Joining the frat party

Consider the frat party: young men sucking beer out of long plastic tubes while standing on their hands on the lip of a keg; pounding tequila shots and swaying, bleary-eyed, while others pound on sticky tables and chant; dancing with construction cones on their heads and slices of pizza held bikini-like over bared nipples -- not, to be sure, the most becoming facet of young American manhood.

Enter Peggy Honeywell, the folk singer alter ego of San Francisco artist Clare Rojas. With a sweet, Midwestern face, thick, black curls piled high on her head and eyes that could melt an iceberg, she settles on a sofa in the center of the melee and, without so much as a flicker of irony, launches into an achingly tender ballad called “Bower Bird.” (The title refers to an Australian species whose males are known for their remarkably complex mating behaviors, which include building elaborate “bachelor pad” bowers to lure the females.)

The young men pause respectfully -- one, perhaps love-struck, begins to harmonize -- then happily resume their head banging, now absurdly out of rhythm.

The scene appears in a three-minute video in Rojas’ current solo show at Lizabeth Oliveria (a collaboration between Rojas, Ted Passon and Andrew Jeffrey Wright) and epitomizes the show’s endearing spirit: an appealing fusion of earnestness, playfulness, technical skill (her painting, like her voice, is delectable) and deceptive conceptual acumen.

In this, as in past work, Rojas has a great deal of fun with the male image. In the largest painting (all are untitled), a nude male figure floats horizontally in the air, guzzling a bottle of beer, his pointed penis arcing skyward, while women poke him with pencils and laugh. (Two more penises, free-floating and anthropomorphized, appear to be engaged in a boxing match nearby.) In other, smaller paintings, nude men adopt silly, contortionist poses, as if emulating female fashion models. The women, by contrast, are invariably clothed -- they wear long, formless, patterned smocks -- and always seem confidently in charge.

Rojas’ folk-y imagery and floor-to-ceiling installation style betray a direct line to the work of fellow San Franciscan Barry McGee and McGee’s late wife, Margaret Kilgallen. The most obvious distinction is Rojas’ rigorous investment in Americana decoration, particularly quilting. Much of the installation is taken up with bright, blocky pattern -- triangles, squares, stripes, flowers and stars, anarchic in its sprawl but taut in design and fabrication.

As with much of the best McGee-school, street-conscious work of the last decade, the show is distinguished by its visual generosity.

Stepping into the virtually wallpapered main space of the gallery is an enlivening, heartening, cheering experience. Given the scale of Rojas’ output in recent years -- three albums as Peggy Honeywell and a whopping 13 solo shows, three of them at museums, since she received her master of fine arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 -- it’s clearly the result of fierce effort. Like any good hostess, however, she is loath to let you think so.

Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 837-1073, through June 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lizabetholiveria.com.

Digesting some science fiction

Science-fiction books are filled with creeping, oozing, mucus-y organisms whose primary occupation is to envelop, penetrate and feed on other, less fortunate organisms -- typically humans. Andy Alexander’s fourth solo show at China Art Objects lends a curious twist to this familiar motif, presenting a species of creature -- made from polymer clay but eerily organic -- whose modus operandi appears to be enveloping, penetrating and feeding upon worn copies of old science-fiction books.

The sculptural potential of science fiction is something Hollywood has mined for decades -- think of “Star Trek,” “Dune,” “Alien,” “War of the Worlds” -- with the slimy limbs, dripping teeth and obscene protuberances serving as outlets for the expression of bodily, psychological or social fear and anxiety. Alexander’s works tap into the same vein, albeit free from the encumbrance of character or narrative.

They’re fascinating objects. In some, the clay form consumes the perimeter of a given book entirely, arching up and around to spin a jungle gym-like cocoon. In one, it smears itself thin across the surface of an open book, leaving the text faintly visible in spots, a single corner peeking out like a smothered victim gasping for air. In another, it bores straight through the book, leaving a gaping hole.

Accompanying these works are a pair of larger works -- “The Inside of Out (Mountain Top)” and “The Outside Inn” -- wherein Alexander elicits similar effects from bronze, wood and plaster, extending the motif to architectural proportions. The latter involves a model building whose interior is filled with proliferating clay forms and whose exterior is all but subsumed by mounds of snow-white plaster.

The wordplay of the two titles is echoed in a pair of garishly psychedelic prints installed in the same room, one of which reads “Always True Never Real,” the other, “Always Real Never True.” The contrast between the crisp, graphic quality of the prints and the sensual, organic nature of the sculptures points to Alexander’s impressive stylistic -- and, for that matter, imaginative -- agility.

China Art Objects, 933 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 613-0384, through May 5. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chinaartobjects.com.

From the mailbox to the art gallery

The photographs in “Postscript,” London-based artist Veronica Bailey’s L.A. debut at Bank, explore one of life’s vanishing pleasures: the experience of a personal letter.

Most of the mid-size images in the show depict a single envelope against a flat, slate gray ground, photographed from above the opening looking in. (Some depict a single folded sheet.) At a glance, you might mistake them for elliptical Brancusi- or O’Keeffe-like abstractions, complete with the faint suggestion of female genitalia.

Their magic, however, lies in their material specificity. Shot at close range with an extremely shallow depth of field, the envelopes’ fuzzy, torn edges are crystal clear, while their planes descend evocatively into shadow. Glimpses of script trailing illegibly into the folds suggest whispered conversations just out of earshot.

The formal elegance of the work is enriched by the fact that all of the letters belonged to one of 20th century art’s most fascinating women, Lee Miller. The stunningly beautiful American fashion model went on to become Man Ray’s lover, muse and collaborator; the wife, for a time, of a wealthy Egyptian businessman in Cairo; and one of the first Americans to photograph the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

These letters date to her years as a war correspondent, and most involve her soon-to-be second husband, the Surrealist painter Roland Penrose. Their titles -- “Mad With Envy,” “I Love You,” “Missing You” -- intimate the contents. Bailey, who has photographed the pages of books and newspapers for other series, has a wonderfully sensual way with paper that’s enough to make one grieve the onset of the Digital Age.

Bank, 125 W. 4th St., No. 103, L.A., (213) 621-4055, through May 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.bank-art.com.

Collectively, they are powerful

If cryptography refers to the enciphering or deciphering of messages in code, then “Cryptofloriography,” the title Monica Furmanski gives to the series of prints in her show at Fringe Exhibitions, suggests something altogether magical.

The prints are photographic images, most of which appear to depict some sort of fauna. With roughly two-thirds of each image having been digitally removed, however, it’s difficult to tell. All that remains are a few spindly forms floating against a flat, pale green ground.

The effect, which resembles watching a flawed DVD when the pixels begin to drop out, invites an initially unfavorable comparison with the manually perforated photo works of Soo Kim. The crisp cut edges of Kim’s works have a sculptural elegance that makes the synthetic blur and flat, plastic texture inherent to digital prints somewhat disappointing.

Step back to consider the images in the context of Furmanski’s entire installation, however, and they spring to life. The nine prints in the show range from 17 by 13 inches to 41 by 82 inches, and they’re scattered all across the tall walls of the main space.

Two walls have been painted the same color as the background of the prints, which enhances their skeletal delicacy, and the front windows have been covered in a green, translucent film that casts a peculiar light throughout the gallery.

It’s an elegant installation that does much to ameliorate the limitations of the central medium.

Also on view, in the basement, is a mesmeric video installation by Kadet Kuhne, “Infinite Delay,” in which a straitjacketed figure bobs at the bottom of a swimming pool, bathed in a gorgeous, rippling blue light. The circumstances of the situation are unclear, but the tone suggests a sort of perceptive purgatory between observation and action, restraint and release, sleep and consciousness. The effect is both lulling and unnerving.

Fringe Exhibitions, 504 Chung King Court, Los Angeles, (213) 613-0160, through May 19. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.fringeexhibitions.com.