There’s a big bite to her humor

Considering how annoying most of the characters are in Tamy Ben-Tor’s two “mockumentary” videos at Lightbox, it’s surprisingly hard to pull away from them.

Ignorance can be fascinating -- as can extremism, absurdity, fear-driven arrogance and ideological fervor, especially when performed and performed cannily, the characterizations laced with bitter, brutal humor.

Ben-Tor, a native of Jerusalem now getting her master’s of fine art at Columbia, caused a stir with this work when it was shown, together with other pieces, in New York last year. (This is her first show in California.) Critics compared her to the controversial comedian Sarah Silverman, the shape-shifting self-portraitist Cindy Sherman and the irreverent Mel Brooks. Ben-Tor does bear similarities to all three but has developed an approach of her own that is captivating and unsettling, like the massaging of a bruise.

In both videos at Lightbox (eight or nine minutes each), Ben-Tor takes on the enemy, or at least the perceived enemy. “Women Talk About Adolf Hitler” (2003) features a variety of characters giving their take on the genocidal despot. In “Girls Beware” (2005), the characters issue warnings, ostensibly to Israeli Jewish girls, about the dangers of Arab men. Ben-Tor assumes all the identities herself, brilliantly enacting them through gesture, accent and costume.

In the Hitler piece, Ben-Tor becomes a shrill gender-studies maven from New York conducting a ludicrous psychological dissection of Hitler, accounting for his behavior by pointing to his fear of dentists, his inability as a painter to grasp perspective and his dependence on “painkillahs.” She also makes appearances as Teutonic Mitzi, a giggling, topless blond enamored of Hitler’s mustache and oblivious to his crimes; Chava, an Israeli so full of loathing for the man that she can barely spit out his name; and a nameless, voiceless, creepy character who mimics Hitler’s appearance and fondles his portrait.

The characters verge on caricature but keep to the realm of credibility. Likewise, the video’s form mimics that of the scholarly, talking-head documentary spiced up by the egalitarian unpredictability of shock-jock call-in radio. Political correctness feels moot in this hybrid arena of self-serving and self-defeating agendas.

The personalities in “Girls Beware” are equally well realized -- comical, irritating and viable. Ben-Tor exaggerates, but as with all effective caricature a nugget of accuracy gleams within.

So much of humor is based on denigration and humiliation. Ben-Tor’s brand of subversive satire spreads the shame broadly and thinly, so that we’re not just laughing at others but also at ourselves -- the parts that are just as cliche and just as deluded as her fictional figures. This “Exploration in the Domain of Idiocy,” as Ben-Tor’s show is titled, is well worth taking.

Lightbox, 2656 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-1111, through April 15. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.lightbox.tv

An artist who breathes his work

In the spirit of conceptual performance pieces of a generation ago, SungHong Min has created a room-size work out of the act of breathing.

The San Francisco-based artist first recorded a single breath. On paper, the inhalation and exhalation translated into a jittery wave pattern. That pattern became the inspiration for an installation at Sabina Lee Gallery that visualizes on a large scale and with graphic elegance the rhythm of the act.

For each component of the piece, Min placed a small amount of charcoal powder onto gel-coated photographic paper and breathed out. The powder dispersed into a diffuse gray spray across the sheet. He repeated the action 340 times over the course of 17 minutes, 52 seconds (without disclosing the significance of the span), then joined the sheets in pairs, as if two breaths were facing or mirroring each other. Finally, he connected the papers and spread them across the gallery walls, floor and ceiling to form a continuous looping circuit.

Min’s sober methodology tracks his physiological presence. The playfulness of the installation registers something more poetic and exuberant, like an oversized emotional seismograph.

In a gallery alcove, Min also shows a group of tiny paintings made using rust as pigment. Puddles and drips morph into patterns and structures, cellular strands and root systems, lacy insect wings and cilia-fringed legs. The color of the rust gives the spruced-up doodles the patina of age. In both the paintings and the installation, time is as tangible a material for Min as space, and the foundation for thoughtful, quietly provocative work.

Sabina Lee Gallery, 5365 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 935-9279, through April 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sabinaleegallery.com

Where opposites are attractive

To describe Elliott Puckette’s new paintings and drawings at Earl McGrath Gallery is to speak contradictions. They are works of precise improvisation and controlled abandon.

In each piece, whether ink on paper or paint on panel, Puckette stages a meeting of opposites -- amorphous, open-ended grounds and tight, directional lines. The elements don’t clash or cancel each other out but instead sustain a beautifully refined tension, a kind of visual detente.

The panel paintings are texturally richest. Working in gesso, kaolin (a fine white clay) and ink, Puckette creates atmospheres of clouded, puddled pigment. The surfaces are reminiscent of darkroom outtakes with their sooty blacks and X-ray grays, their vague suggestions of depth and mass.

These tonal fields are all mood; the lines upon them assert melodic drive.

Puckette draws the lines in black or scratches them out so they appear in the white of the underlying surface. Either way, the lines recall elegant calligraphic script, tapering and broadening to acquire the barest heft. There’s elasticity to them. They bend and bounce, loop and swirl, maintaining a safe respect for the panel’s edges.

In three large drawings on paper, the dimensions of the page (74 by 38 inches) resonate with the proportions of the body, and the lines hint of balletic motion. The fields of continuous atmosphere offer no real place for the eye to settle, and the dynamism and rhythm of the lines give the eye no real reason to do so. Reflexively, and quite willingly, we are swept along in an ode to the intersecting realms of abstraction and ornamentation.

Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-4257, through April 15. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.earlmcgrathgallery.com

Photographer turns to drawing

Anthony Goicolea’s photographs, featured in two previous shows at Sandroni Rey, have a hallucinatory quality to them. They look like runaway dreams overpopulated by the self (the artist repeats his own image multiple times within them), scenes teeming with psychological unrest, sexual fantasy and loaded memory.

Goicolea’s drawings on Mylar, on view at the gallery, are similarly packed but visually and texturally more absorbing. In “Disassembly,” six young auburn-haired men form a tower, one cradled in another’s arms and each of the rest straddling the shoulders of the one below.

A few extra pairs of arms also wrap matter-of-factly around the column of bodies. The figure on top uses a gold-bladed saw to remove the tip of a tree rising beside them. All of the other trees in their midst have been reduced to pallid stumps.

The one being so delicately felled bears a golden aura, but each branch that’s been detached and is held by one of the young men has lost its vital sap and turned into a mere outline, a cipher. The ground beneath pulses brick and bloody red. The scene, like several in the show, is hellish and wondrous at once.

Water, snow, night and sleep are regulars in these dream sequences. Goicolea hints of dangers -- drowning, freezing -- but stages his figures in groups as if to convey protective strength in numbers. It’s not apparent in the drawings, as in the photographs, that every character is an aspect of the artist himself, but all of the figures are young and negotiating the sticky terrain of emerging self-hood.

Goicolea’s expressive, Symbolist sense of color, and deft use of the Mylar surface’s transparency further evoke that condition’s tenuousness and intensity.

Sandroni Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 280-0111, through Saturday. www.sandronirey.com