Politics and art? Of course, she says

Art is an urbane method for not following conventions. Put another way, it’s a type of nonviolent civil disobedience. Partly that explains why art’s profile tends to be liberal -- a fact that annoys conservatives no end, fueling dark thoughts of cultural conspiracy. But it really shouldn’t. Civil disobedience is an American tradition.

Andrea Bowers has composed a rich yet deceptively simple meditation on this durable connection between aesthetics and civil disobedience, and it is as timely as it is remarkable. At Mary Goldman Gallery, a site-specific sculpture, two drawings and a split-screen video projection cover a lot of ground. Individual works are pungent, but they all resonate against each other.

The gallery is divided by “Soft Blockade” -- a floor-to-ceiling wall woven from strips of multicolored fabric and suspended on metal posts. Sewn onto the tapestry is an all-over pattern of interlocking S-curves in white thread -- an image of chain-link fence, slyly made from chain stitching. The curtain sets the stage.

A drawing hangs at each end. Bowers employs a Photo-Realist style, but her handiwork contradicts the illusion of transparency that photographs create. She makes a point of surrounding the people in her drawings with lots of empty white space -- the contemplative space of art. Isolated from their worldly contexts, the subjects perform elaborate Kabuki. Inviting scrutiny, the drawings slow you down, transforming photographic verities into reflective questions.

To the left is a black-and-white triptych. Several women enact the basic instructions for behavior during an act of civil disobedience: Go perfectly limp and be carried away. Their arched bodies hang in space, like poised figures in a ballet.

Bowers leaves out the authorities -- police, soldiers or guards -- who would be dispersing these protesters. One result is that body parts are severed by white space at the places where the law would be exerting force -- wrists, under the arms or legs etc. Oddly, the visual sense of commotion gets enhanced.

On the right wall is a large and startling drawing in colored pencil. It shows a blowzy drag queen posed behind a partition or barricade, on which a sign commands “No Smoking.” She is, of course, depicted taking a drag on a cigarette, arching a heavily penciled eyebrow beneath her chrome yellow Eva Gabor-style wig. Diana Vreeland once insisted that “elegance is refusal”; if true, no painted transvestite has ever looked more elegant than this -- tacky feather boa and all.

Behind the tapestry wall, chairs are set up for viewing the continuous video projection. On the left screen a teacher and her assistant instruct a small multicultural class -- eight women, two men -- in the philosophy and tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. On the right screen the class practices the techniques. A more eloquent display of equilibrium between theory and practice is hard to imagine.

The setting appears to be a community center. Dressed in tights, sweats and leotards, and with lithe and graceful bodies, the young participants look like a troupe of modern dancers. Their movements, repetitive and based in everyday locomotion, enhance the analogy.

In all these works, Bowers’ shrewd suggestions of theater forge an inseparable link between art and politics. Notably, most of the people depicted are women. While familiar traditions like weaving and sewing are sometimes emphasized, American society’s tacit identification of the arts as a feminine activity is invoked.

Bowers’ work makes plain that arguments over politicizing aesthetics or aestheticizing politics are moot. You can’t have one without the other. Neither abstract nor academic, her vivid work offers pungent provocation.

Mary Goldman Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-8217, through June 26. Gallery closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Key items: glue and cardboard

“Hemmed in Two” is an immense, 46-foot-long construction that looks like a cross between a romantic sailing ship and a Brobdingnagian sea slug, or perhaps an elaborate hat for opening day at Ascot merged with a jerry-built shelter for a vagabond. It slumps in the main room at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery like some ramshackle barge run aground by the self-proclaimed monarch of an imaginary land.

The piece marks a noteworthy American debut for 45-year-old British artist Hew Locke. (After Los Angeles, the show travels to Atlanta.) Locke, born in Scotland, raised in British Guyana and now living in London, is a wizard with a glue gun.

Cardboard shipping boxes have been cut into Baroque shapes, plaited like grass-cloth and embellished with decorative patterns of white paint and black marker. The forms are draped over a wood frame, like a cloak and hat on a rack.

Locke uses his scissors and knife blade to slice and punch decorative patterns into the cardboard. The marks suggest tattoos and ritual scarification, along with numbers and wavy lines reminiscent of universal pricing codes. Colonialism redux.

Peer inside and you’ll see a cardboard thicket -- plus, here and there, a few African dolls, garlands of artificial ivy, clay figurines and goggle-eyed cardboard creatures. Walk around the nominal “front” and the ship’s prow seems to bend like a deviated septum. At the back, it’s coming apart at the seams, trailing fragments of cardboard crates that caution “Fragile,” “This Way Up” and “Handle With Care.” The ship of who-knows-what-state is foundering.

The show also includes portrait reliefs of assorted royals, similarly made from embellished cut-cardboard. These gigantic paper dolls are less compelling than the sculpture, which cheerfully pushes its toy-like exuberance into your space -- and into your face.

Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA, 5151 State University Drive, (323) 343-6610, through July 24. Closed Fridays and Sundays.

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Crafting mass against volume

Celebrated British sculptor Richard Deacon returns to L.A. Louver Gallery for his third solo show with four eccentric new works and one from 2000 that gives the exhibition its title -- “Beyond the Clouds.” Each is a marvel of sculptural smarts.

The title piece is a giant glazed ceramic vessel, which sets mass against volume in a manner that speaks directly to your body. (The lumpy block is just shorter than a standing adult.) Ten conjoined, concave surfaces are glazed in a color that looks like liquid patina, melding runny bronze and coppery green. Your mind works overtime to “inflate” this visually collapsing form, imbuing the dense sculptural mass with air.

Two puzzling wooden sculptures -- “Jacob” and “Splint” -- fuse organic and man-made shapes in ways that at first appear impossible. But Deacon hides nothing. Exposing the fabrication in his work, he entices your brain to work backward: You mentally take apart the sculpture, then put it back together. Liveliness gets injected into an inanimate object.

Two dimpled, stainless steel wall reliefs, one indoors and one on an adjacent patio, are each composed from biomorphic panels welded together at the edges. The curvy shapes, surface undulations and wavy light reflections create subtle cognitive dissonance. It takes an inordinate amount of time before you realize that the seven circular holes cut into these amoebic blobs actually line up in the simple pattern of a rectilinear grid.

Once that gets noticed, these glamorous wall reliefs are suddenly held in visual suspension -- poised between pulling apart and locking together, meandering idly and lining up in strict order. Who knew a visual contest between ductile and tensile strength could be so cheerfully hypnotic?

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Contemplating spreading light

Tom Chamberlain’s paintings demand nothing but your time, and they repay the debt in spades. At Kontainer Gallery, the young London-based artist adds to a current mini-Brit-Art invasion with his American solo debut of abstract paintings.

Layers of acrylic are brushed over relatively fine canvas in almost imperceptible strokes. Sometimes monochrome, sometimes not, all the surfaces seem to spread light. This halation is hard to explain and harder yet to pin down in your vision. A small silvery panel titled “Closer Still” coaxes your eyes exactly that way -- closer and closer still, to no explicable avail.

“Closer Still” looks rather like the shimmery surface of the sea witnessed through the hazy light of a summer day. Other works in rich browns and ethereal whites organize themselves around spots of shadow or light, creating cottony webs across the surface of the canvas. The paintings’ edges tend to be more uniform in tone, so that the optical effects pull away from the sides in a manner familiar from Abstract Expressionism and Analytical Cubism.

In short, you seem to be looking into atmosphere, which rises up from the surface. A gallery handout explains that Chamberlain’s paintings are made from “repeated marks, which travel in an ovular arc from one edge of the canvas to another;” where the repeated lines cross, a spot of light or shadow gradually builds up.

Maybe -- but, try as you might, you can’t tell that just by looking. Like some improbable offspring of Vija Celmins and Ross Bleckner, these paintings retain a stubborn, gorgeous mystery.

Kontainer Gallery, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-4746, through June 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.