A room of glorious gloom

There are artists who also write, and then there are writers who also make art. Christopher Russell is among the latter.

With an underground reputation based on a clever ‘zine called “Bedwetter,” which he published for several years, Russell showed a small group of seemingly casual photographs in the back room at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in 2005. They hummed with melancholic strangeness.

A recently completed novel is the incentive for a new body of work, dubbed “Together,” which comprises a full-scale installation in the gallery’s front room. Featuring reading tables, photo albums, artist’s books and altered photographs with graffiti-like designs scratched with blades, it does not disappoint.

The windows and door of the gallery’s storefront space have been draped with eccentrically shaped curtains, pieced together from heavy afghans crocheted from brightly colored yarn. This burst of homemade chromatic splendor and warmth, backlighted by effulgent sunshine like Grandma’s version of high church stained glass, is disturbingly askew.

Crocheting requires a straightforward ability to follow a repetitive pattern. One stitch and loop follows another, with colored yarns carefully ordered. Those are the rules of the road, which these disheveled curtains only partly follow.

Russell’s irregular, tattered piecing of the afghan fragments defies ordered logic, looking more like what’s left by the ravages of time. The transformation of blankets into drapery isn’t exactly customary, either. Whether fabricated by the artist, found in thrift shops or perhaps a combination of both, these peculiar window works are at once playful, smart and just a little bit scary.

And they resound against what’s on the floor at the opposite end of the room, where two large black-and-white photographs in dun-colored ornamental frames lean against the wall. Each shows the front porch of a lower-middle-class home. One has a security screen front door and, incongruously, a black tarpaulin stuffed behind the steel bars to cover up the front window. The door and tarp are domestic barricades, but they could just as well be keeping someone in as keeping someone out.

The other house is a duplex. Though the left side appears perfectly normal, the right side has a screen door jam-packed with what appears to be several weeks’ worth of delivered mail. Is no one home? Or is someone not answering the mundane entreaties of the outside world? And what do the neighbors think?

Are there neighbors?

Russell’s imagery kick-starts an open-ended narrative featuring an inevitably rocky path. A sense of essential self-protection wrestles with irrational paranoia, all in the stew of a lonely quest for connection. Elsewhere, an uncanny gray-brown photograph showing only dried oak leaves scattered across a dark stain on concrete pavement makes you want to rush home to take a shower. Russell’s deceptively simple works display his knack for infusing complex, often contradictory sensations into otherwise bland imagery.

Near the entry, Victorian wallpaper in a peacock-feather pattern turns out to be composed from text in Russell’s novel. (A gallery handout says the book concerns a pair of serial killers. Natch.) On it hangs a large, elegant, silver-framed photograph showing close-up bits of dried grass peeking through what could be shards of glass or sheets of ice. The peacock-feathers’ whiff of fin de siecle decadence deflates like a lead balloon.

The work’s pervasive sense of over-cultivation is appropriate to our hothouse era of extravagantly art-schooled culture. It also has a long if sporadic history in Modern art, reaching back to the decadent, reclusive aestheticism of Huysmans’ “Against Nature” (or “Against the Grain”) and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” More recent inspirations for Russell’s aesthetic would include the abject art of Mike Kelley and the desolate suburban writing of Dennis Cooper. His rapturous sense of gloom is distinctive, however, and keeps this odd work compelling.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through Saturday. www.ahgallery.com

Hero or villain? It’s your call

The entry to New York-based artist Adam Helms’ second show at Sister Gallery sports a bit of perhaps-unwelcome camaraderie. An enlargement of an innocuous, souvenir-style snapshot of an American soldier in the field shows him flashing a grin -- and a middle finger -- at the camera.

This can’t turn out well.

Inside the main room, which is presided over by a second such photograph, the sidewalls are lined with grim silhouette drawings in black ink on Mylar showing ski masks, balaclavas and other styles of criminal-looking hoods. The end wall features a large collage of historical photographs -- a second one is in an adjacent room -- depicting slain outlaws, terrorists and guerrillas, some familiar (Emiliano Zapata) but most not.

A few are in poses that recall Mantegna’s famous, feet-first image of a dead Christ. The second collage is focused more on cowboys in Indian country, American soldiers in Vietnam, antiwar protesters in city streets and even medieval woodcuts of hellish monsters, all topped by pictures of forbidding mountain fortresses.

Helms’ disturbing selection of pictures is marked by a subtle dialogue between conflicting modes of display and concealment, pageantry and cover, both serving purposes of intimidation. A corpse posed like a religious figure may -- or may not -- have been a man of profound evil. That fortress is not just forbidding but awesome.

The conflict gets internalized in the terrific ink drawings, which oscillate visually between representational images and abstract puddles. (Think pools of dried blood.) The dead-black ink, ranging between thinly washed and thickly poured, catches light in various ways, creating patterned surfaces suggestive of modern military camouflage.

Helms then deftly spins the mix one more time, in three small drawings reminiscent of Rorschach ink blots. Heroes or villains, saints or sinners -- the faces of both appear at once. The grimy patterns are yours to project upon.

Sister Gallery, 437 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through Saturday. www.sisterla.com

Melding divergent forces, with a smile

The five large-scale paintings in Michael Reafsnyder’s enchanting exhibition “Aqualala” at Western Project -- his first L.A. solo show in four years -- are among his most deft and accomplished. Slathered, watery blues and deep purples are painted wet-on-wet, in great gushes of sensuous color.

Licks, swipes and squiggles of crimson, white, bubble-gum pink, turquoise and other hues punctuate them. Each canvas is contained, its edges a strict boundary for the paint’s otherwise Dionysian delirium, while Reafsnyder’s trademark smiley-face still ices his pictorial cupcake.

What’s new here is sculpture -- typically (for this artist) eccentric in its joyful fusion of high-minded material abstraction with goofy, down-and-dirty pleasure. If the imaginative paintings suggest rapture of the deep, the sculptures bring us the mermaids one might hallucinate there.

Bumpy, lumpy blobs of heavily worked and kneaded clay are glazed in splashes of thin, watery color -- and yes, the smiley-face grin turns up, seeming right at home. The sculptures’ sizes are modest, each a couple of fistfuls of clay mounted atop a pedestal. They all have the presence of glorified knickknacks, at once treasured yet disposable.

Reafsnyder is adept at walking a razor-sharp line between seemingly incompatible differences.

These mermaids merge Willem de Kooning’s “Clam Diggers” with Capodimonte porcelain figurines. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Perhaps the subject -- a lingering, multicultural myth of being torn between comfortable origins and a hostile world -- is not quite so eccentric as it first seems.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through March 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.western-project.com

Thin show sports some sharp barbs

Mario Ybarra Jr.’s laceratingly witty “Protest Flag” is composed from the Stars and Stripes hanging from a wall-mounted flagpole wrapped in black electrical tape. The pole’s finial sports a golden sculpture of an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak -- the national emblem of Mexico. As the crown of the support for the national emblem of the United States, it raises the question of precisely what is being protested, and why.

Ybarra has a talent for these double-edged political barbs. A second strong piece, titled “MVP,” is a painted clay self-portrait of the artist wearing a familiar blue L.A. baseball cap. The head is mounted on a wood plaque, like a big-game hunter’s trophy.

Being a dodger, in art as in life, can make one the most valuable player of all.

With just six works spanning the last nine years, the show is rather too diffuse. But when it hits, it clears the fence.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 202-2213, through Saturday. www.annahelwinggallery.com