Alchemy yields a subtle magic

Three sheets of plain paper are taped to the front door of Machine Project, a weekends-only gallery in Silver Lake. One directs deliveries to be left next door when the gallery is closed. Another is a recipe for phosphorus, taken from “Chymicus Rationalis,” a how-to book published in 1692 by an English alchemist named William Y-Worth. The third is an announcement for the current exhibition, by artist Karen Lofgren, in the “secret gallery.”

The main gallery in the small storefront space is empty, except for a stack of phosphorus recipes and a page for signing up to be on the mailing list. It’s not uncommon for exhibitions in off-the-beaten-track galleries like this to be canceled. You begin to think that the announcement for Lofgren’s exhibition is a misprint -- that you’re in the right place at the wrong time.

You’re actually in the wrong place at the right time. The secret gallery exists in a parallel universe of sorts, right beneath the floorboards. You cannot enter it. But to see what it holds, get down on all fours, close one eye and peer through the glass-covered, silver-dollar-size hole in the floor.

There, amid utter blackness, lies the glowing skeleton of a unicorn, curled up in the fetal position like a recently discovered mummy. It is life-size and lovely, carefully crafted from hundreds of tiny white Christmas lights wrapped in hundreds of feet of translucent packaging tape.

Lofgren’s unicorn is not meant to be realistic. Nor is it pure fantasy. Instead, it combines the showmanship of P.T. Barnum with the guardedness of early California assemblage to stimulate the imagination. Inviting timely thoughts about the relationship between secrecy and power, it also raises important questions about the pleasures and pitfalls of discovering wonders for oneself or having them served up by others, as prepackaged products.

Throughout history, art has often gone underground to survive repressive regimes. Lately, so much contemporary art has so nakedly pursued fame and fortune in the spotlight that it makes you wonder what happened to the underground.

It may be back, right beneath your feet, where it is easily missed yet quietly waiting to work its alchemical magic.

Machine Project, 1200-D N. Alvarado St., L.A. (213) 483-8761, through Sept. 12. www.machineproject.com. Saturdays and Sundays only.

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America’s status: That falling feeling

Art and politics often mix like oil and water. That’s not the case with the works in “No Man’s Land,” a thoughtful exhibition in which melancholy and hope are subtly interwoven to suggest that the United States’ position in the global landscape has shifted -- for better and for worse -- from ascendancy to decline.

Organized by guest curator Sara Pironti for the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, the seven-artist show features a large room displaying sculptures and drawings flanked by two darkened spaces, each showing a projected video. A solitary painting hangs in the entryway. The videos set the tone for the evocative ensemble, which is pointed but not preachy, sobering but not joyless.

In the side gallery just off the entryway is a seven-minute, two-screen video by T.V. Moore. It shows a weary soldier, in helmet and fatigues, running through the streets of a modern city with a boombox balanced on his shoulder. Passersby pay no attention to the wayward GI, whose pedestrian activity looks increasingly Sisyphean -- and not all that different from some of the things homeless people do, all but invisibly to most everyone else.

In the back gallery, a 15-minute video by Jed Lind follows the horizons of desert, mountain and seashore vistas as a man reads from what seem to be the journals of folks who lived like Robinson Crusoe, foraging along coastlines for flotsam and jetsam from ships, shipwrecks and plane crashes.

The camera pans slowly, at a soothing pace that is interrupted every 360 degrees, where the horizon appears to be discontinuous, broken, as if by an earthquake.

Scavenger-inspired sculptures by Ryan Taber and Cheyenne Weaver create similar ruptures in time and space. The artists craft customized models and 3-D diagrams, deftly combining scale shifts, genres, types of representation, academic disciplines and historical eras in rich stews of narrative possibility.

Yoko Iida’s crumpled, wallpaper-scale drawing and Tyler Rowland’s pile of yard sale leftovers, all spray-painted gold, lack the complexity of the best works. The only painting, Lisa Sanditz’s picture of an overdecorated cave, almost gets lost amid the generally large works. But “No Man’s Land” is about not belonging, so the little painting makes odd sense, fitting in by standing out.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Sept. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Reality shakes hands with fiction

When the word “landscape” entered the English language in 1598, it referred to pictures painted by artists who went into the countryside and depicted what they saw. The term’s meaning soon expanded to include the countryside itself. Today, it encompasses even more, describing the zeitgeist or outlining distinctive features of times, places and attitudes.

At Bamboo Lane/Revisited, “Enter/Exit: the uncommon landscape” treats the idea of landscape even more loosely, using it to convey dreams and realities and various intersections of the two.

The best works in the small group exhibition are indirect and slippery, poetically melding fiction and realism.

Pete Goldlust and Julie Hughes have collaborated to make “Polyponesian = Tuberfoil Mangrove,” an abstract mural in which two-dimensional shapes and 3-D forms cavort playfully. Goldlust’s whimsical figurines sculpted from plasticine and Hughes’ writhing images printed on acetate stage a story worthy of Dr. Seuss and Sigmund Freud, in which eating and excreting belong to a sensuous, sometimes scary continuum.

Tyler Hudson has transformed a shopping cart, lawn mower motor, wine rack and serving tray, among other mechanical odds and ends, into a pair of wheeled vehicles. “Vons #30” resembles the mutant offspring of kids’ go-carts. “Metro-sexual Cart” looks as if it belongs alongside old-fashioned lawn furniture. Both suggest that conflict and compromise rule the day.

Competent but conventional works by Susie White, Sandra Low and Cindy Suriyani (in collaboration with Paul e Magalad) lack the multilayered resonance of the show’s most engaging works.

So do half of Sam Gezari’s eight panoramic photographs. The four that depict alienated laborers bring little insight to modern life. On the other hand, the four that show suburban homeowners cutting their grass with riding mowers adroitly capture the peculiar way pleasure and productivity fuse in America. In a country where two-fisted multitasking is venerated, leisure and labor bleed into each other, forming a landscape where relaxation is frowned upon and work means far more than a paycheck.

Bamboo Lane/Revisited, 418 Bamboo Lane, Chinatown, (213) 620-1188, through Sept. 3. www.bamboolane.com. Wednesdays through Saturdays only.

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Subversives in the corporate world

Not so long ago, artists went out of their way to ensure that their works didn’t look corporate.

Corporations, by contrast, had no qualms about borrowing or buying any type of art that enhanced their public image.

Times have changed. Today, multinational conglomerates have made so many inroads into everyday life that many artists refuse to cede so much to them. At the Patricia Faure Gallery, a sleek show features pieces that turn the slick impenetrability of corporate culture into something subversive, idiosyncratic and strange.

James Hough sets the pace with six large paintings that look like magazine advertisements for a company dedicated to improving the lifestyles of clients who seek professional consultation for everything they do or think. Without pointing a finger at anyone, Hough implicates viewers in a search for meaning that’s ironic but not cynical, as earnest as a greeting card and as ominous as Orwellian double-speak.

Sherin Guirguis’ laser-cut line drawings begin as superimposed silhouettes of designer furniture. Using a computer, Guirguis transforms these tasteful products into asymmetrical Rorschach blots aglow with fluorescent tints. Push-pinned to the wall, they recall botanical specimens or abstract microorganisms, the pictorial version of computer viruses.

Brothers Joseph and John Dumbacher proceed in the opposite direction. Beginning with wads of crumpled paper wrapped in masking tape, they use computer software and hardware to create pint-sized abstract sculptures in gorgeously tinted anodized aluminum. The proverbial ghost in the machine never looked sexier or more user-friendly.

Outside in the courtyard, Jeff Hasting has encased a specially mixed organic cocktail of seeds and nutrients in three Plexiglas vitrines. His space-saving, low-maintenance gardens are surrogate paintings whose colors and compositions change with the seasons. Like all of the works in the untitled exhibition, they treat stylish packaging as the ground out of which quirkiness sometimes sprouts.

Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Sept. 3. www.patriciafauregallery.com. Closed Sundays and Mondays.