Trying to elevate the ordinary

Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans chronicles everyday life in the manner of a blogger, working on the assumption that his personal take on things merits public attention. There’s an appealing confidence in that approach and in Tillmans’ sense of entitlement, his belief in the inherent significance of everyday life. Ordinary life is significant, but not all of it is equally worth sharing.

Tillmans’ installation of prints hung in syncopated rhythm across the walls at Regen Projects has a certain stylishness to it as a journal, or accretive self-portrait, but it lacks intensity. It’s not revealing enough or distilled enough, compelling enough, troubling enough or beautiful enough to hold our attention for long.

The photographs vary from snapshot-small to mural-huge (more than 13 feet wide). A few are framed. Most are unceremoniously taped to the wall with studied casualness, up high, down low, alone or in clusters. The installation invites the kind of skimming that’s become the multi-tasker’s norm. The room is a bounty of loosely connected options. Browsing it feels akin to surfing the Web or flipping channels on TV on a slow night: Nothing in particular to settle into and not much happening synergistically, either.

There are interiors and landscapes, pictures of political demonstrations and images that zero in on a lovely curve of glossy paper. Tillmans shows us a woman’s crotch, close up, from the front, and a man’s dangling genitals from the back. He presents a pleasant-enough portrait of the singer Morrissey and a straightforward shot of another man picking a splinter from his foot. In one photograph, a jacket lies on a bed and in another a pair of men’s underwear hangs from a door handle. The largest print, of a fence that has trapped fallen leaves and errant plastic bags, is remarkable only for its scale, but it also reads as a metaphor for Tillmans’ own photographic practice of snagging bits of nature and culture that life blows his way.

London-based Tillmans has been making portraits and diary-like spreads to critical acclaim and some controversy (due to intimate angles on sex and drugs) for more than a decade. He calls his stance “an unprivileged gaze.” It trades on the raw charm of the ready-made, thickened by a postmodern penchant for multiplicity and a contemporary fixation on the random. Seeking a truth to fluid experience, something pure and minimally inflected, and yet feeling “post-authentic,” Tillmans backs himself into a corner, aesthetically. We have our own unprivileged eyes. What do we learn, how are we changed by seeing through his?

Within Tillmans’ installation, a few images give pause. A picture of a soldier with a machine gun standing in a small apartment benefits from lack of context. The same goes for a photograph of a room with several bulging mail sacks and the residue of a low-grade party. Both interject a drop of unfamiliarity, even mystery, into the mix. A photograph made looking down at the artist’s own feet on beach sand, and the kooky shadow they cast, adds a bit of gentle humor, a joie de vivre smile.

For several years, Tillmans has also been making images with no definite referent in the physical world. Two of the abstractions, lush, calligraphic gestures drawn by light, are included in this show. In one, fine dark tresses dissolve into smoky trails and nervous, Twombly squiggles. In these large, romantic images, Tillmans relies on chance in the darkroom to achieve his effects. Ironically, the abstractions seem more charged with intentionality than the composed snippets of everyday life. Unapologetic indulgences in beauty, they hold our gaze more securely than the prolonged self-indulgence of the rest.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Nov. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Isolated details from Bush politics

War may be a continuation of politics by other means, as the military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz famously stated, but on the surface, the two don’t resemble each other in the least. Christopher Morris has shot both. He has photographed violent conflict around the globe for the last 20 years, earning him thousands of pages in print and top awards in photojournalism. War, we learn anew from his pictures, is immediate, raw, tense, chaotic.

On assignment for Time magazine, Morris has, since 2000, also trailed President Bush. In his 15 color photographs at Mary Goldman, we see politics as war of a very different order, as strategy built of symbols, colors, postures. Action on the political stage is physical too, but little is left to chance, especially in Bush’s realm. All is controlled, sanitized, fresh-scrubbed and camera-ready.

Morris isolates details from the political drama, shifting our attention from an event’s calculated focal point to others that are equally telling. Laura Bush’s prim shoes, for instance. Or a coconut cake adorned with tiny flags on toothpicks. Both are equally pristine and primed for the spotlight. In his photographs, supporters are as uniformly white and picture-perfect as the cake, and similarly ornamented with the stars and stripes. A few of the photographs show Secret Service agents, one stationed in a parking garage, one hip-deep in marsh reeds in Maine. Stiff, stern, these agents are (as the rhetoric goes) with us, not against us, but their presence is foreboding.

This selection, made by Time photo editor Alice Gabriner, represents a small slice of Morris’ experience these last four years, but it’s enough to evoke both the polish and the fear that he sees the Bush administration exploit to its advantage.

Mary Goldman Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, (213) 617-8217, through Nov. 20. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Showing the many roles of women

The women in Peregrine Honig’s intriguing mixed-media works on paper are sometimes fragile, sometimes self-assured, detached, dismayed, often beautiful and alluring. They can look strong, but also wounded or vulnerable. The drawings themselves, like their subjects, resist easy categories. Lovely and tough, childlike and yet cynical, they carry a heavy emotional load for their delicate scale.

The artist draws in ink and pencil, fleshing out her images with washes of color, occasional patches glossy and flirty as nail polish. She also collages shapes (usually retro-quaint butterflies) cut from printed illustrations onto the page. In several of the images at Acuna-Hansen, she writes a few lines that serve as caption or narrative prompt.

In “Fawn Knots,” a figure shifts from fawn to woman, from one creature to two, as we survey its parts. Pink flesh gives way to soft brown spotted fur. When hands and feet, or limbs, meet the ground they become plant roots. Here, woman is classically identified with innocent nature. In another image, a nubile nude on her back brings her knees to her chest, birthing a stream of butterflies and flowers.

The lightness in Honig’s touch belies a darker, more brutal understanding of women’s roles as currency, sex objects, decoration. “Patronize” is the toughest of the bunch, a gripping image with text mocking the hypocrisy of patriotic men who exploit women. Honig touches nerves in her work, but not gratuitously. The work is more finely balanced than that, and in its conflation of compliance and defiance, pain and beauty, more complex in its constitution.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., (323) 441-1624, through Nov. 20. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Slightly goofy, slightly elegant

Ceres Madoo’s “Danglers,” at Andrewshire, are goofy enough to amuse but elegant enough not to be dismissed as comic one-liners. Each of the hanging sculptures is fashioned by hand of wire and a different color of ceramic resin putty. They hang from the ceiling, hefty as chandeliers, sprightly as birdcages.

“Flana” looks as if it were crafted from long ropes of chewed bubble gum. The ribs of its oval armature are knobbed by vertebra petals, then curve down into playful curls with scalloped tails. The industrial gray piece that looks like a mock-serious hatrack brings to mind eyelashes or the fine fringe rimming leaves or propelling small organisms.

Madoo mixes work and play with panache. Her sculptures are delightful explorations of ornament and its origins in the patterns of nature. The linear structures evoke the ribs and veins of leaves, scales of fish, meandering vines and intricate bones. Though her prints and drawings are unremarkable, Madoo’s three-dimensional work has tremendous verve. It falls comfortably into a lineage that includes Karl Blossfeldt’s stunning early 20th century photographs of plant forms on up to Elizabeth Turk’s recent lace-like, skeletal forms in marble.

Andrewshire Gallery, 3850 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 389-2601, through Dec. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.