Testaments to the work of human hands

One of the last things you’d expect to find in work by a protege of Bernd and Hilla Becher is tenderness. Or romanticism. Granted, the photographs of Simone Nieweg aren’t overflowing with emotion, but for all their plain-spoken, typological crispness, they do bespeak a certain warmth toward their subjects, an affection that goes beyond formalist respect.

Nieweg’s first solo show in the U.S., at Gallery Luisotti, samples nearly 20 years of work, all of it images of gardens, including vegetable plots, fences and sheds. Descriptive clarity is the operative force, whether the pictures are hung singly or in “tableau” groupings of six.

What gives the work its humanness is the very personal scale of the environments and efforts that Nieweg records. She may be systematic in her approach, like the Bechers and so many of their other former students (Candida Hofer, Andreas Gursky et al.), but what she scrutinizes is often idiosyncratic and intimate: hand-tended vegetable patches, sheds pieced together from building scraps, a gate of weathered wood bowed as if holding its breath.

The photographs are testaments to resourcefulness and odes to the textures of handcrafted space. Several are also starkly beautiful. In one picture, garlic stalks skein the earth like loose, calligraphic netting.

Another, the show’s rightful centerpiece, is a masterpiece of Minimalist restraint.

The composition is built of stacked horizontal strips of varying color and density. The broadest stripe, constituting the picture’s entire lower half, depicts moist chocolate earth, dotted by hundreds of fallen red apples. Moving up the image and deeper into space, we see a cultivated plot of low, leafy green vegetables, a band of filigree trees on the horizon and a pale gray sky. The tree responsible for scattering such colorful confetti lies outside the frame, except for its trunk, which anchors the image like a sturdy, humble bolt.

What Nieweg leaves out of her photographs is as telling as what she includes. She largely omits the familiar world of daily urban intercourse, a world whose uniform surfaces and industrial scale are alien to the places she shows. In this respect, Nieweg’s work brings to mind Eugene Atget’s systematic and tender documentation of the 19th century face of Paris in the early years of the 20th century.

Atget, whom Nieweg acknowledges as an influence, brought time to the surface in his records of place.

Nieweg, too, takes to heart photography’s preservationist impulse. She frames places, textures, modes of engaging with the land and with time that are rare and endangered. The garden plots she photographs are ever under the threat of being developed, paved over, built up. They are only tenuously held by their farmers. Thanks to Nieweg’s prints, they can also be avidly and enduringly held by our gaze.

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Nov. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Narratives bump in the night

Mix the dark of night with woods and abandoned public places. Add a woman alone in the purest white. Blend, photograph and print.

It seems a sturdy enough recipe for mysterious, noirish stills. Allyson Hollingsworth appears to strive for such effect, but instead she has produced several groups of pictures with provocative ingredients that fail to mesh and a narrative format missing key elements of narrative, namely established character and forward momentum.

Hollingsworth’s pictures, at Michael Kohn Gallery, are appealingly small -- roughly snapshot size. They would lend themselves well to individual perusal. But they’re installed in discrete series with the alluring titles “Nocturne,” “La Sonnambula,” and “A Night There Lay the Days Between,” the latter inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem.

In each series, the artist appears in different spaces (a home with garden and pool, the grand structures of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts), sometimes wandering, sometimes striking a performative pose.

As her titles suggest, the feeling is dreamlike, slightly incongruous. A few of the images hint at something amiss. The woman turns back in one, as if in flight or fear. But overall, there is a conspicuous lack of tension, and even with the starkest lighting, not quite enough atmosphere to carry the day -- or night.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., (323) 658-8088, through Oct. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kohngallery.com.

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Taking some readings

Christopher Orr’s curious little paintings meld scientific sobriety with lush romanticism. It’s an intriguing mix that we barely get a chance to savor in the Scottish-born, London-based artist’s first area show.

Some type of observation or measurement is taking place in most of the five small canvases (averaging about 7 inches per side) at Sister. “Events in a Dense Fog” has a man in a teal jumpsuit kneeling on the ground, holding out a small device in his left hand while indicating a short span of space with the fingers of his right.

In another of the paintings, a youngish man stands on the edge of a meandering fault in the earth. A bulky, boxy instrument is slung over one shoulder, and headphones cover his ears as he extends a radar dish toward the abyss.

The image brings to mind the Everyman in the staged photographs of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, a lone crusader taking the Earth’s pulse and healing its wounds. In Orr’s work too, an air of officialdom (with roots in the pages of National Geographic and illustrated textbooks) mingles with reverence for lush wilderness and the natural phenomena that animate it.

Orr points to the past in every inch of these diminutive works. He favors brown tones so dark they suggest aged varnish. The linen weave of the canvas shows through in parts, as if the surfaces were worn and abraded, and the characters wear clothes and carry technical equipment at least two generations out of date. An entrancing whiff of nostalgia results.

Sister, 437 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through Oct. 22. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.sisterla.com.

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The raw power of full color

Destructive force is palpable in Whitney Bedford’s paintings at cherrydelosreyes, but there’s something perversely glorious about that power when allied to color and paint. It can be unleashed, and nothing’s at stake but a moment’s confidence in the everyday veneer of order.

Bedford orchestrates a fine tension between description and delectation. She paints ships pounded by rocky seas, volcanoes spewing liquid fire. Even a placid landscape, like the shoreline in “Red Amazonia,” becomes charged with tumultuous energy under her brush.

The sky, a thick lipstick red, bears down upon a bank of trees. The sea, while waveless, is a viscous violet smeared onto the panel, adamantly of the surface yet connoting dreadful dark depths.

Line and color goad each other on as Bedford paints these radically updated maritime scenes. Searing, synthetic hues smother nervously inked detail. Skies shine blue raspberry, lurid tangerine, sickly coral, furious crimson.

Some of the works have a flat cartoonish simplicity, with as much painted out as painted in. But the most engrossing panels are those where Bedford layers filmy swaths and skittish line, where gesture bolsters color, and color moans, shrieks and keens with Symbolist intensity.

Recent MFAs such as Bedford (UCLA 2003) are treated as hot commodities these days. Rarely are their debut shows as richly realized as this one.

cherrydelosreyes, 12611 Venice Blvd., (310) 398-7404, through Oct. 23. Closed Mondays through Wednesdays. www.cherrydelosreyes.com.