Unlikely survivors in the mean city

The ambrotype, a photographic process invented in the 1850s, took its name from the Greek for “immortal” or “imperishable.” An underdeveloped positive on coated glass, the ambrotype image assumed full visibility when backed by a dark surface. Cheaper to produce and easier to view than the daguerreotype, it supplanted the earlier method in popularity, especially for making portraits. Ambrotypes were widely made in the camps of Civil War soldiers and sent home as mementos.

“LA Botanical,” Joyce Campbell’s elegant, deeply thoughtful project at G727, shares something fundamental with those Civil War portraits, which long outlasted their subjects. Campbell’s images are also made using the ambrotype process, and they directly engage with concepts of survival and living memory.

The 39 pictures in the artist’s ongoing project represent plant species that grow in the city today, in spite of the myriad forces (development, climatic change, general disregard) that threaten their endurance.

Each species that Campbell shoots has a documented use: as food, poison or pleasure inducer, for medicinal or cosmetic purposes. The names of the plants and their functions are detailed in a small, graceful catalog accompanying the show; but in the gallery installation the images appear without any identification or verbal support. Humble icons, they stand for themselves with great dignity, a row of thin, clear glass plates propped, viewing room style, on a shelf that runs chest-high along the gallery walls. The shelf and the space directly behind it are painted black to maximize the pictures’ legibility.

Campbell, originally from New Zealand and now living in L.A., shoots each specimen close-up, in isolation: sprigs of sage (anti-fungal and a stimulant to hair growth), sprays of pine (solvent and treatment for lice and tapeworm), stalks of barley (nutritious, cholesterol-lowering grain), stems of devil’s weed (hallucinogenic, an antidote to nerve gas and cure for bed-wetting). Milky, silvery tones give way to shadowed areas that recede into darkness and lend the plants a sculptural presence.

The ambrotype process yields a high level of clarity, but Campbell invites blur in places, sacrificing detail for a stronger sense of the animate. This is taxonomy practiced with soul -- not the clinical, formulaic sterility that has become such an affectation in photography post-Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Campbell’s project is vast in scope but modest in execution, its subjects revealing themselves through characteristic forms and textures rather than the imposition of a severe aesthetic scheme. The pictures take from Karl Blossfeldt a respect for the brilliance of nature’s design and from Anna Atkins a tone of serious botanical inquiry. Campbell belongs to the most thoughtful strain of contemporary photographers reviving obsolete methods -- what historian and critic Lyle Rexer terms the “antiquarian avant-garde.” Her adoption of the ambrotype process is not gratuitous but purposeful, conferring a simultaneous sense of past and present to images that, in fact, are meant to invoke both.

“LA Botanical,” besides being a beautiful assembly of images, is the beginning of an archive. Archives are about preservation, and preservation implies loss -- or at least its possibility. This archive is suffused with palpable nostalgia. The streaks and bubbles of collodion on the glass plates invoke a photographic era when the presence of the hand still mattered. The tender reverence Campbell demonstrates for these plants and their significance harks back to a near-mythic past when our connection to the earth was primary.

These are photographs of survivors. As instigators of awareness, perhaps they are tools of survival too.

G727, 727 S. Spring St., (213) 627-9563, through July 14. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

www.gallery727losangeles.com.

Drawings that can’t be tamed

Daniel Zeller’s dazzling drawings at Daniel Weinberg articulate nothing in particular and everything in general. Wildly free-spirited cousins to the topographical map, satellite image and electron micrograph, the drawings evoke skin; land; cells; systems; processes of change, connection and growth; and conditions of dispersal and expansion.

The New York-based Zeller draws in graphite and ink, tracing filament-fine lines that pulsate and reverberate. In several large works, his continuous fields of short repeated strokes yield rippling, puckered textures that feel vaguely lunar. In other pieces, both large and small, he builds complex, layered networks of lacings and tubings, radiating arteries and meandering clefts.

Like the mesmerizing work of James Siena, Zeller’s drawings are intricate and dimensionally ambiguous. The patterns, elastic and organic, repeat and contort across the page, often from edge to edge, extrapolating from crisp black to the saturated hues of exotic plumage or psychedelic visions.

For his titles, Zeller piles on syllables the way he amplifies line, ending up with combinations that sound both authoritative and elusive: “Cryptoblobulastic Fusion,” “Cellular Interdispersion,” “Deregulated Uncontainment,” “Transversive Misinformulation.” Whether they are mapping or inducing spectacular neural phenomena (or both), Zeller’s drawings are hypnotic marvels.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through June 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

First rule here: Don’t over think it

A print by Theresa Pendlebury based on one of her journal pages gives the group show at Mandarin its name: “Alone in the Jungle.” Another provides a ready answer to the show’s incoherence: “You’re Applying Too Much Logic Here.”

Curators Alexis Hall and George Porcari assembled the paintings, sculptures, furniture, photographs and video using Pendlebury’s notebooks from the 1980s as a thematic launch pad. Animism, anthropomorphism and (as the show’s press release puts it) the relationship of contemporary art and domestic furniture to television, computers and film emerged as organizing conceits from Pendlebury’s pages, which combined drawings of lamps and other household objects with phrases snatched from TV dialogue.

The two dozen works, dating from 1970 to the present, form a loose constellation that could take multiple shapes depending on who was joining the dots. Applying as little logic as possible serves the work best, because much of it is slight and doesn’t fare well under the strain of curatorial pressure.

Pae White’s chandelier of cut newspaper is the whimsical highlight, Mason Cooley’s assemblages have peculiar heft, and Mike Kelley, Bas Jan Ader and John Baldessari are represented by modest gestures of visual wit. The potluck show, which also includes work by Jorge Pardo, Bob Weber, Irv Tepper, Kenneth Anger, Katy Stone and Tif Sigfrids, ends up being a who’s who of mostly Los Angeles Conceptualists with a few curious additions -- a minimally gratifying spread of the fresh and warmed over.

Mandarin, 970 N. Broadway, Suite 213, (213) 687-4107, through June 16. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

www.mandaringallery.com

Maps lead the way to exploration

Josh Dorman’s first solo show in L.A. two years ago was pure refreshment and intrigue. Now he’s back at George Billis with more paintings (plus collages) executed on old survey maps, building on what the maps deliver so generously on their own -- opportunities to explore space physically and metaphorically, to wander and wonder.

The yellowed maps, preloaded with visual, verbal and historical import, make rich raw material for Dorman’s musings. They embody systems of representation that he exploits (coloring in Boston’s syncopated city grid to make a vibrant stained-glass-like pattern) and more often subverts. He reinforces the flatness of aerial perspective in areas and defies it in others, blurring together terra firma and terra incognita. The surfaces become playing fields infused with chance, while still bearing the traces of their sober function as navigational tools.

“Red Plateau” is a fabulist’s take on West L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. A map of the Valley’s streets rises from a broad umber mound scattered with architectural ruins. Below, animals parade, Noah’s ark style, into a vivid mechanical underworld of gears and pumps and vices.

The scene oscillates between generation and decomposition. Small arrows point every which way like pickup sticks, and the plateau of the title contains bodily organs within its craggy base.

Dorman trades the maps’ clarity and one-to-one correspondence for a shifting, discontinuous, dreamy reality driven by free association. Printed letters are painted over or amended to spell place names, such as Loversville and Erth, and to mark territory with such phrases as “My Own Vile Eye” and “How Our Unseen Ideals Die.” The punning spirit of William Wiley courses through this work, which is densely imaginative, clever and wise.

George Billis Gallery, 2716 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 838-3685, through Saturday. www.georgebillis.com