A song unheard, an image unseen

The enigmatic appeal of Terence Koh’s current exhibition at Peres Projects, his second with the gallery, is epitomized in its curiously seductive title: “Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of My Butterfly Song.”

At a glance, the warning would seem to be misplaced. The installation is spare and pristine, with hospital-white walls, a white floor and bright fluorescent lights. The only immediately apparent works are three discreet vitrines, one housing white objects, one black and one silver. There’s no sound and little hint of anything ominous.

There is a song involved -- an original composition performed by the artist in “his own private language” -- but you won’t hear it: It plays at very low volume from iPods hidden inside the soundproof Plexiglas of the vitrines.

It’s intended for the butterflies, but you won’t see them either: They’re hidden within blocks of compacted powder, also inside the vitrines.

The idea, apparently, is that the vibration of the song, soft as it is, will eventually erode the delicately sculpted blocks, revealing and perhaps resuscitating the dead butterflies. In case this should happen -- and in case they somehow manage to make it out of the vitrines -- Koh has provided, above the gallery door, a small purple painting made from grape Kool-Aid and sugar: nourishment to sustain them on their journey back into the world. The painting is titled “So I’m Using This as an Exit Strategy for Some Purple Afternoon.”

This explanation is not obvious in the work -- I learned of it through the gallery owner -- but it makes a strange sort of sense and lends the show an endearingly magical quality. I, for one, found myself wanting to believe it was possible.

What really distinguishes the exhibition, however, lending weight to its more fanciful aspects, is Koh’s deliberate and often unsettlingly evocative use of materials.

The glaring white of the walls, for example, is jarring and subtly disorienting. The clean angularity of the vitrines contrasts sharply with the soft blocks of powder and the other objects inside: a pile of mirror shards and a single strand of silver hair in the silver case; a black wig in the black case; and, in the white, a pair of pillow-like spheres with a long lock of white hair extending from the point where they touch. A trail of poured white paint leading from this last assemblage to the ledge, then under the Plexiglas and down one leg of the vitrine, vividly underscores the grouping’s sexual connotations.

The purple painting, though too high to see clearly, is deliciously enticing, as is the installation’s final element: a slowly spinning ceiling fan coated in what looks like bright pink frosting. (The title reads “Modernity Is Nothing But a Bit of Strawberry Cream Floating Above Us All.”)

The sheer refinement of the installation would seem to belie the irreverent, juvenile, porn-heavy tone of the websites and publications for which the artist -- who went by the name Asianpunkboy (APB) until last year -- is best known. Deliberately Warholian in the cultivation of his persona, however, he clearly relishes such contradictions and encourages confusion regarding his motives and intentions.

When asked in a recent interview about the difference between the two bodies of work, he replied that he was “a two-headed beast” -- “both hairless albino wolf and rabbit with a pink uni-horn.” A survey of other media coverage reveals numerous inconsistencies in his statements about himself, including about his age and his ethnicity. Even the checklist of the current exhibition betrays a certain indifference to factuality, listing such materials as “white angel powder” and “stardust.”

This is to say that there’s probably little point in attempting to pin down what Koh is saying here. There are a few common themes linking this and the Web work, among them sex, the body, masculinity and fantasy. But more interesting, at this point in the young artist’s career, is the vague, restless and rather shifty way in which they meander through his various media.

Peres Projects, 969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 617-1100, through Aug. 7. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Euro-American boyhood portraits

In much of his work over the last few years, New York-based photographer and video artist Anthony Goicolea has appeared to be playing the part of a young male Cindy Sherman, presenting himself as a chameleonic figure adrift in a crisp, cinematic milieu. The narcissism of Sherman’s project is taken to absurd but unsettling extremes by Goicolea, who often appears a dozen or more times within the same frame. The horrific qualities of Sherman’s later work, similarly, are unmistakable in the younger artist’s excessively tactile (fleshy, sticky, slimy, bloody) portrayals of male adolescence.

In the series that constitutes his current exhibition at Sandroni Rey, however, Goicolea appears to be drifting closer to the Gregory Crewdson school, taking himself out of the frame altogether and enlisting a crowd of young, ski-masked surrogates in school uniforms and hooded red sweatshirts.

The centerpiece of the show is a video, projected in a hay-filled shipping container parked just outside the gallery, that portrays these boys in a rural European landscape performing various ritualistic actions: building a bonfire, dueling with flaming sticks of wood, waving a black flag emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, and so on.

Inside the gallery, eight large-format photographs depict similar scenes with the same cast of characters.

While it’s a relief, in many ways, to be free of Goicolea’s freakishly cloned countenance -- an extremely unnerving sight at times -- these images lack much of the friction his countenance brought to the earlier work. They’re wonderfully picturesque: Goicolea is an extremely talented landscape photographer. But between the facelessness of the boys and the banality of the symbolism, the scenes feel exceedingly hollow: vaguely nostalgic, vaguely ominous and blandly generalized portraits of Euro-American boyhood.

The most memorable image, tellingly, is the only one that conveys a specific human interaction: a tentative kiss between two boys alone in front of a fire. The sight of their faces slipping ever so slightly out from behind their hoods leaves one longing to break through Goicolea’s artificial narrative and glimpse something of the boys themselves.

Sandroni Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 280-0111, through Aug. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Bringing out the elegance of steel

Among the two-dozen sculptures in Noho Modern’s current exhibition of work by the late James Prestini (1908-93), there are only a few basic shapes -- an H, an I, a circle, a square and a rectangle -- all retained from the standardized steel structural elements that were the artist’s primary materials.

A consummate Bauhaus-era Modernist, Prestini sought to bring out the best in these industrial forms, not by celebrating their brawn, as Richard Serra and other later-generation sculptors might have, but by slimming them down, sharpening their lines and dressing them up in a slick nickel plating.

The result is an exceptionally elegant, if ultimately rather simplistic, body of work. Whether standing alone or stacked in slender towers, the forms achieve a degree of balance that makes them appear much lighter than they are, as if they were made from tin rather than steel. Their thin walls and many hollows carve up the negative space with striking delicacy, while their polished surfaces reflect and gently distort the dimensions of the gallery.

Prestini is best known for the turned-wood vessels he made in the 1930s and ‘40s. The new works are neither as accessible nor perhaps as elegant as those -- there is a warmth to wood that steel simply doesn’t have -- but they reflect a similar concern for the integrity of the medium, and an equal degree of refinement.

Noho Modern, 11225 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 505-1297, through Aug. 7. Open daily.

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Undermining perceptions

Florian Maier-Aichen’s first solo exhibition at Blum & Poe, two years ago, was a spare but promising debut made up of four or five unassumingly clever photographs, most of them slightly offbeat landscapes.

His second show, on view now, makes one appreciate the much larger dimensions of the gallery’s new location on La Cienega: With about twice the number of works, the exhibition offers a broader glimpse of the artist’s curious sensibility and more than lives up to the promise of the debut.

The assembled works, which range from 2 feet to about 8 feet wide, are also primarily landscapes -- specifically long-range or aerial views taken in California or Germany. The images themselves are all fairly banal but for a minor element of visual tweaking that serves to undermine the viewer’s perceptions in some way.

The most overt example -- a motif that appeared once in the last exhibition and recurs twice here -- is that of a bridge that has quietly and inconspicuously collapsed.

Another memorable image is an aerial view of Long Beach Harbor in which the sky and the sea appear as flat blocks of jet black, with the land stretching in one textured gray band between them, hemmed at the top with a lacy white mountain range.

Among the most spectacular images are several mountainous views in which Maier-Aichen has tinted the trees and ground cover a vivid red. In the largest of these, a turquoise jewel of a lake nestles between the hills, striking a bold contrast. With the creamy, laminated tone of an old souvenir placemat, the picture teeters precariously between ugly and gorgeous but, like most of the works in this show, leans seductively toward the latter.

Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 836-2062, through Aug. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.