Sending clear and subversive messages

Eric Beltz writes like a schoolteacher and swears like a dockworker. He draws with extraordinary control and sends his mind wandering with abandon. His first solo show in L.A., at Acuna-Hansen, is a fascinating display of colliding temperaments, amazing skill, irreverent humor and thoughtful cultural scrutiny.

Beltz calls what he does “high definition drawing.” Working in graphite on smooth Bristol paper, he articulates every leaf and log in his pictures with the kind of illustrational clarity that typically serves an equally clear message. Beltz, though, is an equal opportunity subversive, and he uses the tools of precise description to relay the uncertain, ambiguous, projected and imagined.

He takes aim mainly at Americana and the foundational myths of our country. One drawing, titled with a curse directed at a tree, pictures George Washington seated on a chunk of the sawed-down tree, an allusion to the legendary felled cherry. With his right hand, Washington appears to bless a decapitated owl on the tree’s stump, and toward his other side a snake coils under the words “Never Surrender.”

Beltz annotates the image with phrases in clean cursive -- “How long a’dying the world is; How obstinately determined to live on,” among others -- and stately Gothic script. All feed into a symbolically dense tableau about divine right, the struggle to survive and the tension between so-called civilization and nature. Like all of Beltz’s imagery, the scene has a pristine stillness, but that harmony is shot through with anger and aggression.

Throughout his work, Beltz tends to separate heads from bodies, leaving blank space where necks would be. The disconnection seems gratuitous at first, but nothing here is unintentional or arbitrary. In the image of Washington, as in others, the gap captures the idea that thought can operate independent of action, that sense often separates itself from might -- a theme that threads all too persistently through American history. Driving the notion home even more graphically, Beltz draws the “head” of the fallen tree as a tight spherical mass of leafless branches, a wondrous cranial network with severed stem.

In other drawings from a series called “American Visions,” Beltz has Thomas Jefferson issuing a barbed farewell to his political successors and Benjamin Franklin stoking a fire labeled the “Breath of Satan” while bats and a wild turkey flutter overhead. In another image, three colonial soldiers with bony skulls ingest a hallucinogenic weed while the Jamestown fort burns in the background.

Beltz’s work buzzes with anachronisms and fruitful contradictions. He draws plants with the accuracy of a botanist and the symbolic intent of a religious painter from a much earlier era. The snippets of text that factor into every image oscillate between contemporary curses and biblical condemnations, moralistic aphorisms and stark bursts of hostility, all written in lettering either quaintly polite or authoritative. If fonts could be accused of abuse of power, Beltz would likely identify himself as a willing accomplice.

His historical riffs are smart in all senses of the word -- intelligent, cheeky, stinging. The work feels visually reverential but seethes with informed despair. Each vignette swarms with urges and drives (self-righteousness, escape, violence, contempt) that define America as cannily as Beltz’s primer-like simplicity of presentation. “HISTROY!” is the title the artist gives his show: a battle cry collapsing the distance between “history” and “destroy”?

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., L.A., (323) 441-1624, through Nov. 24. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.ahgallery.com

A brief, intriguing introduction

The two sculptural installations and five drawings in Ree Morton’s show at Overduin and Kite aren’t enough to fully introduce the late artist, but they do offer a mildly intriguing peek at her sensibility and a sampling of her sense of touch.

The pieces date from the middle of Morton’s truncated career: She earned her MFA in 1970 and was killed in a car accident in 1977.

In an interview from 1974, about the time these works were made, Morton likened her process of manipulating and assembling found objects to a kind of drawing. Chance comes into play and, as with much in the assemblage tradition, an overt engagement with time.

“See-Saw” is a sculptural sketch touching on both ritual and play. The central plank that normally serves as a seat is stained a rusty red and balances on a cut log. Backrests, one facing up and the other down, are painted with pictographic diagrams, and the whole is encircled by small, glitter-coated wooden blocks, like the markers of a sundial.

In the other installation, a panel of hemmed but unstretched canvas hangs on the wall, buttressed by three chunks of lumber.

The wood struts seem to extend from slender, stem-like forms painted on the canvas in solid and broken lines against a ground dappled with aqueous jade dots.

In this untitled work, Morton’s sense of play moves to the plane of perception, as the forms within the piece read alternately as trails and trees, the perspective shifts from aerial to frontal, and the minimalism of the wood butts up against the lyrical, organic forms on canvas.

Overduin and Kite, 6693 Sunset Blvd., L.A., (323) 464-3600, through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .overduinandkite.com

Energy charges landscapes

Information generally depends on the stable building blocks of detail, but in Erica Lee Wheelock’s fantastic drawings at Sam Lee, the relationship of part to whole is never consummated. Each drawing abounds in particulars of pattern, shape and design yet remains seductively elusive overall.

In her first solo show, this San Francisco-based artist draws landscapes that suggest a pervasive, viral energy more than a sense of place.

Structures, roads and crop circles, anchors of familiarity and convention, morph into finely inked earthwork spirals and amoeba-like clusters, veins, bursts and swells. The ridges and crevices of a mountainside occupy the dense center of “Slime in the Ice Machine,” but beyond, a switchback path looks oddly intestinal, and the contours of the land in one spot resemble a giant turnip or beet.

Wheelock’s stream of consciousness doesn’t run clear. Her images are whimsical but hint at the toxic, and she chafes openly at pollution and land mismanagement. “Somebody Oughta Smack FEMA,” she writes at the bottom of one drawing; she titles another scarily wondrous ‘scape “Superfund,” in reference to the effort to repair environmental sites damaged by chemical waste. The title of another drawing, “One Inviting Disaster,” would serve well as the title overall.

Through tightly crosshatched, striated, squiggled lines, nearly all in black, Wheelock defines a topography of growth and change, deviation and fancy. Her drawings look like refined versions of doodles that overtake the margins of school notebooks during lectures.

Steeped in intelligence, fear and awe, Wheelock’s engrossing images show the land in fabulous disorder, cursed and simultaneously set free.

Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St. No. 190, L.A., (323) 227-0275, through Dec. 8. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.samleegallery.com

Poignant works lost amid clutter

Less would have been more in the case of Elsa Mora’s work at Couturier. The Cuban-born, L.A.-based artist’s show is packed with an uneven selection of sculptures, photographs, assemblages and paintings to the point where the poetic is nearly drowned out by the trite, and the poignant suffers next to the sentimental. A tighter selection would have presented an artist gifted at understatement and at probing various aspects of containment and concealment.

The strongest works in the show are shallow, wall-mounted boxes filled, display-case-style, with families of objects. An assortment of scissors and related forms in porcelain strays suggestively from the functional to the metaphoric. Medicinal, organic and sexual are all referenced in blades that reveal wounds of their own and come not always to a point but sometimes to knotted or soft ruffled ends. The forms are aligned like specimens, evidence of processes and associations only obliquely acknowledged.

Another series engaging this type of contrived taxonomy centers around the physiological. Each shadow box contains a human figure of some sort (several are stuffed in cloth) and assorted other natural and found objects: small bundles of printed matter, sculpted bits of shell and bone. Nature here is re-imagined through personal history and the freely associative work of the hand.

Mora pays tribute to women of note in an earnest but hokey installation that places their portraits on photo transparencies of butterflies pinned to the wall in a giant spiral. Similarly, she honors dozens of “disappeared” Latin American women by setting their photographs in the centers of blossoms that sprout from a sculpted dress. Such symbolic overkill is countered again and again, however, by quietly powerful works such as the “Nameless Things” series, paintings on paper musing on the beauty of pregnancy.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 933-5557, through Dec. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .couturiergallery.com