Steeped in loss and decay

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost,” wrote Proust. The bittersweetness of that truism pervades Kristen Morgin’s extraordinary show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

Morgin’s full-sized, decomposed car in clay, wood and paint was a standout in “Thing,” last year’s L.A. sculpture survey at the UCLA Hammer Museum. In her first solo show, she presents four more works steeped in nostalgia, sheathed in the patina of loss, decay and abandonment. They are at once traces and formidable presences. They stir a sense of melancholy over what is gone and at the same time exultation at what has been created -- what is here, now. The frisson generated by dueling forces of destruction and creation is breathtaking.

Each piece refers to something once common, now obsolete or nearly so: an old model Fiat, a child’s pedal car, carousel animals. Each is constructed true to scale but fragmented, with a skeletal structure of wood and wire and a fleshed-out body of clay, cement and paint. Morgin, who teaches ceramics at Cal State Long Beach, astounds in her ability to conjure from unfired clay the textures of rusted metal and carved wood.

“Captain America,” the toy car, has a pocked, battered surface. Its body seems to have been eaten away by rust. Cracked and corroded, it bears hints of former sprightliness in its small winged hood ornament and the faded star painted on its hood. Wooden blocks replace one absent wheel. Disaster of some sort has struck -- certainly the ordinary disaster of time, but also something more compact in its violence. The car looks not just corroded but assaulted.

“Topolino” too resembles a picked-over carcass. Named after a charming micro-car produced through the 1970s (“Topolino” means “little mouse” in Italian), this specimen looks war-torn. A few parts of the car’s body are smooth, intact, but most of the surface is a tenuous, grainy, crumbling ruin. Morgin’s exquisite sense of detail, as seen in the old-fashioned seat cushion buttons she sculpts and the slats of the dashboard vent, gives the interior particular vividness and authenticity.

The car brings to mind the musty, emotionally searing assemblage tableaux made in the 1960s by Bruce Conner, George Herms and Edward Kienholz (especially his “Back Seat Dodge ‘38”). In Morgin’s work, though, human presence is never explicit but implied, and rather than recycle detritus from the world above ground, she creates her objects from scratch, from the rawest of the Earth’s raw materials.

The carousel animal sculptures (two horses and a lion) inject into the atmosphere of decomposition a note of emergence or becoming. Though the creatures consist only of ghostly fragments of clay clinging to wooden armatures, they convey a powerful animate energy. The horses’ heads strain forward, the lion’s jaw snarls wide. Snippets of painted ornamentation and the look of wood burnished by contact with generations of bodies at play trigger a nostalgic nerve.

On the lion, Morgin has added a new element: graphite drawings on the wooden substructure. The images -- a pear, veiny leaves, a string of beads, a linked chain -- read as whimsical notes atop a fiercely sober artifact. They don’t add much, but neither do they detract from the sculpture’s immediacy.

Absence and death are palpable forces here, in much the same way that they underlie traditional still-lifes. Morgin’s sculptures act as urban memento mori, warning of the transience of material culture. Because her subjects have already receded in time and are all pleasure-related, Morgin’s brilliantly contrived archaeological finds emit a whiff of the sentimental. Ruins tend to have romantic appeal anyway, something to do with those paradises we have lost.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, (323) 933-9911, through Sept. 9. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.marcselwynfineart.com

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Inside the mind of a collector

Until the advent of EBay, which has extended and flattened out the landscape of commercial transaction, collecting served as a fairly reliable personal global positioning system. The gathering of certain material objects over others reflects a collector’s place and time, and both cultural and personal values.

Ken Brecher’s “The Little Room of Epiphanies,” a project room exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, brings this premise to the surface. The show and its contents oscillate between the slight and the profound: A bottle holding Brecher’s father’s ashes rests below a grouping of what appear to be onion rings. Brecher has been collecting for decades -- postcards, obituaries, specialty socks, aluminum coffee pots, busts of world leaders, hotel laundry forms, you name it. Shelves across one wall hold small bottles containing water from a fountain at Graceland, stones from a concentration camp cemetery, a handkerchief bearing tears shed after the artist’s mother’s death, water from Monet’s lily pond, mud from Woodstock, stones from a Westwood hotel.

After spending some time perusing Brecher’s cache (and this is but a fragment), it feels natural to settle into his anthropological mind-set, where there are no discernible gaps between the sacred and the mundane. All of this stuff is valuable material evidence of a single life and a civilization playing itself out.

Brecher’s motivations also constitute a varied collection. He is creating some sort of order, a taxonomy of material artifacts; composing a chronicle of personal experience; building a cultural archive of the late 20th and early 21st centuries; establishing a conceptual and physical legacy for his son. Both the obsessive nature of his enterprise and its generous tenderness come through vividly and pack this small show with wonder.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6488, through Aug. 19. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.smmoa.org

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Sensory, spiritual perception of light

James Turrell’s spectacular new work at Griffin offers an experience diametrically opposed to that of the one-liner art crowding galleries these days. Turrell’s work resists summation. It proffers a sustained, fully absorbing encounter with light, color, space and silence.

For 40 years Turrell has been staging such encounters, using halogen projectors, fluorescent bulbs, neon light, architectural structures and the sky. In late 2004, Griffin mounted a show of Turrell’s brilliantly simple early projection pieces. The current show follows seamlessly with a walk-in installation and several wall works that all channel attention to the sensory and spiritual perception of light.

“End Around” occupies a large room entered through a cut-out doorway. The floor slopes gently upward and broadens as it reaches the back wall, a luminous cinema-screen-like field of violet blue. The blue light emanates from the wall but also appears to recede into it infinitely. The space is pure, cool atmosphere.

Turrell’s “Tall Glass” pieces read as light-paintings -- large rectangular fields of slowly shifting color flush with and just behind the wall’s surface. Materials are identified as “L.E.D. light, etched glass and shallow space,” but the rapturous visions appear to have no material source. Time could also be listed as a key ingredient, since these ephemeral Rothkos, these deep, dusky skies and radiant seas blossom slowly, continuously, cyclically.

Turrell’s technological prowess has increased over the decades, but the how of his works never interferes with the sublime, evolving what. He sets things up so that the work seems to perform itself, and we -- within or before it -- un-spool our own private narratives, or not. The openness of the experience is exhilarating.

Indeterminate distances, solids and voids within the works elicit a slight physical disorientation, countered by the light’s meditative grounding. It’s like being lost and yet found, at once.

Griffin, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6886, through Aug. 26. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.GriffinLA.com

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Photographs as elegant hybrids

Randy West’s series of photographs, “Bird Rabbit Snake,” are elegant hybrids. They’re photographic but incorporate an act of sculpture and evoke drawn and calligraphic line.

West based these 2003 prints on abandoned birds nests he gathered near his home in upstate New York. Unsatisfied with images of the nests in their entirety, he pulled apart the fibers and twigs and reassembled them as coarse tracery on a scanner. The “Reconstructions” form a chronicle of West’s own drawings in shallow space.

Some have the improvisatory, contingent feel of a Cy Twombly. Others recall the gestural potency of Franz Kline, or the dense complexity of wire sculptures by Anne Mudge or Alan Saret.

In the “Blades of Grass” images, West sets just one or two reeds against the pristine clarity of the paper. They loop or curve like shorthand symbols, letters in a foreign alphabet or balletic notations. Velvety soft shadows lend the images dimensionality in places, but their absence elsewhere reinforces the sense that these lines are of rather than above the surface.

Harry Callahan photographed reeds in snow, Aaron Siskind the abstract graffiti of the city. With this lyrical, reductive work, West echoes those efforts and makes his own modest contribution to the practice of photographing line in space.

Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-6834, through July 31. Closed Sunday through Wednesday. www.jankesnergallery.com