A lush landscape of vast alienation

A current of ominous dread skitters along the otherwise benign surface of suburban banality in Tom LaDuke’s landscape paintings. It’s a staple of his work.

At Angles Gallery, this conflicted motif of commonplace anxiety recurs in LaDuke’s new landscape paintings, whose chief materials are military enamel and aluminum panel. The work is almost always gray, with bits of blank architecture, isolated treetops and detached streetlights confined to a narrow strip along the picture’s bottom edge.

The composition is ambiguous and potent. Big sky often functions as an artistic metaphor for independence, a sign of liberation and spiritual possibility, and the vast expanses of silvery atmosphere in LaDuke’s paintings can’t escape that reading. But they’re oppressive, too -- caustic in tone and visually weighty, as if pressing hard on the horizontal strips of human habitation below.

The paintings are joined by visually spare watercolors. Several show the upper portions of a single plant or tree, silhouetted against a blank background. The poisonous species in their titles -- hemlock, sumac, nightshade, etc. -- remove any doubt about the grimness of the environment that the artist means to chronicle. “Narcissus,” a gnarled image of a strangely doubled tree, even proposes a landscape defined by confusion of identity and profound alienation.

A compelling group of sculptures personifies those sentiments. Their source is a pair of influential performance pieces by artist Chris Burden, executed in Orange County three decades ago. (LaDuke did his undergraduate study in Fullerton.) In one performance, Burden stood at one end of a gallery while a friend, standing at the other, shot him in the arm using a rifle. In the other, Burden locked himself in a small storage locker at school for five days, with five gallons of water in the locker above and an empty five-gallon bottle in the one below.

For “Self-Inflicted Burden,” a 3-foot-tall self-portrait sculpture, LaDuke shot himself in the arm. The sculpture, made from lifelike plastic resins, shows him wearing gray sweatpants and bedroom slippers; isolation in the artist’s studio is crossed with an image of nocturnal solitude. His right arm hangs at his side, the hand clutching a Daisy pellet pistol, while a thin trickle of blood runs from the angry red hole just below the biceps in his upraised left arm (no exit wound is visible). The look on the artist’s face, examining the lesion, appears partly puzzled and partly annoyed.

“Hours of Operation” is an industrial landscape constructed on an 8-foot-square tabletop. This labyrinth is composed of row upon row of personal storage units, each of which holds a portion of a life-size mold LaDuke made from his entire body. Storage units don’t get more personal than that.

History is always a burden, and here the pun has special resonance for a Southern California landscape (artistic and otherwise) that has always been predicated on the roseate vision of a wide-open future, not an inescapable acknowledgment of the past. Chris Burden’s artistic legacy looms large, and we can’t allow ourselves to forget that his physically grueling, even traumatic, 1971 performance pieces arose within a society being shredded by unnecessary foreign war, bitter racial strife and economic hardship.

Now is not then, of course. In 1971, Burden asked a friend to shoot him so that, within a certain frame of safety, he could embody a daily horror abstracted in press accounts. In 2004, LaDuke chose instead to shoot himself. In the difference lies another level of meaning.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Oct. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The canvas speaks volumes

New York painter Glenn Ligon understands that a stereotype, before it’s anything else, is a term that describes a molded printing plate. His text paintings have made good use of a format derived from Jasper Johns’ precedent of employing printing templates. Race, sexuality and the way context shapes our conventional ideas about them are principal themes of his work, and printing and text provide their form. A fine selection of 17 examples at Regen Projects is Ligon’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Most were made during the last two years, but two date from at least a decade ago. Ligon’s texts come from diverse sources. An excerpt from James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” might be followed by a homophobic joke told in the urban patois of Richard Pryor. The high poetry of formal language rubs against barroom crudity, while homosexuality resonates against sexual fear and self-loathing.

Elsewhere, a quote from John Howard Griffin’s autobiographical “Black Like Me” speaks in the language of a white man masquerading as an African American. In capital letters without punctuation, the text says: “I had expected to see myself disguised but this was something else.” Black letters on a white background become increasingly mottled and dark as you read down the tall canvas, until finally a mostly black canvas obscures the words. Underneath, however, it’s still white. Is this painting a “disguised self” that is “something else”?

Ligon uses thick oil stick, gesso, thin acrylics and sometimes coal dust (it’s black and beautiful) to give a tactile range to elusive language. Quotations are repeated, then dissolve into black or white monochrome -- a “context” that makes the words unreadable against an identical background.

In other brightly colored paintings, the printing register slips, creating visual dissonance. Glamorous in their Warhol-like flair, they are agonizing in their evocation of harsh discord.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Oct. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Mixed media blurs daily routines

If you mixed Allan McCollum’s fuzzy photographs of television screens with Chuck Close’s portraits composed from inked fingerprints, and then tossed in a dose of Nancy Burson’s composite pictures made with computer technology, you might end up with something along the lines of Jason Salavon’s video projections and digital photographs. At the Project, which is inaugurating a new space near Culver City after several years in a downtown warehouse, the young Chicago-based artist is having his L.A. gallery debut. It’s a mixed affair.

Salavon is a whiz at computer software. Using self-designed programs I couldn’t begin to understand, he pulverizes and then reconstitutes digitized images. For example, a target-like abstraction was made by taking apart Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 “Apocalypse Now,” frame by frame, and then reorganizing it into a hypnotic, 4-foot mandala. Conceptually appealing, it’s visually inert.

More intriguing are four still photographs that began with multiple images of domestic rituals commonly photographed: a department store Santa Claus, a Little Leaguer proudly posing, a graduation and a wedding day. “These are the moments of your life.” Salavon blends together the multiple representations of each photo-op event, as if unique examples of a generic ceremony might yield one ur-example. The resulting picture is a recognizable but fuzzed scenario; protagonists dissolve like sugar cubes in tea.

Best is a 3 1/2 -minute video triptych in which Salavon labored to create a similarly average example of the nightly comedy monologues delivered by David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. Digitally aligning multiple monologues, he underscores the comforting routine in comedy routine. Blurred and glowing phantoms buzz softly in the darkened gallery, like something out of “Poltergeist,” where demons lurk inside the tube.

The Project, 6086 Comey Ave., (323) 939-3777, through Oct. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Drawn into a geometric world

A house divided against itself cannot stand, Abraham Lincoln noted in a morally courageous, politically incorrect speech in 1858. In 1974, as the nation was coming undone in the tumult of Vietnam, social strife and Watergate, Gordon Matta-Clark took Lincoln at his word: Using a chain saw (and an incisive intellect) he split a suburban New Jersey house in half, top to bottom. Even in photographs the physical effect of the divided house is nerve-racking -- and thrilling.

At Richard Telles Fine Art, a fine selection of 23 drawings by Matta-Clark (1943-1978) surveys his brief but influential mature career. The timing is apposite: The architect-cum-artist was a studio assistant to Robert Smithson, whose work is the subject of an excellent retrospective now at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The show includes fanciful landscapes in ink and marker, historical buildings from ancient world cultures, pencil renderings of geometric forms, an image of an urban rosebush protected -- and imprisoned -- by a chain-link fence and abstract force-fields made from a hail of arrows. One 1975 drawing of a conical section appears related to a complex, temporary work in Paris, where Matta-Clark sliced a multistory hole through a 17th century apartment building that stood in the way of the planned Centre Georges Pompidou.

Most compelling is a sequence of two large pencil drawings. The first overlays a diagonal grid with circles. Odd intersections create positive forms from eccentric negative spaces, highlighted in the second drawing.

This becomes a template for a third work, in which shapes are sliced with a knife from a stack of dozens of sheets of paper. Space here is at once optical and physical. Dynamic force becomes a three-dimensional gestalt, which isn’t what one expects from a drawing.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Nov. 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.