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With no art museums in Los Angeles expressing any inclination -- for good or ill -- to hop aboard the international bandwagon of biennial survey exhibitions, L.A. Weekly has stepped into the breech. The lively and generally satisfying show at Track 16 Gallery, quixotically said to be the publication’s “first annual biennial,” is less a wide-ranging survey of what’s happening now among the city’s artists than a group exhibition keyed to a distinctive curatorial sensibility. The show is stronger for it.

L.A. Weekly art critic Doug Harvey has selected 16 artists who work with mixed media, plus a handful of single-channel video artists. Few have shown widely, and some are having their debut. A welcome sense of discovery, coupled with a distinct lack of interest in established marketability (or attendance at one of L.A.’s many prominent art schools), attends the show.

That said, the four exceptional collages and a five-panel folding screen by Elliot Hundley, whose work has been seen in group shows at Regen Projects and LACE in the last year or so, set the pace and tone for this biennial. Hundley’s collages are assembled from thousands of small scraps of paper -- cut-up snapshots, magazine photos, pieces of colored tissue paper, etc. -- which he glues or affixes with straight pins to board or heavy paper. These fragments of a camera-mediated, reproduced and disposable landscape are pinned like exotic butterflies in an anthropologist’s research lab, and they are just as compelling, mysterious, obsessive and beautiful.

Hundley often includes chopped-up nude figures, as if laying bare his specimens might somehow reveal more than meets the eye. But the fragmented and pinned body parts instead become vaguely ominous. They’re like markers for a humongous crime spree, charted on a police detective’s push-pinned city map.

Atomized experience is a leitmotif in the show, conveyed by a preponderance of work that employs techniques of collage and assemblage. (Messiness abounds.) This is not visionary work made in the old L.A. manner of Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz or George Herms, but a post-assemblage sensibility inflected by such sober precedents as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon. Grim agitation, a clenched resolve to make silk purses that retain some of the bloody stench of sows’ ears, is everywhere encountered.

Notable are Sarah Cromarty’s romantic images of journeys at sea or in the forest, which she coarsely gouges into slabs of plywood, then paints with grimy stains and oleaginous colors sometimes sprinkled with glitter. Wistful yet repellent, forced in their cheerfulness yet moody in pitch, they embody our currently conflicted social and political moment.

Avigail Moss’ dark wall-hangings in purple-black felt, cut and stitched in the shape of giant teardrops and lightly sprayed with paint, are exotic abstractions -- lovely as a Venus flytrap. Adrian Ellis makes organic stalagmites from thousands of commercial ketchup packets, their unseen innards composed from a mass-produced confection the color and consistency of bloody ooze.

Cartoon-like yet monstrous, “The Lean Years” is a gnawed and stumpy figure rising from a painted dinner table and carved from foam by Erik Frydenborg. Imagine Saturn devouring himself rather than his children.

And Glenn Bach’s loose-limbed drawings are composed from whirlwinds of blunt and choppy pencil marks that struggle mightily to coalesce into serene landscapes glimpsed from the back porch -- but they can’t quite manage so rose-tinted a task. Their depicted world insists on coming apart at the seams.

Among the videos projected in a separate gallery, the standout is an organic abstraction assembled from thousands of flickering, brightly colored pixels by Christine Siemens. Her fabricated image looks like something glimpsed through an electron microscope -- cells, microbes or enzymes -- to a soundtrack of cars whizzing by on a highway. Oddly, and without ever using figurative imagery, the brief loop recalls John Steinbeck’s tortoise attempting the harrowing task of making it across the perilous, sun-baked pavement without getting summarily squashed.

The biennial is timed to coincide with the current issue of L.A. Weekly, designed to survey the Los Angeles art scene, and it’s paired with a show of cover art from the publication, selected by art director Shelley Leopold. A mid-show celebration will be held at 7 p.m. Saturday, featuring art-rock band Fireworks, a DJ set by artist Shepard Fairey and a performance piece by Joseph Deutch, whose graduate school performance inspired by the game of Russian roulette caused such a ruckus last winter at UCLA.

Track 16, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4678, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.track16.com

A deceptive look at mythic figures

The 16 deceptive paintings in Keith Mayerson’s “Rebel Angels at the End of the World” wobble gracefully between lame and reflective, repellent and seductive, amateurish and accomplished. It’s a strange and destabilizing feat -- a salutary one in which you’re never quite sure what to make of what you’re seeing.

At Q.E.D., Mayerson’s subjects are mythic: James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Captain Kangaroo, the Beatles, King Kong and more. So is his heterodox style, which is part Rubens, part Sunday painter, part LeRoy Neiman, part Van Gogh.

Giddiness, artifice and the excess associated with camp are much in evidence but not the middle-class self-importance we also associate with that term. If there’s a space between camp and not-camp, Mayerson is mining it.

The Brooklyn-based artist paints in short, thin dabs of bright color with a relatively dry small brush. His iconography of stereotypical gay tragedy -- Dean, Clift, Garland -- is rendered in flaming hues.

But so is John Lennon, Andy Williams, and Captain Kangaroo and his pal Dancing Bear. Disappointment is a recurrent theme, and not just in Dorothy Gale’s wide-eyed frustration with Kansas (and Oz) or beastly King Kong’s unrequited love for fragile beauty. A scarred portrait of punker Darby Crash recalls the upstaging of his legend-making suicide at the tender age of 22 by Lennon’s killing the next day. Fate can be as cruel as murder.

The most resonant painting here is “James Dean Crash Site,” in which the romance of living fast, dying young is enacted in a pileup of colored brushstrokes showing a smashed sports car and some bystanders in a Van Gogh-like field. Our modern obsessions with misfit transcendence, whether in high culture or low, are evocatively summarized.

Q.E.D., 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 204-3334, through Dec. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A fitting metaphor that’s witty and melancholic

“Man in the Snow,” a quietly compelling video by the Swiss team of Andres Lutz and Anders Guggisberg, is projected on the white wall at Anna Helwing Gallery under normal lighting conditions rather than in a darkened room. The blizzard-white landscape blends right into the white gallery, while the beleaguered little figure who struggles for survival against the brutal elements becomes a sly projection of the viewer, squinting into the flickering image in a quest for understanding.

The man approaches from the cold and frozen distance, staggers close to the camera in a mute gesture of thwarted recognition and then trudges away, hip-deep in the drifts. As a metaphor for making the rounds of contemporary art galleries, it’s at once fitting, witty and melancholic.

It also illuminates the five accomplished paintings by Lutz and Guggisberg in the main room -- the duo’s second show at the gallery -- which layer figurative and abstract images in an ethereal, fragmentary manner. Paintings like “The Grand Library” and “Don Quixote” owe something to the work of Sigmar Polke. As their subject matter suggests, information and imagery in the contemporary world are elusive and constantly slipping away -- yet are nonetheless attractive and captivating for it.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 202-2213, through Dec. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.annahelwinggallery.com

Artwork that undergoes change, drip by drip

“Six Continents,” the centerpiece of New York artist Dove Bradshaw’s show at SolwayJones Gallery, is composed of six 100-pound mounds of salt. Glass laboratory funnels suspended above each one drip water onto the mounds, which are shaped like tiny volcanoes or gigantic ant hills.

All salt is a sodium chloride compound, but these six mounds have been collected from different continents. Residual local minerals yield chromatic variation, ranging from snow white to muddy brown, plus a surprisingly subtle range of gray, pink and even green. Water dripping on the mounds leeches into the slowly dissolving salt, causing further shifts in color and slight alterations of the conical shape.

Given the materials, obvious associations include global oceans and humanity’s tears, while the hoary relationship between art and alchemy as magical markers for change gets yet another outing. However, the most appealing feature of “Six Continents” is its more sober quality as a global time clock -- erosion, evaporation, reconstitution, constant transformation -- which compresses geological eons into a rhythmic drip, drip, drip.

SolwayJones Gallery, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-7354, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.