A compact jungle in the gritty city

Dustin Shuler has spent much of his career moving familiar objects into unexpected places, challenging habitual perceptions of space and the relationship between nature and technology. It’s a strategy that has had considerable currency since Duchamp hauled his famous urinal into the refined chambers of the New York art world in 1917, but Shuler has employed it on a particularly large scale -- with automobiles, most notably, and airplanes.

For one 1980 work, “End of an Era,” he ran a 20-foot nail through a 1959 Cadillac and propped it on its side on a Cal State Dominguez Hills quad. For another, “The Spindle,” made six years later, he impaled eight cars on a vertical 54-foot spike, suspending them like entomological specimens high above a shopping center parking lot in suburban Illinois.

In a recent, smaller-scale work now at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, he turns to nature, moving a microcosmic portion of a vast ecosystem into a small and typically quite intimate architectural space. “The Rainforest: A Landscape in the Shower” is exactly what it sounds like -- a jungle packed into the confines of a mass-produced shower and bathtub unit.

The organic elements are all real. There are tropical plants, birds, turtles, fish, frogs and insects. Plexiglas units on each side of the module house elaborate water, light and sound systems to orchestrate the weather cycles within and to broadcast the ambient sounds out to the gallery.

The sculpture sits in the front foyer of LACE, just inside the door -- a startling sight after the gritty bustle of Hollywood Boulevard. Its presence is both soothing and unsettling, evoking the harmony of nature as well as the discomfort of captivity, and illuminating the subtle tensions between nature and art. Shuler spent 15 years developing the piece, according to the show’s press release, but is it the structure or the behavior of the creatures it houses that makes it compelling?

Perhaps it is a cooperation; perhaps it doesn’t even matter. In any case, there’s something wonderful about stumbling upon such a perfectly calibrated bubble of life, a sweet oasis in a dry, dirty city.

A concurrent exhibition of photographs and video by Venezuelan artist Alexander Apostol is a complementary companion piece. The city, architecture and the body are the three primary threads running through the work, and they mingle in subtle, clever ways, often to the point of merging.

The main space houses 15 77- by 59-inch digital photographs, each focusing on a single Modernist building in or around Caracas. Remnants of an optimistic time (the mid-20th century) when Caracas was flush with recent immigrants and booming economically, the structures speak to the subsequent legacy of urban decline, imbued with a pathos that Apostol accentuates by digitally removing all of the buildings’ doors and windows. Mounted on Plexiglas and propped up against the walls around the gallery, rather than hung, they read like a collection of portraits. Each building is an individual body drawn out of a crowd.

Several videos in the gallery’s two back rooms explore urban decay through the lens of family, gender and sexuality. One, “Soy la Ciudad,” features a leopard-print-clad transvestite reciting passages from Le Corbusier’s 1927 text, “Towards a New Architecture,” while her makeup grows increasingly garish and disheveled. Another, “Av. Libertador,” portrays a series of transsexual prostitutes on a mural-lined boulevard, announcing themselves illustriously to the camera using the names of famous 20th century Venezuelan artists.

“Don Carlo,” the least affected but also perhaps the most absorbing of the videos, presents a rambling interview with a solitary woman (her interlocutor -- presumably the artist -- is off-screen) about a variety of issues involving her apartment building, which is owned and occupied by members of her extended family. Alternately philosophical, political, aesthetic and gossipy, her account casually but distinctly illuminates the deep connection between architecture and the body and underscores the enduring complexity of urban life.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777, through Dec. 17. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.artleak.org

Liking the pictures more than premise

To create the works in “A Series of Catastrophes and Celebrations,” her first solo show at Bank Gallery, Kim Schoen invited a dozen or so friends out to the Mojave Desert one day at “high noon,” gave them each a camera and some film, set off a series of fireworks and asked each participant to photograph the resulting explosions.

The show’s two slender catalog essays -- both written by event participants -- make elaborate work of this fairly simple setup, rooting the project with great enthusiasm in an ambitious range of Big Subjects: the photograph, history, documentation, memory, subjectivity, war and so on. Katherine Lewis fills the project’s ambiguity with meandering questions. (“Were the fireworks some sort of homage to fictional fallen cowboys? ... Were we meant to think of the violence our country was (and still is) enacting in other places around the world ...?”) Kristina Newhouse loads her own 600 words with no fewer than seven footnotes, invoking a cumbersome mantle of critical theory.

It’s a sincere effort but one that only illuminates the basically pedestrian nature of the premise -- a conceptual limitation that might otherwise be easy to overlook -- lending the project an air of art school chatter.

Fortunately, however, the pictures are quite beautiful. Delicate patterns of white or yellow smoke are suspended against flat fields of blue or gray. Schoen prints the images in a variety of sizes and tones, illuminating the complexities of a simple and familiar motif and creating a lively sense of rhythm around the gallery.

It’s heartening to see a Conceptually oriented young artist creating visually compelling objects. If the Conceptual framework has yet to synthesize, Schoen has established a promising foundation.

Bank, 125 W. 4th St., Los Angeles, (213) 621-4055, through Oct. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.bank-art.com

Two perceptions of the landscape

Yvette Molina’s “The Garden of Sorts,” her second solo show at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, presents an elegant series of lush, romanticized landscapes. Oil on aluminum paintings composed in the spirit of traditional Chinese scrolls, with boughs of foliage silhouetted in the foreground and the suggestion of distant land formations dissolving into mist beyond, they have a vaguely exotic air.

Look closely, however, and the foliage itself is surprisingly familiar, even banal. It is not the rarefied verdure of some distant land, but the common palms, ferns and brush of coastal California (Molina lives in Oakland), rendered with attentive delicacy.

The paintings in Mery Lynn McCorkle’s “Single Cells,” a slightly smaller exhibition in the gallery’s back room, are landscapes of a different sort -- playful interpretations of a microscopic realm, with clusters of cell-like motifs spraying across each composition like sprightly schools of fish. Made with auto-body pigment, acrylic and glitter on synthetic vellum, they’re bright, jaunty works that pose a lively contrast to Molina’s more refined reveries.

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., G2, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through Oct. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.ruthbachofnergallery.com

Historical marker of life in New York

Walker Evans spent several years in the late 1930s prowling the New York City subway system with a concealed camera, documenting unsuspecting passengers. The result, later published in a book titled “Many Are Called,” is a melancholy portrait of a booming but lonely city, told through a parade of anonymous faces.

In the early 1980s, the photographer Bruce Davidson repeated the project, albeit in color and without the subterfuge, and his New York is a very different place: cramped, cluttered, smothered in graffiti, and not so much lonely as treacherous. Selections from the series, simply titled “Subway,” are on view at Rose Gallery.

Evans captured most of his subjects squarely, isolating one or two per frame in a manner suggestive of a mug shot. Davidson is far more confrontational, coming at his subjects from a mobile variety of angles and often at aggressively close range. In the glare of his flash, most have the look of trapped animals. Corralled into battered chrome boxes -- rich and poor, black and white, young and old -- they respond to the lens with hostility, pride or indifference, invariably defensive.

There are friendly moments such as the faint, curious smile on the face of a pretty young mother, or three small children peering out the window of an elevated car to a Ferris wheel in the distance. The predominant feeling, however, is one of claustrophobic chaos. One of the most startling images portrays one young man holding a gun to the head of another, who cowers in what looks to be a very real state of terror.

It’s a far more ominous portrayal than one is likely to encounter in today’s post-Giuliani, post-Sept. 11 New York, if for no other reason than the considerably diminished presence of graffiti. Like Evans’ work, it makes for a lucid historical marker.

Rose Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., G5, Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through Oct. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.