Heady hybrids of images, objects

As soon as photography was invented, people compared it to painting. Thus began a century-spanning dialogue that continues today with the cross-pollination between the two media producing all sorts of hybrids.

And now that film-based photography is being displaced by digital imagery, the discussion has expanded to include sculpture. At ACME, Katie Grinnan’s new works play the virtual space of computers against the solidity of 3-D objects. Her wild hybrids are heady, head-spinning collisions between pictures and things that set the mind and pulse racing.

The biggest, nuttiest one transforms a corner of the gallery into a sideshow-style extravaganza that is part house of mirrors, high school basketball intermission and whirling dervish. A Pandora’s box of high and low sources, it recalls the headless horseman from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Dr. Frankenstein’s work as a cut-and-paste collage artist and Bruce Nauman’s sculptures cast from the dismembered and reconfigured dummies taxidermists use to build lifelike trophies.

On one wall hangs a nearly life-size color photograph of four life-size figurative sculptures Grinnan made from molded plastic. Each is a headless cheerleader. They stand in front of a bright orange backdrop, linking limbs to form an acrobatic, gravity-defying tower of team spirit.

On the adjoining wall Grinnan has painted a bright orange rectangle. On the floor she has laid a similarly sized and tinted rectangle of linoleum. Atop it stand the four sculptures from the photograph.

Each homemade mannequin has been dissected and reassembled so that the foursome appears to be spinning, like a mutant maypole or a feverish vision of a Walpurgis Night dance. So dramatic is the effect that it seems as if there are more than four bodies in “Cheerleaders.” To glance back and forth between the photograph of the figures and their 3-D version is to feel as if the genie has escaped from the bottle and there’s no putting her back.

The other sculptures also pit two dimensions against three, suggesting that the world we live in is a lot less stable than it seems.

From one side, “Rubble Division” appears to be a devilishly clever photograph of doors and windows in which one-point perspective is folded, like industrial-strength origami, into an abstract pattern.

The other side includes twisted lengths of rebar, chunks of concrete and tautly stretched bungee chords among its crisp pictures of demolished buildings, ruined freeways and rusty pipelines.

Four videos, each played on its own monitor, have the presence of sketchbook studies. Unlike many artists, whose idea of sculpture is a prop to be videotaped, Grinnan never forces her sculptures to play second fiddle to her videos. She never shoehorns three dimensions into two.

Four synthetic silk garments, printed with images of her other works, likewise invite living, breathing bodies into the picture.

Grinnan’s love of chaos is tempered by an equal and opposite love of formal composition -- the more complex the better.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com

Into a void of inhuman beauty

Michael Lazarus’ new paintings are potent little icons that look as if they could have been made by someone on a deserted island. Low-tech, cobbled together, intense and stripped back to basics, each carved and collaged work also looks as if it might have been made by an urbanite for whom mainstream culture is a bothersome distraction.

Lazarus’ nine small pieces at Sister don’t reassure viewers that life is rosy. They stare into the void and find it filled with inhuman beauty both frightening and fascinating.

Most include the silhouettes of skulls, often cut, like jack-o’-lanterns, from the small wood panels on which Lazarus works. Spray-painted silhouettes of rib cages also appear, along with occasional silhouettes of birds, coiled snakes, a rat, a raised sword and a red monkey doing a handstand.The cut-out pictures Lazarus neatly glues to the surfaces of his well-organized works usually feature single textures and colors, such as blue feathers, green grass, blond hair or tan skin. Sometimes whole landscapes, urban and rural, are included, shot from such a distance that you must look closely to see the buildings and trees.

Lazarus weaves together these elements with bold, interlocking patterns and geometric shapes: spirals, diamonds, checkerboards, arcs and other forms. His palette is basic, mostly primary and secondary colors, set off with icy whites and midnight blacks.

His paintings recall works made by outsiders. Neither precious nor fussy, they seem to have been urgently crafted, as if he had no time to spare and getting the job done was more important than nailing every detail. The handmade imperfections provide character and pathos.

Op Art from the 1960s stands behind the patterns Lazarus paints. But unlike much design-oriented art from the last decade, his is neither utopian nor optimistic. Think of it as Goth Op. The combination gives Lazarus’ art its kick, which is swift and unforgiving, the work of a fatalist unwilling to sugarcoat things.

Sister, 437 Gin Ling Way, (213) 628-7000, through Oct. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sisterla.com

Scrawny forms command space

Patrick Nickell’s abstract sculptures resemble nothing so much as continuous lines drawn through space in the preposterous shapes of gerrymandered political districts on a map. Yet these wobbly works are so humble, understated and brave that they bring to mind the underdog.

At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, each of Nickell’s sculptures seems to have the deck stacked against it. Its materials are utterly mundane: plywood, cardboard and screws. And Nickell didn’t do anything to these hardware store supplies that an ordinary DIYer couldn’t do in his garage or basement: cut, drill, glue and paint.

Plus, the dimensions of each piece are so comically disproportionate (never more than 1 5/8 inches deep and often more than seven feet high and six feet wide) that each seems too fragile to stand on its own -- much less stand up as serious sculpture, with its daunting history of monumentality and such heavyweight materials as marble, steel and bronze.

Yet Nickell has managed to make sculptures that command space. Each of his scrawny forms more than holds its own. The two galleries in which the seven pieces are installed actually feel crowded.

That’s because Nickell uses negative space -- or emptiness -- as a medium with the same potential as any other material. Think of his fun, beat-the-odds sculptures as supersized Richard Tuttles or steroid-enhanced Fred Sandbacks.

But that’s only half the story. Nickell does not simply make new and improved Minimalist works. He also strips away the breathless reverence that surrounds these esteemed artists, bringing back some of the fun, freshness and gee-whiz fascination their work generated when it was new.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Oct. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com

Paintings’ pairings make strange sense

“A Little So Cal Abstraction” is a gem of an exhibition that doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is: a dozen paintings that artist James Hayward has selected because he loves them. Like the deepest love, his is unconditional. But that doesn’t mean it lacks nuance.

At Mandarin Gallery, no work looks anything like another. Hayward’s installation accentuates the differences, pairing paintings that seem to be from different planets yet make strange sense together.

Michael Reafsnyder’s “Jive Talkin’ ” brings out the color of John M. Miller’s two-tone, two-panel painting, along with its often overlooked innocence, which is childlike and generous. Richard Allen Morris’ thickly painted “Photo” plays yin to the yang of Ed Moses’ flat, shadowy “Nabu-Ho,” which recalls photographic negatives.

Order and its undoing reverberate between Karl Benjamin’s hard-edge abstraction and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s painting of unstable stacks of thin, curiously colored rectangles. Liquid light seems to pour from Olivia Booth’s two small paintings on glass, which rest on a glass panel, and Marcia Hafif’s 2-foot-square oil on canvas, which makes aqua and burgundy seem like a natural match.

In the second gallery, paintings by Scot Heywood, Carolee Toon, Daniel Mendel-Black and Hayward do not interact so felicitously. Each bold abstraction stands on its own, like an unrepentant renegade who would rather go it alone. Tough love is never easy, but it pays off in the long run.

Mandarin Gallery, 970 N. Broadway, Suite 213, (213) 687-4107, through Oct. 14. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.mandaringallery.com