Structure of human identity

If personal identity is socially constructed, as many people claim, what happens to self-perceptions when shoddy building materials have been used? What happens when the construction project falls short of code?

These and other cheeky yet perfectly reasonable questions float to the surface in a terrific, multifaceted new installation by Monica Bonvicini. Organized by West of Rome, the summer special project series launched in L.A. last year by Milan’s Emi Fontana Gallery, the installation includes sculpture, drawings, videos and mixed-media works that employ architecture as a template to deconstruct identity.

Bonvicini was born in Venice, Italy, and now divides her time among Los Angeles, Berlin and Vienna -- four cities with a wide variety of charged architectural histories. Sexual and economic presumptions embodied in modern conceptions of architectural space are explored with wit, insight and formal verve.

Titled “Not for You,” which is spelled out in flashing lights on an interior sign reminiscent of an old-fashioned movie marquee crossed with a cheap carnival sign, the installation fills a large, vacant storefront on the second floor of Pasadena’s Shops on Lake Avenue. Down past the Red Brick Pizza and Trader Joe’s, the commercial ambience lends an appropriate frame of reference. So does the outdoor signage that remains from the now-defunct store: Organized Living.

Inside, living has been reorganized. A visitor is greeted by an immediate whiff of collapse and decay, which infuses the cavernous retail space. Ceiling fixtures are illuminated at random and the floor is in disarray. Bonvicini has laid down drywall over a thick layer of high-density Styrofoam, so the floor gives slightly under your footsteps as you traverse the show. It feels as if you’re walking on thin ice. Holes punched here and there suggest prior visitors have fallen through.

A curtain at the left is printed with a pattern of chain-link. A steel ring suspended at the right dangles six harnesses -- the kind a construction-rigger might wear -- and each one is slathered in black paint. Every seven or eight minutes a hidden mechanism causes the steel ring to jiggle and the harnesses to dance, like some modern sadomasochistic twist on a medieval game of ring-around-the-rosy, meant to ward off plague.

Around back, past the display case holding assorted hammers wrapped in sinister brown-leather casings, a two-screen video projection scans boarded-up buildings and weed-filled empty lots as the camera drives along streets in South L.A. The title, “Shot Gun” (2003), locates the car seat in which the cameraman rode, while it also inflects the scene with the violent aura of a drive-by shooting.

The video features a soundtrack composed of clips from a recording of a cheery local radio call-in show whose subject is home repair. Endless scenes of ordinary urban decay glide by while advice on how to deal with the scourge of mold infecting basement walls echoes through the room; the money-making concept of Organized Living begins to take on unexpected social and political shadings.

Nearby, a suite of six collages fabricates museum displays for enormous power tools. One features a hand-printed legend: “Jesus Christ is supposed to have started out working as a carpenter, but I can’t find any mention of his skill at putting a house together .... “

Across the way, a second video projection provides the most powerful, hypnotizing element. “Destroy She Said” (1998) consists of two angled walls, one tilted and the other upright, with exposed studs and unpainted drywall. Construction debris is scattered on the floor. The video’s imagery, taken from 40-year-old movies, is a montage of fashionable women in deep distress. Conspicuously, they lean against walls, doors, windows, stairs and other architectural elements, while tears flow, chests heave and voices sigh. Gunshots punctuate the dreamy musical soundtrack.

The video installation nicely reclaims Picasso’s “weeping women,” taking a hoary artistic tradition of male authority and female suffering for a much-needed feminist spin. It’s hard to say whether Bonvicini’s walls are in the process of being built up or torn down. The ambivalence adds a subtle element of tension and a salutary intimation of cyclical erection and collapse.

West of Rome, 345 S. Lake Ave., Pasadena, (323) 807-2254, through Oct. 1. Closed Mondays through Wednesdays. www.westofromeinc.com

Artists who stand out from the group

Group shows proliferate in the summer, offering a range of new art, new artists and, on occasion, new ideas about art. Three currently on view downtown suggest some of the scope.

In Chinatown, curator Katie Brennan has assembled a nine-artist exhibition in tight quarters at Sister Gallery. “The Female Machine” considers “charged and deliberate sexual content” in some recent art, especially in gray areas of female sexual politics. Emblematic are Fay Ray’s small, tightly constructed collages, which merge fleshy feminine limbs with satin bows, glittery gemstones and shiny metallic trim to craft strange erotic asteroids. Ray’s savvy female machines mix seduction with power, femininity with authority.

Much of the show, however, is either tame or predictable. Not much seems resolved.

E.V. Day opens an oyster to find a pearl resting on a pillow made from animal tongues, which she has placed under a bell jar. Sarah Anne Johnson mingles photographs of women with pictures of clay animation figures, for an indifferent rumination on female representation as a malleable cartoon.

Amy Sarkisian ponders the way advertising infantilizes women, by putting babies’ faces on glamorous models’ bodies. John Williams’ little floor sculpture mixes a star, reminiscent of the kind on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with a vanity table. Both rely on familiar conceits.

Chicago artist Kirsten Stoltmann walks away with the show, in three well-placed head-turners. “Punk” is a chunky blond girl (reminiscent of Catherine Opie’s work) seated nude in a folding chair. A black cat is inked on her ankle and the word “meow” is pointedly tattooed just below her waist. A beer bottle stands incongruously on the floor between her and the viewer. The image, part offering and part armed camp, oscillates between enticement and entrapment.

At the entry, “I’m pregnant” is a photograph with those words spelled out in flowers against a background of cabbage-rose wallpaper to make a frilly frame that visually pollinates a photograph of a sleek, phallic Ferrari. Nearby, a wine bottle has spilled the phrase “you don’t know me” on the floor in Cabernet made from tinted polyurethane, composing a surprisingly pungent still-life suggestive of alienation and sexual violence.

Stoltmann’s work has an impressive economy of means, which amps up what might otherwise be a wallow in showy excess. The concision gives the work its sharp edges.

A few blocks away at Chung King Project, a disappointing survey of recent drawings by 14 artists who live and work mostly in Europe has been compiled in association with London’s the Drawing Room. It’s a rather haphazard affair, mysteriously titled “Flip” but focused on artists’ use of repetition -- of subject, form or material.

The show’s most compelling work is a group of three “obituary portraits” by Des Lawrence. With the newspaper obit screen-printed on the framing mat, Lawrence has drawn a highly refined, photographic likeness of American actor James Coburn, Palestinian Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin and British motorcycle-racing wild man Barry Sheene. The exquisite, even ethereal silverpoint technique butts up against the harsh, tough-guy persona that made each man famous. The drawings are wonderfully indecisive essays in celebrity idealization, where hard or violent lives assume a soft glow in posthumous regard.

Few other drawings in the show come close, while the inclusion of Surrealist etchings by Paul Noble and silk-screened comics by Olivia Plender muddies the drawing-water. The point seems to be that drawing is fundamental to printmaking, which by its nature involves the repetition of an image; but since it can also be a basis for painting and sculpture, which is not included, the point is lost.

Finally, at the nearby Bank Gallery, “Sprawl” brings together five artists who work at the intersection of landscape and urbanism. Virtual space is a leitmotif.

It takes low-tech form in Keith Lord’s small mirrored boxes filled with artificial landscape dioramas. Computer graphics lurk behind David Hamill’s static architectural drawings, which compare unfavorably to the explosive paintings of Julie Mehretu. And electronic manipulation inflects Sebastian Lemm’s extruded landscape photographs, where feathery leaves are woven into cat’s cradles and Rorschach blots.

The standouts are Ann Diener and Bari Ziperstein. Both give sprawl an ambivalent kick.

Diener’s large gouache and colored pencil drawings merge swirling abstraction with stuttering figuration, implying a nonlinear narrative of furious growth, epic tumult and inescapable decay. They send your eye on a riotous journey. “Vertical Field #1” is like riding inside a tornado, where leaves, hats, trees and farmland fly by and wonder and devastation struggle for supremacy.

Ziperstein presents marvelously odd collages in which pristine domestic interiors, clipped from upscale shelter magazines, are invaded by geometric sculptural elements. They bend, twist and warp the carefully ordered, tastefully decorated view. Like some Minimalist Alice passing through the looking glass of modern living, Ziperstein transforms familiar rooms into alien habitats.

Sister Gallery, 437 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through Aug. 26. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.sisterla.com

Chung King Project, 936 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1802, through Saturday. www.chungkingproject.com

Bank Gallery, 125 W. 4th St., L.A., (213) 621-4055, through Aug. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.bank-art.com