No need to read beyond the book title

Browse an individual’s bookshelves and you’re likely to glean some insight into the reader’s personality and sensibility. Our books mirror ourselves, from our highest aspirations to our lowly indulgences. Crime fiction bestsellers, lyric poetry, celebrity biographies, Oprah picks, literary nonfiction, self-help manuals -- they all offer clues.

Browse the mock bookshelves in Jean Lowe’s show at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery and you will see reflected a sense of the artist herself, of course, but also a clever, incisive, hilarious and dismaying collective portrait of dysfunctional American culture.

These nine tall bookcases, built of cardboard and painted with a faux wood-grain finish, hold more than 200 titles, most facing out. The books are actually papier-mache objects, their titles and cover images painted in enamel. Fatter and clunkier than real books, they come across as playful caricatures.

And playful they are, with such titles as “When to Tell Your Husband He’s Adopted,” “Misanthropes Make Bitter Lovers” and “Frequent Problems Associated With Failure to Adapt to Life Outside the Uterus.” Lowe pays homage to some genuine books (Flann O’Brien’s novel “The Third Policeman,” for instance), credits herself as author of several (the sunny orange-covered “The Way of the Optimist,” among others) and presents a wishful volume of her own catalogue raisonne.

She riffs brilliantly on familiar children’s series, adding a contemporary edge to Nancy Drew’s adventures with “The Clue in the Meth Lab.” She shows the girl detective with a suspiciously swollen belly on the cover of “The Secret of the Lost Weekend.” Lowe also has invented new series: cookbooks of vegan delights (from romantic to irresponsible) and handbooks of economic opportunism. The “Charting the Course” series offers investor guides to “The Future of Breast Augmentation Reversal” and “The Burgeoning Diabetes Epidemic.”

Lowe’s work has long been driven by social critique. She’s addressed the exploitation of animals, the culture of excess, the rape of the landscape. Here she takes on a plethora of linked societal phenomena: the use and abuse of religion for personal and political ends; the medicalization of experience, every condition calling for its own pharmaceutical solution; rampant consumerism and self-obsession; and much more. The American way of life exposes itself across these shelves. The goal? “Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion.” The means? “Freedom From Rigor and Competence.”

Lowe is a satirist in the grand tradition of Daumier, Hogarth and Nast. Her closest contemporary counterparts may be Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Like them, Lowe adopts an existing credible, authoritative genre and injects it with wry style to lay bare the flaws and foibles of the status quo. Papier-mache helps give the work a look of sprightly, clumsy innocence, which she subverts with knowing jabs at the dysfunctionality of ordinary life.

The bookcases occupy one of three rooms at the gallery. In another, Lowe presents paintings of a chain bookstore, electronics store, gym and 99-cents store. Each view bends back at the edges, as if seen through a wide-angle lens, adding to the wooziness already induced by the environments’ marketing-driven scale and vividly artificial color schemes. The paintings don’t have as much bite as the books, nor the radical charm of what’s in the third gallery: a papier-mache baby grand with iced soft drinks and packaged snacks beneath its raised lid. Behind and around it, brightly patterned mandalas (painted on domed foam) stick to the wall, like cosmic Frisbees flung and frozen there. The mandalas invite a flowery sort of bliss, but for meditation on wackier, wiser matters, head back to the books.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through April 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com

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A clever, yet forgotten, artist

A gorgeous retrospective organized by San Francisco’s De Young Museum and now at the Japanese American National Museum ought to help correct the injustice of Ruth Asawa’s limited recognition. A concurrent show at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery supports the effort to rebuild an audience for this remarkable artist.

Asawa (b. 1926) hit her stride in the ‘50s and ‘60s after several years of study at Black Mountain College and a formative summer in Mexico, where she learned to make simple baskets out of hand-looped wire. Her most stunning contributions, looped and tied-wire sculptures, link an ethos of problem-solving learned from Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller, a resourcefulness and ingenuity of means acquired from early years on a farm and in World War II internment camps, and an elegant distillation of natural forms.

One hanging copper wire piece is quintessential Asawa: a sequence of five spheres, one nesting inside the next, all built out of a single continuous surface of looped wire. As the permeable, netted skin of the sculpture folds back in on itself, translucency gives way to density, and the momentum of the line, drawn in space, asserts a pulsing rhythm.

Most of the show’s two dozen works are drawings and prints, and not always the strongest examples of the San Francisco artist’s work, but an exhilarating group of sumi ink drawings more than compensates. One of the “Plane Tree” drawings evokes the texture of mineral sedimentation, another the fluidity and heft of a dancer in motion. All have a gestural exuberance that complements the sculptures’ quiet grace.

Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., (323) 933-5523, through April 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.tobeycmossgallery.com

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Where sober battles cheerful

Mark Ryden hungers for the sublime, and in “The Tree Show” at the Michael Kohn Gallery, he quotes it, references it, annotates it, but never quite manages to eke out a true glimpse of it. The effort is an impressive spectacle of skill and ambition, a duel between the earnest and the pretentious, between the serious and the merely silly.

The most absorbing part of the show is the personal archive of materials and paraphernalia that served as source material for the more grandiose paintings. Displayed like a prize-striving county fair collection are a slew of figurines (animals, loggers, Madonnas), a swath of tree-themed books (as varied as how-to-draw manuals and mystic treatises) and a wall of souvenir-style images of the great sequoias and other trees with popular culture status.

Ryden’s collection reads as a sampler of the ways trees are anthropomorphized, marketed, revered, trivialized and destroyed. The paintings, meticulously rendered and elaborately framed, dip into this well of good intention but spin off into cloying fantasies starring young girls descended from the doe-eyed waifs of Margaret Keane. One is enthroned upon a symbol-studded “Tree of Life,” one kneels in apology to a sawed-off trunk with an all-seeing eye among its rings, and others are painted on slick slabs of wood -- nymphs of different genuses.

Through these and even less subtle images of a devil driving a logging truck and a girl nurse cradling a sickly pine, Ryden implies that we dumb down nature instead of protecting it and communing with it. Lofty aspirations are embedded in his paintings, but so are trite formulas, making the entire enterprise easier to dismiss.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., (323) 658-8088, through April 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kohngallery.com

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Group show wants to take you away

Steve Turner Contemporary bids farewell to its Beverly Hills location (the gallery’s next show will take place in a new space on Wilshire, opposite LACMA) with a group exhibition called “SANCTA.” The title -- plural of “sanctum,” meaning holy place or retreat -- overshoots the work, but the curious mix has a few redeeming moments.

Roman de Salvo’s punning “Naughty Pine” is a guiltless pleasure. Three excised knots in a framed plank are electrically propelled, pushing out beyond the surface and pulling back in a continuous mechano-sexual rhythm. Kyle Riedel and Christine Catsifas’ large color photograph of intertwining ferns, orchids, bromeliads and meandering tree roots reads like a tropical fantasy gone amok. Its title, “Lobby No. 1,” suggests that artifice rather than nature is to blame.

Renee Lotenero’s collage drawing fuses intricate renderings of tiles with tiny mosaic cutouts of photographed tiles. It’s an oddly compelling work, animate and unwieldy, entropic. Among the other six artists’ works, Anibal Catalan’s ink drawings stand out for their raw energy, their environment-turned-whirling-dervish sense of controlled chaos reminiscent of Julie Mehretu’s paintings.

Jina Valentine’s delicately overlaid tracings of Top 40 album cover images and words are faintly hypnotic; Marcos Lutyens’ bone-white ceramic sculptures suggest mildly mysterious relics of a hybrid urban/natural world; Lucy H.G.’s video and installation on the theme of flight feels sweet but slight; Adler Guerrier’s photographic nightscapes are excessively casual, a scattering of impressionistic images of lights against darkness too random to matter; and Fernanda Brunet’s canvas billowing with flowers and plants has an exuberance at odds with its paint-by-number flatness and wintry hues.

Steve Turner Contemporary, 275 S. Beverly Drive, Suite 200, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-3721, through April 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.steveturnergallery.com