Life’s details revealed in stripes

Danica Phelps makes abstract paintings that are utterly rooted in the concrete. Her art incorporates the practical, logistical and banal, and yet manages to be poetic. The work is transformative in the highest sense, for it alters conceptions of categories presumed to be fixed. After some time spent considering her enterprise, those polarities no longer make sense. Abstract and concrete become false distinctions. Same with the practical and the poetic. Phelps’ art arises from her everyday life, and it feeds -- simply, beautifully -- into ours.

“The Brown Stripe Factory,” at Sister, is a quiet but remarkable show. It consists of two drawings, five paintings and a modest installation. Phelps has long painted stripes, but they were typically part of larger drawings that chronicled the intimate and ordinary aspects of her life -- running errands, making love, gathering with friends, caring for her dog. The stripes served as a visual accounting system: Each green stripe represented a dollar earned and each red stripe a dollar spent. Gray was for dollars owed.

When Phelps sold one house and bought another a few years ago, the financial transactions yielded large paintings of hundreds of thousands of stripes in orderly rows. She hired others to help with the work (painting the stripes in gouache and watercolor on paper to be cut into narrow bands and applied to wood panels), and this new, communal aspect of her enterprise has become central to her current work. She aspires, according to a gallery statement, to “create a stripe factory that spins labor into very dense matter.”

She is taking orders for paintings and charging by the stripe, with a 20,000-stripe minimum. Two completed commissions are on view, as well as several sample paintings of different denominations. All employ the same palette of eight colors -- sepia, shades of umber, gold, blood, grayish green.

Stripe paintings have been made for at least a generation or two (think Barnett Newman through Tim Bavington), and a production team is also not unique. Artists traditionally maintained workshops. Andy Warhol resuscitated the practice with his Factory in the 1960s, and contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Olafur Eliasson are not unusual in employing large support staffs.

With Phelps, the handwork of others is especially significant. The stripes carry no substantive spiritual or decorative weight. They are units of measure, units of labor, made in trade for currency of the more common sort. The author of each row of stripes signs his or her name to the paper. The right edge of each painting, where the paper strips wrap around the wood, bears a column of signatures.

The project is a model of organizational transparency. Phelps describes her process and her methods, implements them and displays the results. There is no mystery and thus no mystique.

The plainness, the directness are what seduces -- the importance assigned to the simple making of a mark, the complete ecology of the project. Phelps’ paintings are commodities without pretense, geometric abstractions with a humble human touch.

In “Stripe Factory Drawing,” she depicts women at work, concentrating on their pages or exchanging brushes. Their forms and the setting are described by contour only, in clean, lyrical line. Figures overlap, and multiple moments are portrayed at once.

A second, panoramic drawing (13 inches by 22 feet) chronicles the building of walls, from the delivery of lumber through measuring, cutting, fastening and, finally, painting. Everything about the drawing speaks of continuity -- one movement leads to the next, one stage gives way to another. The labor of building unfolds as the roll of paper unfurls, a primitive film strip documenting a basic act of creation performed by a single individual, presumably the artist.

Phelps’ line is never overworked but always pure and immediate. Similarly, her work is not overly intellectualized, yet its conceptual nature resonates deeply. Process is key. Each painting bears within it the record of its own making, and an installation of handwritten notes, work schedules, coiled strips of painted stripes, color charts and templates further fleshes out the process. Everything matters, and all of it is integrated -- the art and the life, the process and the product, the hand and the soul underlying all that the hand creates.

Sister, 437 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through March 22. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.sisterla.com.

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Fun with the grotesque

Fans of James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889” at the Getty should check out Rob Thom’s newest work at China Art Objects. The two largest paintings, especially, show the L.A. painter exercising the same gifts of allying the portentous, grotesque and comical.

In “Big Sorry,” Thom crowds a cast of oddballs into a space marked only by a sky of mottled, dripping blues. There’s a dowdy, droopy-eyed woman, a bearded holy man in a robe, a sausage-nosed chap in a bowler hat, a fellow in suspenders with an absurdly long neck, one character with a huge cat’s head and another resembling Humpty Dumpty. Some appear to hang like puppets. The whole reads as a cross between a fable and an editorial and is painted in jewel tones of thinned acrylic, almost like watercolor.

“Legionnaires” is a more formal group portrait featuring an equally bizarre, vaguely Victorian assembly posing in rows before a curtain-like backdrop. Slightly planar, like paper dolls, the figures are accompanied by two reptilian mascots and a pair of limp puppets. A crimson devil, a pompous king, a jolly clown, a skeleton -- all present themselves with earnest awkwardness as humanity’s far-flung, far-fetched representatives.

With the exception of one clumsy, collaged canvas (“Deez Nutz”), Thom’s new work feels tighter than ever and more stylistically coherent. Narrative plays a smaller role, and the surreal is mustered with more limited and yet more convincing means, simply through the presence of a motley crew mingling on a shallow stage. Slightly creepy, but captivating and strangely beautiful.

China Art Objects Galleries, 933 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 613-0384, through March 22. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.china artobjects.com.

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Not your usual kid pictures

“The Age of Innocence” at DNJ groups the work of four lesser-known photographers who address the vexed condition of childhood. The show holds some nice surprises, particularly in the work of Pamela Mayers-Schoenberg and Holly Andres.

The L.A.-based Mayers-Schoenberg is represented by a 1992 series of black-and-white images of a group of teenage boys in St. Louis. More sober than Helen Levitt’s but more lighthearted than William Klein’s, the pictures echo both artists and adhere to the street photographer’s ethos of authenticity and emotional truth.

One kid stands against a wall captioned by graffiti emphatically declaiming “NO.” Two boys loiter around an automotive carcass near the bank of a river. Mayers-Schoenberg’s photographs serve as honest character sketches of young people negotiating a balance between vulnerability and toughness.

Andres, from Portland, Ore., presents large color tableaux based on childhood memories as filtered through the influence of the staged photography of Gregory Crewdson, among others. She is a filmmaker too, and the pictures read as carefully orchestrated stills, set pieces hinting at deeper dramas.

The most affecting images feature girls rehearsing prescribed notions of womanhood. One girl studies a color-coordinated array of paper-doll-like cutouts, another sets a table with a classic meal of molded jello and canned corn. The girls aspire toward grace but seem slightly melancholy, as if visibly burdened by the constraints of societal expectation.

Brian Sorg and Sarah Bierman, both from Chicago, round out the show. Sorg chronicles, albeit thinly, the life of a teenage skater, and Bierman records the fantasy-tinged play of young girls. One of Bierman’s subjects rides a bike in the basement in her underwear; another tosses handfuls of freshly cut grass. The pictures are tender but lack any real friction, the condition that most infuses and defines the so-called age of innocence.

DNJ Gallery, 154 1/2 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 931-1311, through March 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.dnj gallery.net.

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Salvaged street scenes

In her raw, ravishing installation at New Image Art, the artist who goes by the name Swoon thrusts us into the divide between gritty reality and elaborate fantasy. Both realms are beautiful, rich and seductive under her extraordinary touch, and each bears fundamental aspects of the other: Within the roughness lies ample tenderness, and within the fantasy a darkness and edge.

Swoon has been pasting prints and paper cutouts on the streets of New York for nearly a decade. In her first solo show in L.A., she brings the energy and vitality of the city indoors. Along one long wall, she leans old doors and assorted other discarded panels, a bicycle and a gate cut out of cardboard. Among the castoffs are images printed onto thin paper and wedded to the walls -- a portrait of a woman and her children; another of a man with a bicycle lock slung over one shoulder whose body transforms into an urban landscape of its own; a garbage truck; a scenario of small silhouetted figures on a branch overhanging an ornate, dilapidated dome.

The wall on the opposite side of the gallery is painted a deep, delicious red and covered with white stenciled patterns, ornamental paper cutouts and multiple images of a woman, her upper half an alluring siren, her lower half a spectral, skeletal mermaid. A full-size canoe juts out from one corner, as if to navigate the threshold between these poignant, robust realms.

Swoon’s work is about salvage on several levels. She reinvigorates trashed materials and affirms the dignity of the overlooked, humble and transient. She has a keen sense of human form and gesture and a gorgeous command of the block print medium. Her resourcefulness with materials signals a kind of elasticity of mind, an equal embrace of the mythic and ordinary, a recognition of both as magnificent, relevant and necessary.

New Image Art, 7908 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 654-2192, through April 19. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.newimageart gallery.com.