Sense of mysticism and sense of balance

Encountering the work of Brazilian artist Tunga feels something like stumbling into the laboratory of a shaman. The forms are organic but esoteric, the tone portentous but largely inscrutable. There’s clearly a logic at play -- a code to the various configurations -- but it’s elusive, seeming equally primal and philosophical, rustic and sleek.

It’s difficult, in other words, to get your head around the work. But it speaks beguilingly to the body, with an almost unnervingly sophisticated command of shape, color and texture.

That’s how it is with “Elective Affinities,” a new installation now at Christopher Grimes Gallery. A massive contraption stretching to all four corners of the space, the piece resembles the site of some ritual transaction, enveloping viewers with an air of mystical significance.

At the center is what looks like a large steel door frame, from which are suspended about half a dozen intersecting cane-like rods, all 25 feet in length. Heavy wool blankets envelop this portal, protecting a mysterious pile of talc powder. Sheer gray curtains hang from rods, dividing the space into quadrants.

Chained to the end of each partition, resting on the ground, is a boulder-like sphere of polished aluminum studded with large aluminum teeth and gaping holes where other teeth might have been. Additional teeth hang from the rods at various intervals and are scattered about the floor, amid several loose blankets and chains.

During an opening performance, two mostly nude and exceptionally lithe young women moved silently about the installation, fondling the objects and digging through the talc. Their footprints remain visible here and there, and a trace of their presence lingers in a video of the event, which is projected onto one of the four curtains.

In an interview that’s included on the gallery’s DVD version of the performance, Tunga discusses the tooth as a universal form of sculpture, produced by the body, then expelled and miraculously regenerated -- a process he compares to casting.

The proliferation of the motif throughout the installation thus suggests a sort of compulsive fetish -- a desire to tap into the thrill and horror of that original loss and to somehow harness its power, as a shaman might harness the power of a fallen animal.

A closer look at the teeth still embedded in the boulder-like objects reveals a curious detail: In two, the roots sink downward, as they would in the mouth, but in the others they point outward, as if surrendered by their owners to a particularly sticky lump of candy.

The disparity suggests an interplay of fundamentally opposing qualities -- male and female, expulsion and absorption, productivity and receptivity. It implies a sort of cosmological balance.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through July 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Virtual reality in a world of dangers

Train wrecks, terrorist attacks, car accidents, robberies, fires, earthquakes, riots, hostage crises, plane crashes, toxic waste spills -- images of disaster seem to paper the walls of contemporary life, flooding the media and burrowing deep in the imagination of the American public. Individually ill-equipped to counter such a multitude of threats, we tend to pour our faith into another image -- that of the firefighter, police officer, military regiment or other first-responder, professionally trained to maneuver and mitigate dangerous terrain.

A fascinating exhibition now at the Center for Land Use Interpretation examines the nature of this training through a photographic tour of what it calls “the expanding landscape of preparedness.” The pictures show facilities like the Los Angeles Police Department’s Edward M. Davis Training Center, the San Bernardino County Sheriff Department’s Emergency Vehicle Operations Center, the California Office of Emergency Services’ Specialized Training Institute and seven others scattered across the Southland.

Presented in a series of digital slide shows, one site per computer screen, these images lead viewers through a space that is rarely glimpsed by the outside world, yet is devoted almost entirely to its simulation.

There are mock neighborhoods, mock highways, mock restaurants and drug labs; collapsed building props, bus accident props and props intended to provide the experience of a confined space. The degree of realism fluctuates wildly, with weirdly specific details--a Help Wanted sign in a fast food restaurant or a pair of golf clubs in an escrow office -- floating inexplicably alongside the broadly generic.

Taken by an assortment of individuals affiliated with the center, the images are consistently compelling. They strike a delicate balance between factual documentation and visual appeal and steer commendably clear of irony.

One thing the show makes clear is that much of the time in training, the first responders we come to rely upon are also dealing in images: cardboard criminals, dummy accident victims, hollow props, empty storefronts and red-paint blood. That said, when we encounter a sign advising recruits to “train like your life depends on it -- because it does,” it’s clearly no joke. These images have real-world counterparts and thus have serious consequences.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-5722, through July 18. Closed Monday through Thursday.

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Weathered but living ghosts

The photographs in Ori Gersht’s current exhibition at Angles Gallery, drawn from a recent series titled “Ghost,” are deeply reverent portraits of very old trees.

Gersht, who has lived in London for the past 16 years, returned to his home country of Israel -- specifically to the ancient olive groves of Galilee -- to make the works. The trees are more than 500 years old and look much as you’d expect them to after a lengthy tenure in violently disputed soil. They’re low to the ground, thick around the middle and painfully gnarled, with twisted branches and spare, dry foliage.

Centered individually in Gersht’s 4-by-5-foot prints, they’re rather beautifully ugly, each perfectly unique and saturated in the character of the place.

What’s remarkable, however, is Gersht’s peculiar manipulation of light. Working at the height of midday glare, he overexposed each image by several stops, then delicately resurrected the washed-out traces in the darkroom.

The result is a strange, ghostly quality, hence the show’s title, that makes the images look like negatives or X-rays in some places and like paintings in others.

Some have an almost holographic presence, as if fragments of the image were suspended in clear resin. The palette, meanwhile, is reduced to a dusty spectrum of pale grays, greens and lavenders, with touches of yellow, including a burning ochre sky in one of the most dramatic.

One senses, in this strenuous but poetic exercise, a desire to capture time as the trees themselves experience it -- in protracted waves of sun, dust and wind rather than chronologies of elections, news reports and death tolls.

Angles Gallery, 2230 and 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through June 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Extending off into the horizon

“Sight Lines,” an exhibition at the Happy Lion Gallery featuring three young L.A. artists, is a handsome show filled with clean lines and good intentions. But it doesn’t add up to much more than the sum of its parts.

The most striking single work is Rachelle Rojany’s “Cornered Infinity,” a pair of 22-foot wood planks that reach from the floor to one corner of the gallery’s ceiling, diminishing at the top as though toward a vanishing point. Several smaller wood sculptures have a similarly sharp look, but they communicate very little.

Patrick Lakey’s works span three different media -- photography, bronze and vinyl wall text -- and come across as frustratingly fragmented. They’re more like intriguing pieces of larger projects than complete works unto themselves.

Brian Wills’ vertical stripe paintings are the most satisfying, with a lively sense of pattern and snappy color. But they also feel at risk of falling back on their own prettiness.

It is young work, on the whole, more attractive than deep. Each of the three clearly has the motions down, but it’s not yet clear what they’re trying to say.

Happy Lion Gallery, 963 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1360, through July 3. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.