Hole new take on a sponge

On first glance, the exhibition at Machine Project looks like a standard recap of Minimalism. Three tidy white cubes rest on pedestals in the otherwise empty storefront gallery.

But a closer look reveals something wondrous -- another brain-stretching, comprehension-defying, do-it-yourself exercise with many of the ingredients with which Echo Park’s small, weekends-only gallery has been making a name for itself for the last couple of years. There is low-tech labor-intensity, hands-on dexterity, profound curiosity about the ordinary world and an unflagging passion for the complexity of the seemingly simplest of things.

Each cube is an intricate mathematical figure known as a Menger sponge, made of folded business cards. These “origami fractals” were fashioned by software engineer Jeannine Mosely, with hundreds of volunteers assisting on the biggest.

The smallest measures 6 inches on a side. It’s built from 168 folded business cards and takes a novice about 90 minutes to make. It’s easy if you follow the precisely illustrated instructions in a field guide that accompanies the exhibition.

The $8 booklet, co-written by Mosely and curator Margaret Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring, includes a brief history of the Menger sponge, its place in physics and a biographic sketch of its inventor, Austrian mathematician Karl Menger (1902-85).

The medium-size piece, known as a Level Two sponge, is an 18-inch cube made of 3,456 business cards. It took Mosely 30 hours to construct.

The centerpiece, a Level Three sponge, is a 54-inch cube made of 66,048 cards. It weighs 150 pounds and exceeded Mosley’s 600-hour fabrication estimate exponentially. She began in 1995 and finished in 2004, with more than a little help from her friends. Actually building something turns out to be a lot more complicated -- and time consuming -- than conceptualizing it in the abstract or designing it on paper.

Describing a Menger’s sponge is no mean feat. Here is how Mosely begins her contribution to the field guide: “Take a cube, divide it into 27 (3 x 3 x 3) smaller cubes of the same size; now remove the cube in the center of each face plus the cube at the center of the whole. You are left with a structure consisting of the eight small corner cubes plus twelve small edge cubes holding them together. Now, imagine repeating this process on each of these remaining twenty cubes. Repeat again, and again, ad infinitum ....”

This accounts for the lacy appearance of the business card cube, which increases as the size of the cube does. Seeing three together invites the mind’s eye to picture a fourth. And a fifth, if your imagination is up to it.

And so on, with no end in sight. Eventually you are left with a cube that occupies space but no longer fills it. Menger sponges hover in the ambiguous space been two and three dimensions.

The beauty of fractals is that they describe the world far more accurately than such simple geometric shapes as cubes, spheres and cones. Grasping their formal structure, however, requires a bit of mental agility.

The beauty of Mosely’s sculpture is that it makes this easier for everyone, inspiring awe in the everyday stuff all around us and doing its little bit to keep minds open, engaged and in action.

Machine Project, 1200-D N. Alvarado St., (213) 483-8761, through Sept. 24. Open Saturdays and Sundays only. www.machineproject.com

Totally lost in catching the wave

At a time when people take pictures with their cellphones and almost everyone seems comfortable with a camera stuck in their face, it’s refreshing to see LeRoy Grannis’ black-and-white photographs from the 1960s and Jeff Divine’s supersaturated color prints from the 1970s. At M + B Fine Art, their works take viewers back to photography’s pre-digital age, when cameras were not ubiquitous and posing for pictures had not yet become second nature. Although both photographers focus on surfers, you don’t need to be a wave-lover to appreciate their achievements.

Grannis’ photographs are important historical documents, chronicling rides by such surf legends as Miki Dora, Dewey Weber and Chris Cattel, as well as just about every surf spot along the coast of Southern California. But one of the best things about his 24 grainy, modestly scaled prints is how awkward the surfers look.

Butts stick out inelegantly. Legs are splayed. Arms extend every which way. Torsos bend and twist, as if made of putty -- or like figures in Cubist paintings. Faces, when visible, are knotted up, slack-jawed or lost in concentration -- anything and everything except the photogenic expressions that grace head shots, family portraits and other pictures meant to be attractive.

This is because the surfers are so engrossed in what they are doing that they are utterly unaware of Grannis’ camera, far off on the beach. The unselfconsciousness of the men riding waves is palpable -- and wildly out of step with the present, when even spontaneous gestures seem to be set up to look good in pictures.

Divine’s larger, more luscious C-prints make style their subject, zooming in on hand-painted boards, customized trucks and the long, lazy hours spent on the beach before and after surfing. These more self-consciously composed pictures, often shot with ad hoc equipment balanced on his own board, eliminate much of the distance between surfers and viewers. Even so, the people in the pictures never seem to care about the camera or to let its presence change their behavior.

This sense of living in the moment, without regard to the gaze of others, distinguishes these images from many contemporary photographs. It’s what makes the work art.

M + B Fine Art, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 550-0050, through Sept. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.mbfala.com

Simple, diverse and powerful

“Abstraction” is a five-artist show that lets the work speak for itself. At Carl Berg Gallery, the 11 large-scale pieces have a lot to say to one another, to viewers who take the time to look closely and to the disciplines of photography and architecture, through whose territory the works tiptoe, often gracefully.

Karen Herold builds fluid webs of earthy colors by laying down thinned brushstrokes that seem to swim in and out of focus. The spatial ambiguity her three atmospheric works create is given hot, shocking color -- and considerably more airiness -- in Nicola Staeglich’s single painting, which resembles an impossible close-up of a blazing fire.

Norm Looney’s pair of 7-by-5-foot ink drawings transforms the classic jingle, “Sell the sizzle, not the steak” into a useful compositional principle. In each, thousands of tiny circles and even tinier dots recall the fizz of carbonated drinks while suggesting microorganisms and intergalactic maps.

Brian Hollister paints horizontal lines across juicy atmospheric fields, playing contrasting colors against one another in ways that warp space, boggle the mind and delight the eye.

Richard Wilson engineers slower, more subtle shifts in architectural space with a pair of multi-panel paintings whose components come in various thicknesses, widths, heights and dense, autumnal colors.

His three- and five-part paintings recall fragments of city skylines, each component contributing to a punchy, stop-and-start rhythm. A similar sense of interlocked harmony takes shape in Wilson’s 6-by-12-foot painting from 1971, a hard-edge extravaganza in screaming pastels that seems to be a more disciplined and tightly cropped version of a Frank Stella “Protractor” painting.

The show is a testament to the power of simplicity. Rather than shoehorning diverse works into a preconceived plan or jam-packing something for everyone into one space, “Abstraction” makes room for decisiveness and resolve while leaving viewers plenty of room to maneuver.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 931-6060, Ends Saturday.

www.carlberggallery.com

Noodling around, and that’s fine

Jack Bender is best known as the producer-director of the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning TV program “Lost.” He is also a Sunday painter.

At Timothy Yarger Fine Art, 22 of Bender’s big splashy acrylics on canvas (some with collage elements) are featured in “Jack Bender: Found.” The exhibition tries to link the brilliance and originality of Bender’s television work to what he does with a paintbrush.

But Bender’s paintings are neither innovative nor gripping. They are perfectly benign dips into recent art history, do-it-yourself imitations of the paintings that regularly get pictured in textbooks and monographs.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. As American society grows increasingly professionalized -- and corporate -- it’s satisfying to see someone noodling around in the studio, getting away from his day job and having some fun.

It’s also humbling to see that even great creativity has its limits. Just because someone excels in one medium does not mean that he will succeed in another. The only problem is with viewers who deny a time and place for Sunday painting and want artists to be on the job 24/7.

Timothy Yarger Fine Art, 329 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 278-4400, through Sept. 25. Open daily. www.yargerfineart.com