‘Yep,’ it’s fun all over the place

If Thomas Campbell’s paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures were not works of art, they’d be weeds -- hard-to-kill organisms that pop up just about anywhere and thrive on whatever sustenance is available. The Santa Cruz skateboarder, who also makes surf films and runs a record label, has filled Roberts & Tilton Gallery with more than 50 works, each covered with some combination of funky patterns, abstract shapes, desolate landscapes and simple statements.

They also include a seemingly endless supply of his signature figures -- charming cartoon survivalists who bumble about in cumbersome parkas that resemble one-man tepees. Think low-tech, solo mobile home or ersatz turtle shell, with a single porthole for the figure’s face.

A worktable stands in one corner of the gallery, its top cluttered with supplies and tools Campbell uses to cobble together his art. Postcards, newspaper clippings and pages torn from magazines are stuck to the walls above and around the table. Interspersed among them are Campbell’s drawings, some in used frames but most taped or push-pinned to the walls. The studio tableau has the presence of a wildly productive workstation, a fountain from which everything else in the exhibition, titled “Yep,” spills.

In another corner, Campbell has hung 31 small paintings, drawings and collages, abutting their edges in the manner of an overcrowded salon. These mixed-media works include machine-sewn and hand-stitched components, some resembling wonderfully dysfunctional fans. They embody, like all of Campbell’s goofy, gregarious and oddly graceful works, the relentlessly generative, mix-and-match ethos that is his specialty.

The larger works give him more room to strut his stuff, paying off in spades. A nearly 4-foot-tall bronze sculpture of an eccentrically garbed figure carries a banner that reads “sing ding a ling.” A pair of wood sculptures, mounted on stilts, combines the rugged simplicity of homemade bird-feeders with the sweetness of handcrafted dollhouses. Huge, sofa-dwarfing paintings with shingle roofs built along their top edges present evocative, open-ended scenes, showing Campbell’s Everyman character experiencing the sorrow and joy of life.

Campbell also paints fanciful tableaux on gourds, clogs, skateboards and papier-mache horns, transforming these unlikely objects into suitable grounds for lively stories. His insistently democratic art combines the public accessibility of Keith Haring’s graffiti-inspired figures with the introspective musings of Raymond Pettibon’s whiplash graphics. It’s a fecund -- and fun -- combination.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323)549-0223, through Aug. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.robertsandtilton.com

The raw energy and fury of Cash

There’s nothing polished or pretty about Johnny Cash at his best, belting out woeful tales of bad luck and harsh fate that leave no room for self-pity. At Craig Krull Gallery, photographer Leigh Wiener (1929-1993) captures the naked intensity of the Man in Black in 23 pictures shot from August 1960 through April 1962. Wiener was a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times in the early 1950s, before he became a freelance photojournalist and studio photographer.

Only three of the photographs are candid shots of Cash, singing into a microphone in a recording booth and paying no attention to the camera. With eyes closed or staring off into space, the hard-working musician is lost in song, seemingly at peace with himself and the world.

The rest of the pictures bristle with prickly energy. Shot in Wiener’s studio, they embody the discomfort of a congenital misfit and the fury of a malcontent whose emotions occasionally get the best of him.

In the three color prints, Cash goes through the motions of posing for formal, full-length portraits, but it’s clear that he’s playing dress-up for an album cover. Rather than smooth over Cash’s rough edges, or try to hide his big ears with Hollywood tricks, Wiener accentuates the singer’s working-class roots, hardscrabble sensitivity and unvarnished toughness.

In 10 other prints, Cash wears a black vest over a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. He appears to be engaged in a spirited conversation with the camera, making increasingly animated gestures and increasingly unrestrained expressions. The photo session, from August 1960, must have been a long one, because by the end, beads of sweat cover Cash’s forehead, his combed-back hair is disheveled and his sneer suggests that he has lost his temper.

It’s not the sort of picture you can fake. And it’s nothing like the expensively manicured fluff contemporary entertainers and their specialized staffs release today.

Wiener’s pictures of Cash make the bad old days look pretty good, especially when they are filled with emotions that are not pretty or polished but fierce and freewheeling.

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Aug. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Painting a la sculpting, drafting

Allison Miller paints like a sculptor, piling up lines to form geometric shapes that defy gravity as they stack atop one another, from the bottom to the top of each panel. She also paints like a draftsman, superimposing doodles over one another to eventually form multilayered planes that appear to be three-dimensional. At ACME Gallery, her solo debut flaunts painting’s power to pilfer the effects of other media while never letting you forget you’re looking at nothing but paint dragged across a flat surface.

Each of Miller’s six works measures 4 by 5 feet and is hung horizontally or vertically. Their grounds are white, like the blank pages of a sketchbook. Color is kept to a minimum, predominantly the black, blue and red of ballpoint pens. But Miller is no purist. Metallic gold, silver and bronze tart things up nicely, as does an improbable rainbow of beiges and grays that hovers between the warmth of live flesh and the deadly cool of outdated government paint jobs.

Miller’s paintings are big, and their compositions make them look even bigger. She breaks up space and lashes it back together with masterful aplomb, deploying empty areas so effectively that each image seems to give viewers more room to maneuver than its literal dimensions provide. That’s the magic of art or spot-on design.

Most of her works have the solidity of old-fashioned trestle bridges or steel-frame skyscrapers. Loopy lines provide equal and opposite attractions, suggesting party streamers, banners and colorfully punctuated graphics.

Sometimes Miller paints over large sections, leaving ghostly traces of earlier versions. This brings time into the picture and creates a give-and-take drama that is a pleasure to follow. At other times, her lines seem so nervous, jittery and unsure that you find yourself rooting for them, hoping they don’t peter out before they make it across an empty, suddenly perilous expanse.

Miller’s paintings converse openly and confidently with similarly jaunty abstractions by Monique van Genderen, Bart Exposito, Max Jansons and Mark Grotjahn, adding their own voice to a discussion that’s well worth tuning into.

ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Aug. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com

Bridging cool Pop, hot Surrealism

Pop Art put cartoons front and center, but paintings based on comic strips were not the first to use radically simplified imagery to give form to the highs and lows of modern life. Artists as different as Giorgio de Chirico and Philip Guston boiled down reality to the basics in their haunting, often harrowing images of urban isolation and tortured soul-searching.

At High Energy Constructs, Hilary Baker’s crisp little pictures of eyeballs, spiders, citadels and nuclear cooling towers build on this tradition, bridging the gap that once separated the hot drama of Surrealism from the cool nonchalance of Pop. Baker’s best works are the simplest -- close-ups of brick ruins silhouetted against cloudless skies, or seascapes whose surfaces are made up of irregularly faceted patterns.

“Stellae With Two Moons” and “Sea of Crises” are nearly symmetrical images, their iconic format mitigated by their intimate dimensions and everyday atmosphere. “Leak” is equally still, its windowless tower in a desolate landscape precisely balanced against a shower of black raindrops and a mysterious little puddle.

The palettes of these paintings are as fined-tuned as their compositions. Baker mixes yellow and green like no one else, creating a rainbow of shades that seems as tasty as sorbet and as toxic as antifreeze. She makes gray look sexy and beige exciting.

She’s not always successful. When the compositions get too complicated, the mystery disappears and the paintings have the presence of mere illustrations. This often goes hand in hand with colors that work at cross purposes, diminishing the impact of the whole. But when Baker keeps palette and picture simple, there’s no end to the fascination her works gently deliver.

High Energy Constructs, 990 N. Hill St., #180, Chinatown, (323) 227-7920, through Aug. 19. Closed Sunday through Wednesday.