Disrupting the usual cultural patterns

The wry and slightly off-kilter sense of humor that distinguishes the work of Eduardo Abaroa is evident in a glance through the checklist of his current exhibition at the Roberts & Tilton Gallery. “The Body Cavity Inspection Network #1,” “Sociopathic Real Estate item #34704,” “Twinkie Plant,” “Flavor Enhancement MSG Pig” -- the titles suggest a logic just short of rational yet strangely canny.

A Mexico City native with a master of fine arts degree from CalArts, Abaroa toys with English here much as he toys with the stray cultural artifacts that make up his sculptures. He jostles unlikely fragments in an attempt to disrupt established patterns of meaning.

In the “Sociopathic Real Estate” series, he forces three symbolically compatible but physically disparate sets of objects -- dollhouses, articles of clothing and globes -- into an awkward union. Women’s underwear stretches around the circumference of one house. Black trousers spill out the window of another. Blue jeans, a pair of khaki shorts and a baby blue plaid skirt wrap around others, as if around thick, blocky torsos.

The globes are stuffed into various openings, one or two per piece, and the houses lie haphazardly about the gallery floor, as if spewed from a tornado. One senses that these and Abaroa’s other constructions are less statements than experiments, with each object held up against the others in hope of a reaction, whether material or conceptual.

In this case, what emerges most strikingly -- a curiously poignant detail -- is the strain of the fabric against the boxy proportions of the model architecture. There’s something strange, funny and difficult about the way we’re trying to live, it would seem to suggest -- piling possession upon possession, with so little sense of scale.

Another series, installed alongside the houses, consists of six roughly life-size dolphins made of fiberglass and fitted with various technological accouterments. Playing on the long-standing human fascination with the intelligence of these animals, Abaroa employs each of their sleek forms as a sort of blank slate -- an organic ideal against which to measure our own clunky tools of civilization.

“Aztlan Customized Dolphin” has flames painted on its fins and a bicycle chain spilling from its belly. “Atlantic (Utopian) Dolphin” has been decapitated to reveal a DVD player where its heart might have been; its head is on the floor, plugged into a laptop that plays a short sequence of video taken at a dreary Mexican water park called Atlantis.

Abaroa’s references can be obscure, so the effect of each piece hinges largely on which clues you have the means to interpret and how willing you are to draw connections between them. What saves the work from devolving into a mere conceptual guessing game is its resolute materiality. The combination of found and fabricated items, the alternation between casual and precise construction, the balance between delicacy and disposability -- these tensions give the work a very rooted sense of conviction.

The best example of this synthesis is “The Body Cavity Inspection Network,” a series of wonderfully energetic mobiles made from blue plastic balls and Q-Tips. The materials couldn’t be humbler, but the elaborate construction and elegant design suggest all the complexity of a digital communications system -- albeit, as Abaroa asserts with some pride in the show’s printed statement, a very ineffective one.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 1650 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 549-0223, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Enveloped by the landscape of living

British-born, New York-based photographer Paul Graham’s “American Night” series is a paragon of conceptual economy and eloquence. Three seemingly banal strands of landscape -- all spaciously photographed in nearly 6-by-8-foot prints -- are wound into an astute and downright moving portrait of American life.

The largest strand -- and the first to catch one’s eye in the modest selection on view at the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery -- consists of images taken alongside the roads, highways and parking lots of low-sprawling cities and towns around the country. All are vastly overexposed, so as to appear saturated in glaring white.

At the center of each, some distance off, is a single figure -- one denizen of this inhospitable landscape -- caught unaware. Whether standing, sitting, walking or in a wheelchair, each appears small and vulnerable, weary and slightly slumped, as if literally weighed down by the massive space around him, with its oppressive mantle of heat, poverty and anonymity.

Glance to your left in the gallery and you are confronted with something very different: a sparklingly clear portrait of a large, neatly manicured house in suburban Orange County. The contrast is startling and, far from merely reiterating cliches (a significant danger in tackling the suburbs), lays bare the economic disparity steadily increasing in this country, exposing the house for the hard, desperate fortress that it is.

In the third strand of the series -- represented in this show by only one image, unfortunately (a monograph available for perusal at the front desk offers a glimpse of the rest) -- the photographer returns to the gritty landscape of his own adopted city. Each image is focused at relatively close range on a single African American pedestrian, again usually unaware of the camera’s presence.

Whereas, in the overexposed images, Graham used light to essentially bury his subjects, underscoring their universality while also granting them a sort of privacy, he uses it here to lovingly illuminate their individuality. The city in these pictures is a gray, shadowy, claustrophobic backdrop, stained with the presence of human life, which blocks its inhabitants’ access to nature or sky.

The light -- a beam of which settles on each of Graham’s subjects, as if sent down for that person specifically -- is an almost celestial presence. It offers, if not quite relief or redemption, then a very humane and compassionate respite.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 525-1755, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A lot going on; hard to sit still

There’s a curiously schizophrenic quality to the work of young New York-based painter Jay Davis, now enjoying his second solo show at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery. A stylish nostalgia for Op Art and the hard-edge abstraction of the 1960s appears, in his mid-size acrylic-on-vinyl paintings, to be battling it out with an instinctive sympathy for the forms and rhythms of nature. Sharp geometric patterns and methodical spectra of color mingle with stylized echoes of mountains, leaves and tree branches.

Add a propensity for painstakingly intricate surface decoration, particularly stripes and dots, and an almost (but not quite) goofy emulation of Native American motifs, and you’ve got quite a frenetic situation. The happy result is art that seems never to hold still.

The colors are lively, and the compositions give the impression of growing more complicated the longer they are examined, shifting continuously between abstraction and representation, surface and depth, naturalism and artificiality. Though facetiously titled and loaded with what can only be called decorative impulses, a dazzling painting like “Turn Off the Lights, It’s Too Bright” reaches more earnestly (and successfully) for transcendence than most contemporary painting of recent memory.

That’s a quixotic and perhaps foolhardy endeavor, but one the all too cynical art world could stand a good deal more of.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through March 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Some are cool, others just cold

That the work in “Cool Intentions,” an exhibition of L.A.-based photographers now at Sandroni Rey, falls short of elucidating the show’s glib but ambiguous title, or of answering the question that this title would seem to necessitate (cool results?) is probably for the better. There’s no shortage of cool floating around in photography today, and it’s rarely what makes for the most memorable work.

Far more commendable among the three photographers assembled here are qualities like wit, clarity and visual intelligence. The latter is most notable in the images of Mark Wyse.

His cheekily titled series “Parked Cars in Various Parking Lots Between My House and Ed Ruscha’s” (1999) makes explicit the nostalgia underlying much of this work. But the flair for color and bold composition is largely his own. (His bird’s-eye views of surfers bobbing in textured fields of water are also quite striking.)

Walead Beshty echoes 1960s performance art but illuminates a specifically contemporary malaise in his very funny “Phenomenology of Shopping” series. It presents the artist’s own body partially buried in various consumer displays (stuffed animals, floral bedding, a clothes dryer, etc.).

Mark Roeder’s photographs also focus on the quotidian but fail on the whole to uncover anything new or compelling in the common domestic items that are his subjects. The work feels the least substantial of the lot.

Such are the risks of cool as an artistic strategy. It may heighten the luster of work that’s solid in other ways, but it can’t make something out of nothing.

Sandroni Rey, 1224 Abbot Kinney, Venice, (310) 392-3404, through March 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.