For your listening pleasure

Dave Muller’s sixth solo show in Los Angeles is a sprawling sampler of supersize watercolors, advanced audio technology, a three-volume catalog and nine ordinary radios. The enjoyable, often moving exhibition is both melancholic and optimistic, poignantly combining the artist’s nearly obsessive-compulsive love of popular music with more generosity than is usually found in art this smart.

At Blum & Poe Gallery, “Piles & Globes, Likes & Loves” takes stock of the present by using music as a metaphor for how art functions in the world: as a powerful, pleasure-generating force that works its magic across time and space, drawing some people together (while putting off others), defining eras as they unfold and then living on, as part of history, to inspire subsequent generations in ways never expected.

In each of three galleries, Muller has installed a sort of industrial-strength homemade iPod. His high-tech hardware consists of flat-screen TVs, each with a finger-size radio transmitter affixed to its top. Stored inside each of the three wall-mounted monitors are 30,000 songs. They play sequentially on red, yellow and blue radios dispersed through the three galleries. The songs’ titles and the bands that recorded them appear on the monitors as they play, sometimes accompanied by images from the original album or CD. In the hall, a hefty three-volume catalog lists the 90,000 singles, performers and albums.

Muller’s machines reject the solitary format of much of contemporary technology, which is designed to be used by audiences of one -- not groups responding to the music’s beat and rhythm, but isolated individuals, alone with their headphones, laptops or hand-held monitors.

His use of common radios is a throwback to an earlier era, a protest against atomization and a celebration of music’s social roots. You find yourself staying longer than expected, finding old favorites and discovering new ones, listening alongside other visitors who also drift from radio to radio, gallery to gallery.

Muller’s big watercolors, measuring up to 9 feet on a side, similarly outline a shared trip through rock history. The first and largest gallery features the Beatles and the 1960s, with five watercolors depicting extremely pixilated clippings from the New York Times. Muller’s treatment of the recycled news photos makes them look like a cross between gigantic handkerchiefs and digitally enhanced photographs of the Shroud of Turin, not to mention Rorschach blots.

Eighteen 9-inch-by-9-foot paintings depict the skinny ends of well-used album covers, their crushed corners and frayed surfaces making abstract patterns of the cherished relics. The sacred and profane cohabitate peacefully.

The other two galleries cover the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Like the first, they include works on which Muller has painted snippets of text that appear to have been clipped from a history of rock. Many read like general chapter headings: “Rock ‘n’ Roll 1951-57,” “Progressive Rock 1968-72.” Others are more specialized: “Akron 1976-80,” “Rogue Folk 1985-86.” No phrase blocks out any other. Muller’s compositions recall ruins.

As the dates approach the present, categories multiply, hybridization intensifies and the language gets farfetched: “Space Pop,” “Noise-Punk-Jazz 1992-95,” “Emocore,” “Avant Bop” and “From Grindcore to Stoner-Rock.” Muller chronicles the increasing confusion by painting the snippets piled atop one another, like crossword puzzles gone wrong. In the newest work, the only fully visible phrase is “Further Developments.”

It refers to the future. But it also refers to the present, marking Muller’s invitation -- or challenge -- to viewers. Preferring the loose drift of free thinking to the authority of message-mongering, he leaves each of us to develop, use and interpret his living archive howsoever it suits us.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.blumandpoe.com.

Big or small, an eyeful nonetheless

Mary Jones’ new paintings fall into two groups: compact oils on linen with earthy solidity and big watercolors on paper that are loose, fluid and atmospheric. Both are juicy. Installed in the closet-size space of Jancar Gallery, they unleash loads of visual energy.

Centripetal force appears to have formed the little ones, which are abstract and about the size of sketchbook pages. The multicolored marks, strokes, scrapes and smears on the surfaces of “Bad Apple,” “Lights Out” and “Blue Bang” spiral inward, gathering energy and intensity as if on a collision course with themselves.

Most of Jones’ dense little paintings look as if they have been through the wringer and are all the stronger for it. Not just rough around the edges, they are rugged all the way through, with substance and staying power that belie their small size.

Centrifugal force animates Jones’ nearly 5-by-4-foot watercolors. Sweeping spills and splashes of jaunty color spin out from the turbulent centers of “The Rebellious Flowers Turned Away From the Sun” and “Can You Hear Me Now?”

Space opens up in these exuberant works, into which Jones has inserted images lifted from 19th century American paintings and what appear to be Persian miniatures. Tiny swans, foxes, oxen, ostriches, sharks, sailing ships and fishermen, applied with gel-transfers from color copies, populate the nooks and crannies, inviting viewers to spin still more stories out of the multilayered maelstrom.

The only problem with the show -- Jones’ first solo in Los Angeles since 1989 -- is that you can’t stand back far enough to get a good feel for the long-distance effect of the large works. But even in close-up, creation and destruction dance furiously.

Jancar Gallery, 3875 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1308, (213) 384-8077, Open Thursdays through Saturdays. Ends Jan. 13. www.jancargallery.com.

Connecting beauty, suffering

Charles Gaines’ new works depict the present from the perspective of the not-so-distant future. It’s not a pretty picture.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Gaines shows selections from two bodies of work. Both juxtapose images and text, and both are diptychs of sorts.

In the main gallery, five pieces from Gaines’ “Explosion” series pair a beautifully drawn image and a neatly written chronicle of violence.

The pencil drawings combine various types of marks -- careful crosshatching, delicate shading, furious strokes and extreme contrasts -- to render thick, collaged-together columns of smoke towering over blinding flashes of light. They also combine various moments in time: the deafening blast of the explosion, the shower of debris that immediately follows and the smoke that eventually rises before thinning and dissipating in the wind.

The written components are also collages, each paragraph-long passage piecing together two or three historical accounts of warfare, torture and mayhem from around the world. Countries include Spain, the Philippines, the United States, Mexico, India and Sri Lanka.

Violence is constant and is constantly changing shape.

In a side gallery, Gaines’ “Randomized Text: History of Stars” series pairs photographs of the night sky with sentences lifted from a fantasy-saturated novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and an influential book of social analysis by Edward Said.

Gaines arranges the sentences arbitrarily, but a charged meaning seeps from all of his cut-and-paste works -- a swift kick in the pants that insists on connections between beauty and suffering, accident and intention, contemplation and action.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Jan. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.vielmetter.com.

Abandoned towns, spare landscapes

Andre Yi’s paintings at Carl Berg Gallery make all the right moves. Each begins with a tasteful tint, a color similar to those used by museums on the walls of Old Master exhibitions. These flat, monochrome backgrounds also recall the simplicity of Minimalism.

On them, Yi uses colored pencil to draw solitary structures -- the ruins of mills, mines, bridges and general stores from ghost towns and abandoned mining sites throughout the Western United States.

His draftsmanship is accomplished, not quite as fastidious as an architect’s but crisp and clean enough to give its soft edges the unsentimental strength of realistic illustration.

Yi completes his spare landscapes by painting sinuous black and white lines that extend horizontally across them. Some curl across the ground, like abstract renditions of flowing streams. Others wind through the sky, like stylized depictions of the blowing wind.

But the disparate elements in Yi’s paintings do not converse with one another or add up to wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. These tried-and-true moves come off as formulaic, too polite and mannered to be more than pleasant.

The bold lines dwarf the ruined wooden structures. They nod, very generally, to prints and paintings made in Japan, China and Korea over the last few centuries. Yet they are also standard components of contemporary graphic design, abstract flourishes that dress up bland compositions.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through Dec. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.carlberggallery.com.