This art demands some detective work

For Ryan Gander, art seems to have two related functions. One is to map the space of imagination. The other is to solicit imagination as a means for navigating life. Gander has a nice, light touch and the work exudes a quirky charm. The gossamer results are unexpectedly affecting.

For his American solo gallery debut, the young British Conceptual artist has dispersed a variety of unassuming elements around Marc Foxx Gallery. Think of the show as a nominal treasure hunt. Each work is composed as a kind of clue (even Sherlock Holmes puts in a cameo), which ultimately leads a viewer back outside the object. The treasure is found in the expanding web of interconnected worldly experience.

A color photograph shows in the middle distance an ordinary brick apartment building on an ordinary urban street. It’s nighttime, and what appears to be a small neon asterisk hanging in a lighted window is replicated on the front of a nearby wall. But this second asterisk is too ghostly to be graffiti painted on the bricks.

Suddenly it dawns: The ghost image is merely a light refraction on the lens of the camera that took the photograph. The displacement of the neon window ornament gently shakes you out of looking at the image and into regarding the photograph as a material fiction rendered on a sheet of paper.

That, of course, is what an asterisk does -- refer a reader to another, explanatory place on the page, or fill in for a letter or word that has been omitted. Gander’s asterisk manages both. It explains the casually overlooked displacements in everyday experience caused by the ubiquity of camera images. In turn, the art experience fills in for the missing urban landscape in the picture.

Together, the work’s two illuminated asterisks become an asterism -- a star pattern that is part of a larger constellation, but one that doesn’t form a complete picture. (The Big Dipper is an asterism within Ursa Major, formed from the Great Bear’s hind end and tail.) Gander’s simple -- but hardly simplistic -- picture seems to open up worlds within worlds, breathing light-years’ worth of space into the flat confines of a photograph.

It also coaxes a now freshly observant viewer to follow the asterisk’s lead: Look beneath the photograph to the lower right, just the way you might if you came upon an asterisk on a book’s page. There, affixed to the white gallery wall, is tiny black type that reads, “There’s significance here somewhere.” Indeed.

Photographs also commonly have captions, and this one is no exception. Just beneath its frame is another sentence printed on the wall, providing an instruction: “Now move to the image behind you to your left.” Turning around -- and it’s great when art is compelling enough to make you want to follow on, because it has let you know you are in capable hands -- multiple options come into view.

There you find a trio of television monitors lined up on the floor, a little passport photograph unceremoniously pinned to an adjacent wall and a formal photographic triptych hanging across the way. The choice is yours, but each turns out to have its own distinctive charms. Like the Big Dipper within the Great Bear, these works and the picture of an ordinary apartment (it turns out to be the artist’s residence) are separate from but intrinsically part of a bigger picture Gander draws.

It has always seemed appropriate that an astronomer -- the British scientist John F.W. Herschel -- coined the term “photography,” since a camera arrests the action of light to form a picture, and constellations are light pictures in the sky. Gander’s “constellations” at Foxx rely on camera work, but they also take other forms.

Among them is a message board, the kind that might be installed in a university student union or outside a grocery store to announce community events. One, replete with notices that were pinned to a USC student bulletin board, is overlaid with an architectural floor plan. (It’s rather bland.) Others, far more poetic, are cork panels patterned only with light and dark rectangles; past notices pinned to the board but now removed blocked light for differing periods of time, causing the cork to fade. Each rectangle of sun-bleached color suggests a rudimentary photographic print, while the abstraction recalls an Ellsworth Kelly.

The architectural floor plan does trigger instant recognition of marks Gander also made on the gallery floor using red, yellow and blue masking tape. A label says these primary colors plot the living room of Sherlock Holmes, as interpreted by three young novelist-friends who read Conan Doyle’s descriptions of the domicile. (The colors might be primary and thus immediate and elemental; but, needless to say, the floor plans describe three configurations.) The taped marks cleverly disappear beneath the gallery wall, returning the sleuth’s residential chamber to imaginative space.

Gander’s work partakes, in a wholly distinctive way, of a tradition of British Conceptual art exemplified by an artist such as Richard Long, who makes environmental sculpture by taking walks in the landscape. Where Long traffics in nature, however, Gander travels a cultural path.

One of the most charming trips is found in the video-monitor triptych, set on the floor at a jaunty angle from surrounding walls. Each screen features a cheery yellow circle against a bright blue background.

The first ball bounces up and down in place. The second ball bounces across the screen, as if synchronized to unheard music. The third ball is stationary -- visually mute.

As a visual poem, this bit of optical karaoke is transformed into a surprisingly resonant haiku. We are left without the key to unlock the code. Still, it’s nearly impossible not to project cyclical metaphors of birth, life and death into Gander’s three hypnotizing little disks.

Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through Dec. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcfoxx.com

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‘Jocko’ represents a cultural battle

The spectacular bubble jacket at the entrance to Sanford Biggers’ show at Mary Goldman Gallery sets a distinctive tone. Covered with a dazzling array of exotic feathers, an article of winter clothing meant to ward off the potentially deadly effects of icy weather assumes the imposing guise of a tribal chieftain’s cloak. The power of cultural belief subsumes practicality as a similarly life-saving necessity.

The theme runs throughout the show, the second at the gallery for the L.A.-born, New York-based artist. It is most powerfully rendered in “Jocko.” The sculptural triptych of three bronze figures is plated in shiny chrome, like a modern trophy.

The figures are made from found lawn jockeys, and the title refers to their perhaps apocryphal source. Jocko Graves is said to be the model for the ornamental statue. Although no record exists, the story goes that the young boy was a groomsman for George Washington, instrumental in a crucial Revolutionary battle, who froze to death on duty and whose heroism Washington commemorated with a statue at Mount Vernon. The legend retrieves a large measure of dignity for an object now widely derided as a racist token.

Biggers’ triptych shows the statue cropped at the knees, then at the thighs and finally at the waist. Depending on which way one looks at it, Jocko is either melting away into nothingness or rising triumphantly from a puddle of trophy-chrome. The pithy work is a poignant evocation of historic cultural struggles between honor and ignominy -- and it’s made all the more compelling by the ambiguity of the subject’s history.

Mary Goldman Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-8217, through Dec. 9. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.marygoldman.com

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Cleaning up after the art show

A colossal figure of a burly janitor sweeping up oversize, Damien Hirst-style cigarette butts dominates the gallery at Chung King Project. Ingeniously made from PVC pipe wrapped in corrugated cardboard and colorful packing tape, he’s the working stiff who cleans up after the art world has moved on and whose artistic interests are limited to an abundant array of tattoos.

Hagel -- a collaboration between Paule Hammer and Sebastian Gogel, young artists from Leipzig, Germany -- has adorned the room with nominal “paintings” of lightning bolts, tulips and brass knuckles, each covered in Warholian silver foil, as well as abstract silhouette drawings in dark graphite.

It’s hard not to see the playful installation as a cheeky rebuke to the recent market superstardom of numerous Leipzig painters.

Clearly, Hagel plans to be around once the party’s over. And happily, this engaging installation suggests that the pair also embrace the sociality of art’s worldly operations.

Chung King Project, 936 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1802, through Dec. 23. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chungkingproject.com

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There’s power in the abstract

“Material Space” is a sculpture exhibition with just five works: a 1968 stack of protruding rectangles rendered with wire and cord in a corner; a low-slung 1969 “tumbleweed” of copper and other wire on the floor; a big 1980 chunk of dense foam tied up with rope; a porous slab composed from interlocking steel industrial collars; and a yarn “God’s eye” atop a kind of homemade ironing board, both from 2006. The artists -- Fred Sandback, Alan Saret, John Chamberlain, Michael Gonzalez and Krysten Cunningham, respectively -- have little in common.

And yet, this exquisite show at Thomas Solomon Gallery @ Rental Gallery is as chic a presentation as has been offered this year. Abstract art remains potent. The subtle emphasis on linear materials, from yarn to electrical supplies, demonstrates the enduring possibilities of “drawing in space” as a sculptural activity.

Thomas Solomon Gallery @ Rental Gallery, 936 Mei Ling Way, Chinatown, (310) 428-2964, through Saturday.

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christopher.knight@latimes .com