Her altered states of being

Kim Rugg is a highly disciplined wizard with an Exacto knife. She’s a subversive with constructive tendencies -- or perhaps a rehabilitator with a critical streak. She’s a vandal of the highest order, a tamperer, an interventionist. Her work has a quiet danger about it that is thoroughly engrossing.

Last year, the London-based Rugg made a standout appearance in the group show “Ultrasonic International” at Mark Moore. Her first solo show now fills the gallery’s central space.

Another highlight from the 2006 show, Kenichi Yokono, makes his own impressive debut in the gallery’s Project Room.

Rugg’s work is a remarkable fusion of high-minded conceptual exercise and down-to-earth handwork. At her most searing, she uses the newspaper’s front page as raw material and literally dissolves its integrity. With meticulous precision, she excises each printed letter and assigns it a new place. Instead of organizing the tools of verbal communication according to meaning, Rugg organizes them alphabetically or according to an unknown code. She substitutes one sort of order for another, rendering them all suddenly fluid and suspect.

A front page of the Sun (newly dubbed by Rugg “EHN STU”) bears a headline that begins: “AAAaaadeeefghhikLlMmnnn.” In the articles too, capitals precede lowercase letters, letters precede numbers, and numbers are followed by punctuation marks and finally by blank spaces. In the course of disrupting the delivery of information, Rugg has also altered the normally continuous newsprint surface. Now the page is not just a physically neutral vehicle but an object with slightly irregular texture, its tiny units accreting into a legible whole in the manner of a fine mosaic or precise stitchery.

In “Don’t Mention the War,” a 26-page spread from the Guardian, all references to Iraq and anything else newsworthy have been obfuscated by the new alphabetical regime. The lead story consists of a solid string of the letter A. The crossword puzzle has fallen into line, subjected to a new discipline calling for numbered squares to be grouped together, followed by blanks, then solids.

Photographs as well have been sliced and diced. In other works, Rugg cuts images and advertisements into small squares and rearranges them, turning clear representations into pixelated blurs. In “Don’t Mention the War,” the fragments of the images are rectangular, like minute bricks walling off access to the real picture, the real story. The images grow progressively darker toward the end of the spread, and the final piece in the series is a full-page fade to black. The war has not been mentioned. All sorts of truths lurk within the pages, but Rugg has exercised the ultimate in editorial control, shaping the stories and their imagery to suit her aesthetic project and its implicit social critique.

Her work brings to mind the alphabetic exploits of Bay Area artist Tauba Auerbach, especially Auerbach’s powerful, austere alphabetized Bible. Rugg operates in the spirit of Oulipo, the loose-knit group of French writers and mathematicians who impose constraints as a means of generating and inspiring new work. Rugg’s “Disappearance,” a front page of the Financial Times with all of its E’s missing, triggers memories of political purges while paying homage to the famous E-less novel of 1969 by Oulipian Georges Perec.

In another set of works, Rugg undermines the iconic legitimacy of the postage stamp, and in several other pieces she applies her craft to comic books.

Yokono’s dazzling work merges the playful and the dire, the upbeat graphic punch of cartoons with dark Expressionist urgency.

Based in Kanazawa, Japan, Yokono carves woodblocks as if for printing, painting the raised surfaces cherry red and the rest a crisp white. Raw, vibrant and irreverent, the works have one foot in the pop-dominated present and the other in the tradition-bound past.

Several of the sculptural paintings are in the shape of skateboards, and the spectacular centerpiece of the show, “Fling Mac,” takes the form of a folded screen. The trademark golden arches blast upward within this four-panel landscape, a radioactive wonderland of ebullience and postapocalyptic toxicity.

Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Nov. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.markmooregallery.com

-- Conscious understatement

The inaugural show at Commissary Arts, a new venue dedicated to emerging and underrecognized L.A. artists, features the photographs of Eric Tucker and Rae Scarton.

The dozen color pictures (from a series of about 40) portray Inland Empire locales with the trained neutrality first made popular by the so-called New Topographics artists of the early ‘70s: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke.

For Tucker and Scarton (as for their predecessors), the dispassionate stance signals not apathy or arbitrariness but conscious understatement. Their photographs of sallow banquet halls and housing developments that abut landfills are thick with intention and threaded with irony. They seem generated by dismay as well as by an abiding wonder at how ugly any given landscape can become when made to support the cheap fulfillment of generic dreams.

These are landscapes of the fake, hasty and expedient. In their pictures of painted palm trees embellishing a water tank, and plastic-wrapped drapery valances hovering like false eyelashes atop mobile home windows, Tucker and Scarton home in on desperate ambitions, blandness striving for charm, the plain dressed up to pass for special.

Like vacant stage sets, these landscapes of sand and stucco look bereft, sapped of their lifeblood. All but one. A picture made in Mira Loma shows a baseball park complete with grassy outfield and cheering fans, but what appear to be packed stands are, on closer inspection, actually painted props in a scaled-down, faux big-league fantasy.

Commissary Arts, 68 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 990-9914, through Nov. 18. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.commissaryarts.com

-- An experience that’s twice as nice

The oeuvre of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who died in 2002 at age 100, just keeps delivering. At the Rose Gallery, a selection of the Mexican photographer’s most profound and well-known images (“The Good Reputation Sleeping,” “The Crouched Ones,” “Optical Parable” and more) is paired with an assortment of unfamiliar pictures culled from his archive toward the end of his life.

The photographs date from c.1920 through the ‘80s, but most were made around the time of his richest work, in the ‘30s, and printed later under the artist’s supervision. The selection is more affirming of Bravo’s gifts than revelatory of any unknown dimensions. Like the broad body of known work, it can be navigated in radically different ways: through the spectrum of Mexican politics and culture (the show opens with an elegant study of Tamayo’s hands); modernist formalism (impeccable images of objects, from hats to peanuts, repeated in striking patterns); and a surreally tinged intrigue with the body, its surrogates, its parts in isolation, wrapped, partly revealed.

An exquisite subset of Bravo’s work focuses on women’s hair. The breathtaking classic, “Portrait of the Eternal,” is complemented here by an odd and wonderful image of a glossy, disembodied tress on patterned tile, and another of a thick, twisting braid whose striations rhyme with the patterned fencing and ridged corduroy garments that fill the rest of the frame.

Like the proverbial river of Heraclitus, Bravo’s fertile, dynamic work can’t be experienced the same way twice.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosegallery.net

-- Only momentarily spectacular

Susan Silton’s new photographic prints at Solway Jones are tightly calculated and slickly executed. They can be parsed and justified, the scaffolding of their rationale eloquently explained, but the work emits little more than chilly superficiality.

Silton layers vibrantly colored vertical stripes over film stills in each of the 6-by-5-foot digital montages.

The cinematic snippets, taken from “apocalypse” films of the 1950s and ‘60s, are vaguely serious, showing couples in sober embrace, a mother and her children anxiously gazing into the distance.

The overlying stripes, about 3/4 “ wide, are chromatically lush. Intense bands of lime, brick, sapphire, mauve, pumpkin, lipstick and hundreds more colors align crisply from edge to edge with a kind of severe beauty. Individual stripes often shift in intensity and hue from top to bottom. One rises from palest lilac up through lavender to violet and finally deep navy.

A slight discord between the frozen quality of the stills and the inherent motion of the stripes yields a bit of tension, but it doesn’t help animate the work.

Silton, who lives in L.A. and is concurrently sheathing the Pasadena Museum of California Art in striped tenting (through Jan. 6), attempts in her recent work to capitalize on the cultural history of the stripe, its divergent uses as nationalist symbol, decorative element and stigmatizing uniform.

Multiple layers, however, whether of imagery or signification, don’t automatically imbue a work with depth. These prints assert their momentary spectacle and are gone from both eye and mind.

Solway Jones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-7354, through Nov. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.solwayjonesgallery.com