When dogs are in hot pursuit

You don’t need to own a pet to be entranced by John Divola’s photographs of dogs. But having a car might help.

The grainy, large-scale black-and-white prints he shot in the desert between 1996 and 2001 were made by sticking his camera-wielding arm out the window of his pickup truck whenever a dog began to chase the passing vehicle and snapping away blindly with high-speed film. Their ancestry is in Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th century scientific photographs of animal locomotion, but without the sober veneer of orderliness.

Dogs scamper and bound in the photographs at Patricia Faure Gallery, and the scenery smears and tilts. Sometimes the dog is in the middle distance and sometimes up close. Always there’s a sense that he’s running as if his very life depended on it -- not freely and with exuberant abandon but with the blinkered focus of compulsivity.

Divola’s pictures freeze commonplace moments -- ones usually experienced as a jumbled commotion from within a moving conveyance. The blurred, animated or off-kilter results, several of which were included in Divola’s eccentric 2004 book, “Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert,” are surprising and funny.

Soon, however, the grin fades. The images turn, becoming oddly touching.

Anyone who drives has at one time or another been chased by a dog. It’s nerve-racking, because tragedy looms. But the herding instinct runs deep -- and in the wide-open spaces of the desert, the absence of animal herds from most of modern civilization is obvious. The ramshackle raggedness of the barren scenery so prominent in Divola’s photographs italicizes the point.

The animal chases the speeding machine because it’s as close as he can get to what nature intended and man obliterated. Suddenly the desert scenery fills with an aura of obsolescence, and poignancy arises.

So does a shred of panic. It comes from recognizing the struggle involved in restraining one’s own irrational compulsions -- those seemingly hard-wired responses to stimuli that can wreak havoc on life.

In one of Divola’s most wrenching pictures, a black dog at the bottom left leaps straight for the camera. The ground plane tilts up at an angle, like a tabletop being violently overturned. Fido’s fangs are bared and his eyes burn.

But his demeanor is not so simple. Part fury, part delirium, with a mix of sheer bewilderment thrown in for good measure, it’s as if the dog has marshaled every ounce of muscle to keep from sliding out of the frame and into oblivion. Once registered, that look will break your heart.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.patriciafauregallery.com

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‘Mirror’s’ distorted reflection of life

In her enchanting new six-minute video, “Mirror Improvisation,” New York artist Joan Jonas and a friend frolic in a field while dressed up in frothy tulle skirts and towering and elaborate paper hats, like gaga fairies flitting through an alternate universe. They battle each other with giant swords, build rickety forts, wave gigantic white flags of surrender and engage in other assorted nonsense. Music tinkles on the soundtrack.

The video, which is one among five in Jonas’ compelling show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, was shot close-up in a convex mirror. That warps the scenery, curving the universe, while alternately stretching and compressing the action.

To further complicate matters the cavorting sprites sometimes wield hand-held mirrors that catch the glinting sunlight. It’s like looking into a crystal ball.

Because you can’t see the convex mirror, only the world reflected in its distorting curvature, the surface seems transparent. That’s a pretty good description of what happens to life lived in a media-filtered world -- the bizarre and the ordinary are permanently entangled, all in a frame of dubious authenticity.

The formal structure of the work is built on such abstract perceptual precedents as 1970s video work by Steina Vasulka, as well as Jonas’ own classic videotapes of the period. What’s new here -- or at least what has been made more elaborate -- is the work’s spatial complexity. The topical quasi-narrative of war and peace in “Mirror Improvisation” gains an unexpected urgency.

The show’s videos mix the use of monitors, flat projections and zigzag screens constructed from hinged canvases. Portions of the videos were also projected onto a live performance that was itself recorded, further fracturing and layering the perceptual field.

The performance tells an allusive story of a late 19th century visit to the Hopis of the American Southwest by the great German art historian Aby Warburg, who famously studied formal patterning in Western art and who also suffered symptoms associated with schizophrenia. The stimulating phantasmagoria of human experience is effectively conveyed -- and embodied -- together with a certain nausea that seems unique to our analog-becoming-digital age. The sound can be hard to hear in the echoing gallery (a typescript is helpfully provided), but Jonas remains an incomparable guide on our contemporary journey through media and space.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com

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Modules help get the party started

Tao Urban is an artist for whom art’s primary job is to act as a catalyst for social interchange. Like better-known compatriots Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tobias Rehberger, he stages installations that are explicit excuses for a party composed of strangers. Where casual rituals centered on food and drink often provide Tiravanija and Rehberger’s forms, what Urban brings to the gathering is a distinctive Pop ethos focused on music.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery is currently a playground stuffed with interlocking plastic modules in Good & Plenty colors. The sculptural modules come in two sizes -- a foot (or more) wide and around 2 or 3 feet long -- and each has slots that allow the modules to fit together easily. They can be rearranged with a minimum of fuss.

Here they’re linked to build benches, tables, arches and pagodas that look like an ad hoc jungle gym. During the exhibition’s run, gallery visitors are invited to “record nights,” where they or guest DJs spin records on a pair of turntables. (The show, titled “it’s not me, ... it’s you ... ,” closes Saturday, which also will be party time.) Two chandelier-like mobiles hover above two six-sided speaker-benches on wheels, and the pink, white, black and off-white plastic modules can be rearranged by partygoers to fit the changing need -- or whim.

The modular units and their connected shapes smartly suggest molecular structures and chemical chains, exploded and reconfigured into a candycolored listening lounge. Urban practices better-living-through-personal-chemistry, in which change and interchange are extrapolated from our DNA. Sociability is an engine for evolution and devolution -- and maybe even revolution.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through Saturday. www.ahgallery.com

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Watercolors with an air of mystery

Violet Hopkins’ large and impressive watercolors -- the biggest more than 9 feet wide -- exploit the gaseous and brilliantly colored look of galactic space photographs to render decidedly Earthbound wilderness. Her caves, jungles and undersea coral grottoes are remote places of exquisite loveliness where some requisite danger lurks -- a jaguar snoozing in the forest, or a shark lurking on the seabed. But that fairly standard dichotomy is not what sets this work apart.

At David Kordansky Gallery, Hopkins’ second solo show comprises five works. The artist begins with a light pencil sketch in the center of the large sheet, which is then apparently brushed using a considerable amount of water. The subsequent buckling of the dried paper establishes a rippling surface terrain of light and shadow.

At the margins, Hopkins distributes puddles of all the colored inks that will form the palette to paint the central image. On the wet page, these colors run. Visually, the abstract rivulets seem to leak and flow into the middle of the field, where they collect to form Hopkins’ gorgeous Realist landscapes. A void resides at the center of each composition -- the cave where bats live, say, or an open arch of jagged coral -- putting mystery at their core.

Like clouds of chromatic gas and galactic matter that come together to form nebulae, Hopkins’ wild places are dazzling cryptic zones in the process of being born. Or, conversely, perhaps they are unraveling -- nature tattered, dissipating and coming apart at the seams.

The quiet tension between those possibilities is palpable. And the level of painterly improvisation in Hopkins’ masterful watercolors, both actual and imagined, enhances the work’s precarious thrill.

David Kordansky Gallery, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 222-1482, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.davidkordanskygallery.com