like: a free-standing buffalo with a water fountain in its back.

As is always the case with group shows, several works leave one longing for a better context in which to appreciate the artist’s abilities or intentions. Jeff Williams’ “Giraffe” (an appealing wall hanging involving two giraffes sunk into a field of jungle wallpaper) and two works by Patrick Liem, “Transmogrify” and “Mangfadigstol” (the first a photographic cloud-like image and the second a sculpture suggesting a bizarrely deformed folding chair), all fall into this category.

The show’s standouts are Justin Michell’s elegant, if not entirely original, enamel-on- Masonite abstractions and Danny Jauregui Montes’ two ink and watercolor works, “House Alchemy #9 and #10,” which combine realist renderings of a nondescript suburban house and abstract splotches of pigment decorated with delicate outlines and wonderful wisps of pattern.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Los Angeles, (323) 441-1624, through Sept. 4. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Afloat, aloft, above the ground

There are few more potentially spectacular sights than the view from the window of an airplane -- and few more relevant to the modern artistic experience. To make that ascent is to watch the world abstract itself: to shift from three to two dimensions, from a spatial experience into a visual image. Roads become lines; fields become shapes; mountains become texture.

A group show of mostly paintings now at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, curated by Stephen Robert Johns, explores the effect of this experience on eight artists. The results range from representational portrayals of New York street scenes viewed from a window above, by David Kapp, to loose, expressive abstract works by Gronk and Mary Heebner, to bright, hyperstylized abstractions by the curator and Scott Katano. Peter Shire presents a lively if didactic installation of floating angel and devil figurines, and Laddie John Dill a number of paintings involving thin, earthy washes of cement and iron oxide.

The most appealing works are several masterfully rendered paintings by Peter Alexander, some portraying realistic clusters of city lights, others drifting gracefully toward abstraction -- all imbued with the intoxicating feeling of flight.

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., G2, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through Sept. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.