Images that have a sense of place

The work of Argentine artist Gustavo Lopez Armentia now at Galerie Yoramgil is filled with maps. Continents emerge from the thick, impasto surfaces of paintings cluttered with the names of countries, cities and other geographical locations (“my house,” “the Museum of Modern Art,” “West 57th,” etc.). Networks of lines -- thin and taut like airline routes or meandering like rivers and roads -- spider across many of his compositions, as if connecting points in his consciousness. Imagined web addresses are scrawled throughout, pointing to another sort of map altogether, invisible but equally prevalent.

The exhibition, billed as Armentia’s largest ever in the United States, includes 67 works, most from the last five years, and offers immersion into the intricacies of his sensibility.

Most of the works are wall-mounted mixed-media constructions characterized by a heavy, sculptural quality and an aggressive manipulation of surfaces. Also included are several sculptures and an assortment of delicate and especially lovely watercolors. All are populated by wispy, melancholy figures and saturated with suggestions of love and war.

Armentia’s style is avidly expressionistic, and the same might be said for his geography, which is rarely accurate in a literal sense but politically and psychologically astute. This is work about the contemporary experience of geography: about what it means to live in a global age, unprecedentedly mobile and perpetually inundated with information.

Galerie Yoramgil, 462 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 659-2641, through Dec. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Human behavior on videotape

The three video artists included in the Project’s exhibition “A City Called Ambition” come from different cultural backgrounds -- Aernout Mik is Dutch, Paul Pfeiffer grew up in Hawaii and the Philippines, and Kimsooja in Korea -- and their works take very different forms. One is a four-channel projection, one appears on a monitor roughly the size of a postage stamp; the other two are on standard monitors accompanied by low, comfortable chairs.

One thing all of the works share -- unusual in video -- is an absence of sound. This lends the exhibition a hushed quality and underscores each work’s contemplative nature.

Mik’s “Parallel Corner” involves four poster-size screens set up side by side at floor level, each revealing a different angle of the same enigmatic scene: a press conference of some sort, staged in an industrial-looking warehouse. Between the bustle of reporters at one end of the space and the languorous activities of several children at the other, the silent flow of activity is mesmerizing and all the more beguiling for its ultimate inexplicability.

Pfeiffer’s jewel-like video “Memento Mori,” which follows the journey of a fly around the grounds of a Palladian manor in England, is equally peculiar and captivating. The gallery’s press release offers a sophisticated-sounding explanation involving architecture, the human body, and the Postmodern gaze, but my guess is that the point really has more to do with the strange beauty of the creature’s frenetic, smudgy movement and the lovely backdrop of shifting grays.

The final two works, both from Kimsooja’s “A Homeless Woman” series, depict the artist lying motionless on sidewalks in two different cities: Delhi, where she is all but ignored, and Cairo, where a crowd of mostly male onlookers gathers curiously and ominously over her.

Each of the works concerns itself with the observation of a particular behavior. The last two are especially poignant, given that the behavior in question is genuine and unsolicited.

The Project, 6086 Comey Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 939-3777, through Dec. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Birds caught in desperate straits

Kelly Poe’s “Birds of North America” series, the subject of her first post-graduate solo exhibition, now at Anna Helwing Gallery, takes its name from a 1972 monograph by Eliot Porter, a nature and wildlife photographer. It’s a tribute of sorts, insofar as Poe shares Porter’s fascination with birds and documents them in a roughly similar format -- individually and with great delicacy, labeling each specimen with its scientific and common names.

Poe takes issue, however, with the effect that Porter was going for -- namely the romantic illusion that the subject was just “a bird doing private bird things, completely unaware of human presence.” That was decidedly not the case, given Porter’s elaborate staging of each scene.

Poe inserts a human presence with one simple but unsettling addition: a net. These birds aren’t seen chirping peacefully on tree branches or bathing in rambling brooks, but painfully bound and contorted, tangled in the nets of presumably well-meaning ornithologists.

The images, though unnerving, are exquisite, with an extremely shallow depth of focus that draws certain details into sharp clarity while the background recedes into blur.

In her statement, Poe expresses an interest in restoring to nature photography a sense of what critic John Berger has called the “abyss of non-comprehension” between animals and humans -- a “sublime emotion” in Poe’s view -- and she achieves. As the unfortunate creatures stare back at us, eyes filled with a blank desperation, there’s little room for romantic identification.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 202-2213, through Dec. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.