The art of credits and debits

For the last 10 years, Danica Phelps has recorded, detailed and dated all of her financial transactions. Her work based on these notations has all of the earmarks of a dry Conceptual art project (or an accountant’s fantasy), but it turns out to be fully engrossing and extraordinarily moving. The work pulses with the juice of life -- with love and honesty, friendship, aspiration and accomplishment, the joy of recognition, the obligations and quiet satisfactions of the everyday.

The earliest work in Phelps’ terrific show at Sister Gallery dates from 1999, and the most recent was still being created in the gallery at the time of this writing. A diary in words, images and symbols, Phelps’s work is ongoing, self-perpetuating. It forms a marvelously complete ecology.

A piece at the entry to the show illustrates how. It consists of a sheaf of drawings traced from originals that Phelps exhibited at the gallery in 2004. When a work sells, the artist traces it and writes the names of the buyer and gallery at the bottom of the tracing, along with bands of variably hued green stripes, one for each dollar of the selling price.

Those tracings become works available for sale as well, and when each is sold, another tracing is made with a new layer of notations added to the previous set at the bottom of the sheet. As the work regenerates, it accumulates and preserves its own history.

Every element of Phelps’ work derives from her direct experience. Some sheets document a week at a time, with a brief account of each day’s activities and a tally of income and expenses. Payment for groceries, supplies, gas, gifts and other expenses is marked with bands of red stripes, one for each dollar spent. With some regularity, Phelps records a sale, topping the corresponding block of green stripes with the exclamation, “!!Art Money!!”

For a project in 2004, Phelps made daily accounts for three weeks through drawings and calendar-like pages noting her waking time, time spent walking her dog, tending to e-mails, working in the studio, preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals, driving, reading, talking, house-hunting, paying bills. The drawings, on separate sheets, illustrate the same in fluid, contour-driven line. Phelps’ drawing style is much like her written entries: spare and straightforward, yet tender.

She rarely records her feelings about her activities, but the list is necessarily selective, and Phelps edits out picayune details while frequently mentioning encounters with friends and lovemaking with her partner, Debi. Similarly, the sweetly erotic drawings outnumber the images of replacing light bulbs or carrying home bags of newly purchased seedlings. Economic underpinnings count for much in this work, but clearly not all.

Recently, Phelps sold her house in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint to buy another in Prospect Heights. The show includes numerous crisply articulated drawings of interiors, presumably of the new house. As the work progresses chronologically, the financial dimensions of the transaction take up more and more space. Engineer’s reports and legal fees announce themselves through dense chunks striped in shades of red.

One tall piece, slightly larger than a human frame, is nothing but a verdant field of green strokes, representing the $220,000 Phelps received upon the sale of her house. She is currently working on a corresponding panel, with 218,527 stripes of red denoting the amount paid to close the deal on the new house. Because of the intensity of the labor involved, she enlisted helpers who, in the early days of the show, could be seen sharing a table in the gallery with the artist, all of them painting stripes on prepared sheets, later to be cut and applied to the panel.

Phelps manages to be self-reflective without lapsing into self-indulgence. She keeps the emotional tone of her work understated, but its intimacy and modesty pull us in close. Marking by hand the record of every dollar earned or spent, the chronicle of every day, implies movement through the world at a pace born of attention to the significance of small acts. It also distinguishes the character of her enterprise from a related precedent, Chris Burden’s 1977 “Full Financial Disclosure,” a pseudo-official, politically driven installation of his canceled checks, accompanied by a series of television commercials in which he publicly comes clean.

Through the authenticity and deep intelligence of her efforts, Phelps collapses the gap between art and life. Art sacrifices a bit of its mystique in the process, but the new shine acquired by everyday life more than makes up for it.

Sister, 437 Gin Ling Way, L.A., (213) 628-7000, through May 13. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.sisterla.com

Only a wannabe combative artist

Delia Brown’s new paintings at Margo Leavin Gallery are smart, in a calculated sort of way, but otherwise vacuous. They aspire toward glamorous, critical wit, pulling from various sources -- 19th century society portraiture, celebrity photo-ops, Postmodern institutional critique and role-playing performance -- but in an imitative manner that recalls, among others, Hans Haacke warmed over.

Haacke has been, since the early 1970s, a prime progenitor of strategically combative art that admits to its commodity status and nips at the hand that feeds it. In several notorious works, Haacke has penetrated the feel-good facade of corporate sponsorship of the arts to expose the dirty little secrets behind the brand names.

In pale comparison, the New York-based Brown merely gathers those names and parrots them back. In one huge, gratuitous work, she remakes the Museum of Modern Art’s grand Monet waterlily triptych, embedding in its luscious surface the names of the museum’s major corporate sponsors: Toyota, Pfizer, Merrill Lynch, UBS, et al.

In her “Double Self-Portraits,” Brown deftly mimics the red-carpet poses of sexy starlets, painting into the backgrounds the names of high-style brands -- Coach, Dior, Samsung -- to serve as not-so-subliminally seductive wallpaper. The posturing has further layers. Brown’s “self-portraits” are really paintings of a fictional persona she names Chelsey Green. The actress Hollis Witherspoon plays Green charmingly in a “mockumentary” video that ends, a bit too coyly, with Witherspoon-cum-Green-cum-Brown commenting wistfully on how sad it is that artists now are so conscious of the commercial status of their work. Sadder, even, for us.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A., (310) 273-0603, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Painting outside the horizontal grid

“What is needed now is a new structure -- one that goes beyond the 90 degree, vertical and horizontal grid,” wrote painter Don Sorenson in his graduate thesis in 1973. “Our Modernist epic is drawing to a close, another structure is being formed, and it appears we are on the threshold of the new.”

Sorenson gave painting an ambitious but tiny nudge closer to that threshold through his paintings of the ‘70s and ‘80s -- energetic, allover weaves of zigzag stripes oriented on the diagonal. The 14 works at Berman / Turner Projects don’t constitute a retrospective, as claimed (Sorenson also made figurative paintings and geometric sculpture), but they do give an ample taste of the late L.A. artist’s vigorous efforts to balance order and spontaneity, control and abandon on canvas.

In these chromatically flagrant lightning fields from 1976 until 1985, the year of the artist’s AIDS-related death at 37, tight and loose vie for dominance. Sorenson wrested his signature style from the stripe by asserting its multiple identities (usually two at a time) as rigid directional force, gently rocking curve and free-spirited squiggle.

Apricot, mauve, periwinkle, pumpkin, silver, lipstick, violet and dozens more colors thrash it out in these paintings. By amping up the static Minimalist grid into a maximalist, lightly harnessed frenzy, Sorenson did forge a new structure, but not one that he sustained very well. Some of these painterly tours de force veer toward a satisfying synthesis, but others lapse into a gloppy mess.

Berman / Turner Projects, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-1937, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.bermanturnerprojects.com

Showing surfaces but not any depth

In 2003 French photographer Lise Sarfati spent several months in the U.S. photographing young adults. Her pictures at Rose Gallery, part of a larger series recently published as the book “The New Life,” emphasize the interiority of these emergent young men and women.

Sarfati doesn’t propose any kind of thesis about the conditions of youth in America or share any privileged insights, the way Larry Clark or more recently Lauren Greenfield have done with their tightly themed work. Sarfati’s subjects appear to be looking inward, but Sarfati herself merely skims the surface, balancing colors and savoring the effects of light.

The photographs, though slight, are often lovely. The young men and women sit alone in their homes or on back porches, staring pensively (or perhaps simply vacantly) into the middle distance. Ennui floats through the scenes but doesn’t settle convincingly. Sarfati rarely gives us enough context or access to the subjects’ souls for the portraits to be incisive.

What she does consistently deliver are nice chromatic sketches -- skin and lips merging gorgeously with the pale pink covering of a couch; bleached blond hair rhyming dissonantly with sallow gold corduroy; a soft blue-gray print bathrobe accessorizing stucco walls of the same shade. Sarfati is an established documentary photographer, but these pictures make a better case for her as a Color-Field abstractionist.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through May 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosegallery.net