Part of the package

An elaborate project on view at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions has the feel of a one-man band’s traveling case, with an arsenal of objects and visual experiences spilling out of a single crate. It’s a far grander display than one might expect from the package, which itself is part of the show.

This impressive, playful and smart scatter is actually a two-person show, a collaboration between Toronto-based artist Scott Lyall and New York-based Rachel Harrison. Each is collaborating with another artist for the first time, brought together by independent curator Dan Adler.

The exhibition, which debuted at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, is the first L.A. show for Harrison, who has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad over the last several years. Lyall has participated in group shows in L.A. but has been more active in Canada and on the East Coast.

Although it’s billed as a collaborative installation, both artists remain largely true to their individual practices. Depending on how you look at it, the exhibition feels like one big, sprawling sculpture constructed from the work of two artists, or a rather unconventional show of three bodies of work -- his, hers and theirs -- that accessorize and display one another.

Lyall’s massive geometric forms, layered out of pink insulation foam board and plywood, collude with the crate, boxes and assorted pedestals to create the work’s dominant element. Imagine a model of an overbuilt island within an atoll of much smaller satellites. But Lyall’s forms also become bases and display modules for Harrison’s quasi-figurative objects. These suggest buildings, bodies and geological wonders, like Chimney Rock, and are scrapped together out of chunks of wood and foam slathered in thick, frosting-like paint and accessorized with clothing. In turn, the objects become ornaments to Lyall’s masses, landmarks on the island and easels for displaying found images the artists incorporate in the installation.

Titled “When Hangover Becomes Form,” Lyall and Harrison’s project initially feels a little shoehorned into curator Adler’s premise of an exhibition addressing “a brand of discomfort that can promote useful reflection on previous excesses, pleasures and abuses.” But the more you look, the more you see the uneasy collaboration working within the framework the curator proposed. Adler’s words, found in the introduction to his accompanying essay, resonate oddly with images that include Moses holding the stone tablets, a sign-waving protester popping up from a fashion-show crowd to shame a model on the runway, a vintage glamour shot of Cher and a video projection of a frog sitting motionless by a stream.

The resonance doubles in the case of a reproduction of a portrait of Ronald Reagan that turns out to have been included in a work by politically vocal conceptual artist Hans Haacke. It becomes perversely prophetic with a dated head shot of Mel Gibson.

Signs of the morning after proliferate: spent birthday candles, scattered candy, a rumpled fur coat, energy drink empties.

The island itself suggests a kind of hangover -- civilization’s chronic, sighing gaze at the amalgamation of good ideas of yesteryear. And even the show -- conceived as an investigation of installation by two artists wary of installation, and a long-distance, first-time collaboration by individuals with very different practices -- feels like the brilliant idea from last night’s party to which we awake in the morning.

That’s not a weakness but rather a strength. With art, the show manages to evoke that pit-of-the stomach, foggy-headed commingling of remnant reverie and emerging sobriety that usually follows inebriation. It turns it into something we both sense and understand as metaphor.

Although less obvious than the pictures the artists borrowed or the monster they made together, the most effective elements in this cultural antithesis of the natural high are the distinctively individual works of Harrison and Lyall.

In his essay and in titling the exhibition, Adler invokes a 1969 show curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland. Titled “When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head,” the exhibition often is credited as the first major European survey of conceptual and post-minimalist art. It also was the career-defining show for Szeemann, who is widely regarded as the first of a new breed of independent curators. Not unlike Adler, he invited artists into a premise but then left them free to produce work. The results included Richard Serra splashing molten lead, Michael Heizer demolishing a sidewalk and Richard Long taking off on a hike in the Swiss mountains.

That precedent reminds us that a show devoted to idea-driven art included work that, like Harrison and Lyall’s, was physical, visceral, bodily, spatial and experiential, and above all, less defined conceptually than by attitude. Serra’s splatters, Heizer’s wrecking equipment and Long’s wanderings were the attitudinal gestures of wide-eyed artists responding to 1969’s commingling of wonder and woe. Perhaps Lyall’s pop-minimalist parfaits and Harrison’s eye-shadow-and lipstick-hued, clumsy / classical, faux expressionist figures, partly dressed in fishnet tank tops and gold-sequined miniskirts, are beginning to show what it means for artists to wake up groggy in 2006.

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‘When Hangover Becomes Form’

Where: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd.

When: Noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday; noon to 9 p.m. Friday. Closed Monday and Tuesday

Ends: Aug. 20

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 957-1777, www.artleak.org