Everyday life amid catastrophe

For at least a decade, Karin Apollonia Muller has been making savvy photographs that consider the disquieting contradictions of ordinary experience, a project for which Southern California has been her muse. Muller divides her time between Los Angeles and Germany, where she was born (in Heidelberg) in 1963. Perhaps it takes an outsider to see a place with fresh eyes, because she understands the perplexing city in ways that deeply resonate.

Her seven recent large-scale photographs at the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery are as fine as any she’s made. One reason is that she begins with an array of events -- wildfires, mudslides, freeway catastrophes and such --that are L.A. cliches and that also make the city the nation’s reigning symbol of imminent apocalypse. (Had there been a recent earthquake, it no doubt would have figured in her pictures.) But the resulting work is less journalistic or documentary than cinematic, even though she doesn’t stage the scenes.

At the bottom of a large, sun-bleached panorama of devastating landslides in Laguna’s hills, where many expensive and often ugly houses lie crumpled or teeter on the brink, a security fence rings the swimming pool of a modest but intact home. As the land indiscriminately swallows up civilization all around, the terra might not be as firma as we casually presume, but at least the children are protected from the harrowing specter of accidental drowning.

Visible threat is always more pressing than something we can’t see, even if the invisible might be more hazardous. And that’s just one detail from a photograph jampacked with incident. (It’s 4 feet high and 5 feet wide.) Muller’s best work asserts the power of the visual, teasing out ambiguous narratives that transcend localities and encompass larger truths.

Frequently she employs filters that cause the distinctive Southern California light to blanch the scene; what appears ordinary is at once strange and unsettling. The explicit, fast-paced drama of catastrophic events is leeched away in these nonmoving pictures, creating a visual space for reflection.

A magnificent pair of images show multicolored smoke billowing above Griffith Park, giving Tiepolo’s glorious Venetian skies a run for their money. Weirdly, though, a tiny rescue helicopter glimpsed amid the conflagration’s prismatic heavenly residue seems as charmingly whimsical as a dragonfly on a still life, warning of the perils of human vanity.

As you look at another scene -- of cleanup after a vehicle fire adjacent to a downtown Hollywood Freeway onramp -- several moments may pass before you notice a puzzling detail about the truck that burned, snarling traffic. Tall buildings line the background in America’s densest urban enclave, but the calamitous truck was hauling hay.

The show’s most captivating photograph records a routine auto accident at the downtown intersection of Broadway and Aliso Street. Behind it, the Hall of Justice dominates the scene in all its 1926 Beaux Arts glory. How the little car tipped over the big car is anybody’s guess, but life around the collision continues without skipping a beat.

Muller’s composition, however, pulls the rug out from under such complacency. An adjacent sunken freeway runs along the photograph’s bottom edge, transforming the conventional streetscape into a thin veneer covering up a tough, brutal and hollow core. Given the nation’s current social and political landscape, it is hard not to see Muller’s trenchant recent photographs of apocalyptic mayhem as more than a simple record of life in L.A.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 525-1755, through June 23. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.karyn lovegrovegallery.com

Challenging perceptions

Hirsch Perlman’s silk-screened drawings of cats lounging, stretching and warily observing appear to require 3-D glasses to be properly seen. Printed slightly off-register, in red and green on big white sheets, the line drawings exhibit a knotted, coiled energy.

With no funky cardboard glasses at hand, however, the out-of-whack images also seem slightly cracked. You’re left with the discomfiting feeling that you’re not actually seeing kitty. And obviously that’s correct. In his third solo show at the Blum & Poe Gallery, Perlman pokes his finger in the eye of smug assertions, of certain knowledge.

The cat prints deftly derive from a famous 1935 explanation of quantum mechanics, known as “Schrodinger’s cat.” Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger proved that the feline was simultaneously dead and alive; the paradox arose from a conflict between conceptual knowledge and visual perception. Think of Baghdad, New Orleans or even a personal catastrophe and Perlman’s discordant work becomes weirdly sobering.

The cat prints are interspersed among hazy black-and-white close-up photographs of crumbling sandcastles at the beach, with the sea, horizon and sky unfurled in the blurred gray distance. Long exposures have left strange auras of reflected sunlight sparkling around the photos’ margins, enhancing the already alien appearance of stills reminiscent of those taken from a NASA landing craft. Are we at Zuma, or on Mars?

An installation in a separate gallery provocatively ties the loose pictorial strands together. A crude wooden table holds a laser printer, a binding machine, reams of paper and stacks of faithful homemade copies of the U.S. Army’s 241-page counterinsurgency manual, rewritten last year for the first time since the 1980s wars in Central America. Chapter 4, “Designing Counterinsurgency Operations,” begins with Napoleon’s botched invasion of Spain, which doomed France’s empire by underestimating Spanish resistance.

Perlman’s tidy installation is also slightly feverish, like something from a college basement or Ted Kaczynski’s cabin. The artist is selling the bound manual for a nominal fee, with proceeds to be donated to organizations working to dismantle the electoral college and secure rights for Guantanamo prisoners. Counterinsurgency -- a struggle against subversion -- assumes a smartly nuanced meaning.

In this context, the voice of Donald H. Rumsfeld echoes in receding memory: “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say ... “ Suddenly Schrodinger’s cat snaps into register.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, through June 23. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.blumandpoe.com

Considering the end of the world

The small project room at Roberts & Tilton is painted black, but a spot of light flickers at the rear wall. There, a boxy black shelf cradles a cellphone.

Open, the elegant slim-line model plays a brief loop on its media screen, showing Saddam Hussein being hanged. The searing work is a high-tech reliquary housing splinters of what looks like a horrific modern martyrdom. Cincinnati-based artist Jimmy Baker titles his L.A. gallery debut “Rapture,” and it oscillates between two primary meanings of that word: engulfing emotion and what some Christian sects believe are events announcing the end of the world.

In the main room, a Rodin-like “Gates of Hell” is made from two doors of a black Chevy Suburban, each mounted on a stand. One is riddled with seven bullet holes going into the interior, the other with a pair of bullet holes leading out. The gateway opens onto a row of photographs showing wintry rural landscapes populated by rifle-toting men wearing ski masks.

Other photographs show twisted satellite pictures of the North and South poles -- the ends of the Earth gone awry. A nearby iPod audio-triptych plays recordings of musical mayhem.

Four dark paintings of young men are paired with four creamy portraits of young women, earphones isolating the girls in acoustical space and dramatic lighting virtually irradiating the boys. Glass covers the paintings. Baker has etched some panels into filters for perceiving disaffected youth, creating patterned auras and Latin tattoos.

Whether the sitters in these compelling portraits are benign is anybody’s guess, but ambiguity is central to their interest. Baker has a knack for creating a disorienting theatrical environment, and the thrum of anxiety is germane. A viewer is thrust into the uncomfortable position of looking for trouble -- which leads inevitably back to the gruesome reliquary chamber.

Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through June 23. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.robertsandtilton.com

There’s power in the abstract

For his first L.A. solo show in 16 years, New York-based artist Bill Komoski presents a terrific group of large, ethereal abstract paintings at the Angstrom Gallery in which a fluid intimation of landscape seamlessly merges with suggestions of microchips and circuit boards. Linear waves of pale red, blue, yellow and beige bend and ripple, creating a kind of topographic map, while black and white streaks zip through ambiguous space.

Speaking of space, it’s both flat and diaphanous, hugging the canvas in sensuous swipes of transparent acrylic pigment and drifting into an amorphous infinity. Drawing is rendered as a silvery trace, at once the residue of physical action and a memory of artistic thought.

Visually and structurally, Komoski likens painting to the semiconductor -- a material that simultaneously conducts and resists the flow of power. Nearly 8 feet high and more than 6 feet wide, the paintings create a scale just large enough.

In these quietly gorgeous works, the softly illuminated field is bigger than we are but not so big as to overwhelm us.

Angstrom Gallery, 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 204-3334, through June 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.angstromgallery.com