Rags to riches

For the last 15 years, James Richards has been making paintings that look like nothing else out there. At Shoshana Wayne Gallery, nine new works are even weirder.

More sophisticated, supple and -- most surprising -- elegant, they are the best things Richards has made. They’re also among the most exciting abstractions being made today.

Painters who mistake the medium for the message bristle before Richards’ works. That’s because his elusive pieces can be described as low-relief wall sculptures; portable mini-installations; drawings jacked up on speed and steroids; or emaciated, threadbare paintings, the edible bits of which seem to have been eaten by moths (or viruses), leaving only the skeletal structures behind.

But Richards’ paintings never buy into the idea that art that looks beat up, forlorn and down-on-its-luck is more authentically human than taut, formally resolved work. Taking viewers beyond the world of sensible narratives, serviceable sentimentality and plodding logic, his profoundly idiosyncratic paintings make your head spin, but they also make your mind race and imagination soar.

The materials Richards uses seem to be poorly suited to such ambitions. They are crude.

Ordinary 2-by-4s and 2-by-2s are used for the frames, which do double duty as stretcher bars. Some are left unpainted. Others have been unceremoniously covered with uniform coats of beiges, tans and browns. An off-white and a muted green add to the impression that Richards’ paints are factory seconds or discontinued institutional colors.

Thousands of feet of cheap twine, nylon string and yarn take the place of canvas. Richards staples these strands to the wooden rectangles, weaving, winding and wrapping various lengths, colors and thickness to form wacky webs across the frames’ openings. Imagine macrame gone horribly wrong, or the rigging of a sailing ship strung by drunken landlubbers.

Gobs of oddly tinted acrylic paint mixed with gel medium are applied to the crisscrossing strings and spill onto the frames.

Other blobs fill the spaces between the strings, like doodles drawn when the mind wanders. Still others suggest sinewy tendons. They strengthen Richards’ erratic strings and fortify his abstract compositions.

If Robinson Crusoe were an abstract painter, his work might resemble Richards’.

In the face of such rustic associations, Richards maintains a toehold of urbanity by sneaking chenille, a tufted, velvety yarn, into some pieces. More important, he consistently transforms the clunky awkwardness of makeshift materials and cobbled-together objects into lyrical lightness.

All of his works embody a sensation of airborne animation. They seem not to hang on the wall like weighty objects as much as float in front of it, untouchable apparitions aglow with their own energy.

The lines they draw through space mimic the whiplash movements of a fly ricocheting around a room -- restless, frenetic and purposeful. In a world whose atmosphere is jampacked with invisible impulses and a cacophony of electronically transmitted info, Richards’ paintings make perfect sense.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays and Dec. 24 through Jan. 3.

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Acknowledging the holidays

Contemporary art usually takes itself too seriously to be bothered by the holidays. The unstated assumption is that imagery for such popular social occasions is better left to greeting card companies -- and to the ordinary folks whose emotions fall into sync with seasonal rituals.

A few artists, each of whom marches to the beat of his own drummer, have begun to take back the holidays, and the seasons they belong to, as a subject for art. Foremost among them is George Stoll, whose new works at Angles Gallery celebrate a sort of Minimalist Christmas.

Transforming aluminum foil into compact garlands, Styrofoam into kid-size snowballs and tautly stretched sections of organza into images that depict twinkling Christmas lights, Stoll captures the mellow magic of the holidays while avoiding their overblown expectations and mass-marketed sentimentality.

Each of his easily recognized images and objects is lovingly crafted but not so obsessively as to identify Stoll as a fanatic, a specialist or someone different from anyone else. He makes his images of ornamental lights by cutting holes in sections of silk, carefully stitching patches over them and sometimes cutting smaller holes in the patches.

The overlapped fabrics create different shades of color, like shimmering penumbras. Stretched over an open frame, these positive and negative circular shapes cast delicate shadows on the wall behind.

Down the street, there’s a display of 99 cups cast from Tupperware originals. Their waxy translucence, imperfections and rainbow of colors make each of the four clusters of cups seem like a chorus or choir.

At other times of the year, Stoll’s vulnerable, homemade cups would probably call to mind something else. But whatever it was, it too would be based on the quietly generous sociability of his art. Making a place for the individual within the group, his works invite viewers to reflect on the ways joy and melancholy play a part in the holidays, and every other day of the year.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Jan. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Check for holiday hours.

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Grace in the ephemeral

Last year, Koh Byoung-ok presented “B Sculpture Show,” his second solo exhibition at Newspace Gallery. This year, the Korea-born, L.A.-based artist has simplified his name to Koh and created “C Sculpture Show,” an even more graceful arrangement of plain-spoken objects and images.

Ephemerality is Koh’s modus operandi. In the entryway, a glass milk bottle filled with water hangs on a red silk string from a small nail in the wall. An accident waiting to happen, this piece makes every moment seem more precious than the one before.

Paying attention to seemingly incidental details is the point of Koh’s art. Seven inkjet prints depict such common objects as a lime-green spatula, the underside of a McDonald’s coffee cup lid and a washing machine’s sudsy interior. Even after you figure out what you’re looking at, your interest doesn’t diminish.

The same goes for Koh’s close-ups of his toes and a round cracker. Held up to the sun, both fail to block out its brightness. But the light that shines through endows the photographs with mysterious charm.

Koh’s love of gentle trickery takes shape in “Hair Fly.” This nearly invisible work is made of nothing but long strands of black hair, which Koh has tied end-to-end. They hang from the ceiling in three loosely parallel lines that end at eye-level, just above a spotlighted pedestal. Koh has burned the tips of the lowest strands, causing each to curl into a tangled mass that resembles a flying insect.

The delicacy of “Hair Fly” makes a nearby work seem massive. “Fat Milk” is an unopened half-gallon milk carton Koh has placed on a pedestal, but not before using his fingernails to peel the waxy, outermost layer from every square inch of its exterior. At room temperature, the milk slowly becomes cheese. As it does it exerts increasing pressure on the frail paper. Eventually, the carton will burst.

But first, Koh invites viewers to envision every step of the process. Not much in terms of drama, and even less to cry over, but plenty to nourish the imagination and engage the mind.

Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through Jan. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.NewspaceLA.com.

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Martha Graham time capsule

At Craig Krull Gallery, Barbara Morgan’s 10 vintage silver prints of Martha Graham’s dance company preserve some of the strangeness American viewers must have experienced in the 1940s, when they first saw these fascinating photographs. They were part of a suite of more than 200 images that traveled to 150 venues across the country.

Today, the strangeness of Morgan’s gorgeously composed pictures has less to do with how exotically avant-garde the dancers must have looked in the heartland 60 years ago, when radio ruled the airwaves, multiplexes were not on every street corner and the Internet had not been dreamed of. Now their aloof, not-from-around-here quality has more to do with how earnest, hardworking and athletic Graham’s dancers look as they strike poses and make moves that seem overwrought or utterly conventional.

In one, a dashing Merce Cunningham appears to be so light on his feet that Fred Astaire would have trouble keeping up. In another, Graham exults in frontier life, kicking up her toes as she plows through the challenges of surviving uncaring nature.

In others, Broadway and vaudeville have greater influence than movie-studio stills and publicity shots. Some of the dancers’ mod costumes convey bohemian attitude, strands of which can be seen in fashions from the 1960s.

Times change. Photographs don’t. Morgan’s works still captivate because of the wealth of detail they preserve. This richness is enhanced by her technical facility, eye for lighting and intuitive sense of when to release the shutter -- creating a stillness that intensifies the strangeness.

Craig Krull Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.