Come and gather around the llama for an intimate chat

The conversation in “Conversation Piece (Jackin’, Stackin’ and Crackin’),” a remarkable new sculpture by Nathan Mabry in the rear gallery at cherrydelosreyes, is lively and sly. It takes place among signifiers of three kinds of art -- from indigenous folk culture, youth pop culture and mainstream high culture. The chattering among the classes is productive.

On the high side is the buffed black lacquered base, whose cubic form built from three interlocking units derives from the Minimalist sculpture of John McCracken. Among other things, Minimalist sculpture was revolutionary because it took art off its elevated pedestal and put it on the floor, where it occupied the same plane of mundane existence as a viewer. Mabry’s rectilinear, mirror-finished slab does too; but what was radical when it was new in the 1960s is thoroughly conventional today. So Mabry gives his block double duty: He turns it into a pedestal.

Stackin’ on the McCracken is a big terra cotta vessel, formed in the shape of a llama’s head. Crafted as exquisitely as the pedestal, the vessel features a streaked russet patina, which yields the appearance of brute Cor-Ten steel. Llamas are gentle beasts of burden first domesticated by the ancient Incas; here Mabry puts the animal atop a carefully sculpted base the way Brancusi did with fish, birds and Mlle. Pogany.

Like them, the head is sleek, stylized and pared down -- essence of llama. As a vessel, however, it’s also clearly empty. With wit, any presumption of essential purity claimed for folk cultures is undercut. Mabry’s llama grins.

To finish the jackin’, which is street slang for theft, that wide grin is capped with a row of seven gold-plated teeth. The gangsta look is finished off with sparkling embedded rhinestones, spelling out the word “peace.” Mabry does considerable violence to the gated communities where folk, pop and high culture typically lead isolated lives. But the reconciliation and repose he achieves among them transforms the sculpture into a vivacious conversation about peace.

Mabry was among several standouts in “Thing: New Sculpture in Los Angeles,” the important group exhibition of young and emerging artists at the UCLA Hammer Museum last winter, and his work has turned up in two group shows in area galleries since then. In February he will have his first full-scale solo exhibition at this space (which is about to be renamed Cherry and Martin Gallery). “Conversation Piece (Jackin’, Stackin’ and Crackin’)” suggests it’s a show to look forward to.

In the front room at cherrydelosreyes, a disappointingly dull eight-channel video installation by Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw is in thematic sync with “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States,” the sprawling survey of art and psychotropic substances currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art. But the 2004 work, titled “DMT,” is so thin as to be gaunt.

A stationary camera was trained on the faces of eight young subjects, including the artist, each in a clinically white bed. The subjects ingested DMT, a synthetic hallucinogen, and we watch the short-term effects -- fluttering eyelids, pursed lips or even sliding out of the frame -- while white subtitles scroll by.

The subtitles record uniformly inarticulate reminiscences of what the brief trip was like. And I emphasize like -- because, like, it was like, really weird, like, y’know?

Ostensibly the video queries cultural assumptions about art and experience. In reality all it says is, “This is your video art, and this is your video art on drugs.” And it doesn’t even sizzle.

Cherrydelosreyes, 12611 Venice Blvd., (310) 398-7404, through Dec. 11. Closed Mondays through Wednesdays. www.cherrydelosreyes.com

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Minimalism, with some eccentricity

Rachelle Rojany makes sculpture that tries to push the clean, spare lines of Minimalist form to a level of complexity more commonly associated with Conceptual art. The eccentric work in her solo debut at the Happy Lion Gallery can’t always sustain the effort, but when it does it’s surprising and satisfying.

“The Wings Piece” is a suspended, origami-like bird made from six planes of brass-colored mirror. (It looks nothing like Brancusi’s famously sinuous “Bird in Space,” but the association seems intentional.) The mirror is backed by a layer of fiberglass so thick as to confound any airy fantasy of flight, while the chunky cable rigging that hoists the heavy bird aloft only adds to the sensation of weight -- and the potential for earth-bound crashing of mirror.

“Do I” inverts the wedding vow into an urgent commitment question. A figure eight, symbol for infinity, is fashioned from gold like fused wedding rings. One is slightly larger than the other. Mounted on bright red velvet, the fused rings take on the aura of brass-knuckled combat and inescapable bondage between unmatched partners.

A thick, triangular sheet of clear plexiglass held upright in a narrow wooden trough articulates, “The space between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be: A Diagram.” The long edge has been dipped in transparent pink resin, which yields a diagonal band of wobbly iridescence.

Look too closely through the rose-colored glass, however, and you might poke out your eye on the sharp apex of the triangle. At her best, Rojany has a deft way with mixing omens of tranquillity and tragedy, merriment and doom.

The Happy Lion Gallery, 963 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1360, through Dec. 3. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.thehappylion.com

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A mural of color, line and light

Abstraction has been an integral element to Sandeep Mukherjee’s previous work, but it has always been mixed with figurative elements. With the lovely new mural that is the monumental centerpiece to his first solo show with Sister Gallery, viewers are the only figures in sight.

Each of five vertical sections of the mural is 8 feet high, and together they’re 24 feet wide. The panels are made from synthetic white vellum, which Mukherjee scores with a needle and folds in linear rays. The translucent vellum absorbs and reflects light, while the folds cast shadows that shift as you move along the painting’s length.

Each panel is painted in acrylic ink with a curved sweep of luxurious, jewel-tone color -- turquoise blue, amethyst, burnt sienna, olive green and golden brown -- that extends to at least two edges. The fields of color are further articulated with splotches, apparently made with droplets of water, which trace a spiral path. Some spirals move clockwise, others counterclockwise.

The folded rays of paper only partly enter the colored fields, and sometimes they abut and shoot off in another direction. The mural’s surface is complex, in physical form and illusionist space.

The result is an ecstatic abstraction, built from color, line, movement and light. Like the dance done by a whirling dervish, who positions himself between material and cosmic worlds, Mukherjee’s mural is rapturous.

Sister Gallery, 437 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through Dec. 17. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.sisterla.com

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Thinking outside the paper print

Graciela Sacco has developed a technique for printing photographs on objects, rather than on paper. It’s a mixed blessing. Like Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) -- the celebrated artist who was also born in Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentina -- she seeks to make the ephemeral tangible, albeit in a different manner than he did. Her Los Angeles debut at Stephen Cohen Gallery veers between the starkly compelling and the sentimentally contrived.

Sometimes, as when a photograph of a tile or linoleum floor is printed on a pair of shoes to suggest the tedium of waiting, you read the image in a didactic way. The feet are supposed to look as if they are sinking into the floor, but the empty shoes are disconcertingly weightless.

More impressive are images of teeming crowds printed on slats of wood or, in one case, projected on the wall through 15 clear strips of acrylic suspended on monofilament from the ceiling. One or more boys in the foreground are seen throwing stones, as if in a demonstration that has become riotous. The image is composed from shards.

Typically the camera is considered a passive recorder of such events -- but not here. Instead, Sacco’s work proposes that the camera’s lens has been shattered by the violence and, conversely, also fractures the scene. An unexpected aura of precarious fragility surrounds this subtle work, whose subject is more commonly considered in rougher, tougher terms.

Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (323) 937-5525, through Dec. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.stephencohengallery.com