AROUND THE GALLERIES

New York-based artist Peter Macapia comes to art making with weighty credentials, a vision that spans multiple fields -- including visual art, design, architecture, urban planning, geometry, physics and mathematics -- and a theoretical vocabulary that’s likely to challenge even the most determined layman.

His CV, indeed, is a little dizzying. He has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a master’s in history from Harvard and a PhD in theory and criticism from Columbia. (His advisor was critical heavyweight Rosalind Krauss.) Less then 10 years out of graduate school, he is the founder and director of LabDORA, an experimental design studio concerned, according to one bio, “with design and engineering in relation to the geometry of material organization.” He’s taught at Columbia, Pratt and Sci Arc, and written and lectured on such topics as “turbulence,” “pressure,” “the prehistory of computation,” “hybrid architecture,” “computational matter” and the “material life of geometry.”

“Skullcracker,” his first solo show with Angstrom Gallery, builds on this research in ways that are, frankly, a little beyond this layman’s grasp. Each of the show’s six cut-paper sculptures involves a shape or series of shapes that is developed by way of some kind of algorithm -- that much is clear -- so as to reflect some concept of turbulence.

The gallery’s news release makes a respectable effort to elucidate, explaining that the artist “develops these works using the force of a rotating volume along with algorithms for particle physics and high surface tension,” exploring the “nature of generation, transformation, and self-consumption in which the stability of form is constantly undermined by minute perturbations of matter.” But the technical details remain obscure, better suited to the pages of an academic architectural journal, perhaps, than the tactile environment of a gallery.

What’s surprising, however, is how little this obscurity matters in light of the work’s enchanting physical presence. Macapia may be a mathematical thinker, but he has an exquisite sense of aesthetics, manifest in every aspect of this stirring installation, from the spatial placement of the works to the minute details of line and texture.

The largest piece, “Swarm,” consists of several hundred cut-paper objects, each about the size of a sparrow, suspended from the ceiling by strands of clear monofilament to form a flock-like wave across the length of the gallery. Made from black and white museum board, laser-cut into delicate, lace-like patterns, then molded into crumpled shapes, each piece is unique. They build in some way (again: something to do with an algorithm) on a previous form, so that the character of the shapes shifts subtly from one end of the room to the other.

Interspersed with “Swarm” are several individual pieces, each about 2 feet long, cast in a similar range of shapes. Some are encased in wall-mounted frames; the others are suspended in clear Plexiglas boxes that hang from the ceiling. Some have a spindly, botanical look, like bushy branches of pine needles; others suggest the frail, sun-baked skeletons of animals.

The objects are utterly absorbing: weightless yet structural, slight as a tissue yet exceedingly intricate, with all the spontaneous variety and complexity of snowflakes. Though clearly the product of a single, generative system, each has its own elegant integrity. There isn’t one that couldn’t be removed from the “flock,” enlarged to any scale, and left to function as a sculpture in its own right. In fact, Macapia is in the midst of just such a process, developing one of “Swarm’s” many fragments -- a capsule-shaped form near the center -- into a pavilion at the New York performance biennial Performa 09.

As should be the case far more often than it is in contemporary art, the intelligence of Macapia’s methods enriches the material outcome silently, almost humbly, rather than standing apart and self-consciously demonstrating its prowess. It recalls the biological intelligence of a species or an ecosystem that enriches one’s perception of its existence without needing to be precisely understood.

The bird analogy holds: At whatever level one grasps the dynamics of a flock of sparrows in motion, from visual patterns of dots in the sky to a complex interplay of signals and behaviors, one can’t help but be struck with a kind of awed delight in its presence.

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Angstrom Gallery, 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 204-3334, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .angstromgallery.com

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Sculpture gives shape to videos

“Video Journeys,” at Sister Gallery at Cottage Home, comes to the perennially problematic issue of video art installation from an appealingly common-sense angle, putting 10 video works in the hands of as many sculptors, with the only instruction being to provide some sort of presentation.

The results are diverse and consistently intriguing, if generally impractical as exhibition design. If the first rule of good curating is to avoid competing with or detracting from the work you’re presenting, most of these endeavors fall well short. But this is curating via collaboration, and the entanglement of sensibilities proves far more interesting, in the end, than the integrity of the video in its own right.

Several of the pairings are symbiotic enough to give the impression of having been conceived as a single work. Takeshi Murata’s colorful, largely abstract video “Monster Movie” plays atop a 9-foot Plexiglas tower by Katie Grinnan that is emblazoned with digitally collaged inkjet prints of Las Vegas architecture. Cal Crawford’s “second-rate bitterness,” which involves a tensely pulsating black-and-white bull’s-eye pattern, plays on a boxy, black monitor that Justin Beal has set on a pedestal and snugly wrapped in clear plastic, augmenting its taut, slightly crazed intensity.

In others, the correlation is looser but cooperative.

The grubby carpet-and-linoleum shell that Ry Rocklen has concocted for Paul Slocum’s video “Kurt” echoes the gritty spirit of the video’s rock star namesake, much as Katherine Andrews’ goofy paw print flags and screens extend the weird hamminess of Michele O’Marah’s “White Diamonds/Agent Orange,” a two-channel piece pairing reenactments of Vietnam-era battle scenes with that of a 1970 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton interview.

The most clever, perhaps, is the most seemingly straightforward: Eric Wesley’s presentation of Paul Pfeiffer’s unsettlingly fervent “Sex Machine” on an ordinary burned DVD in a clear plastic jewel case, with the title handwritten across the disc and “For Viewing Purposes Only” stamped across the image when played. The disc is offered to visitors for free at the front desk and points to a fact often elided in a fine art context: Video remains, for the most part, a private, domestic medium that found its fullest expression, at least economically, as a conduit for porn.

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Sister at Cottage Home, 410 Cottage Home St., L.A., (323) 276-1205, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sisterla.com

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Ah, but what does it all mean?

Keith Tyson’s first solo show in Los Angeles, at Blum and Poe, is a tidy sampling of the Turner Prize-winning British artist’s recent output. It contains a handful of examples from each of three ongoing series: the “Nature Paintings” (large canvases covered in glossy swirls of poured pigment); the “Operator Paintings” (diagrammatic works combining collage-like layers of fragmented imagery and convoluted mathematical equations); and the “Studio Wall Drawings” (an assorted collection of pictorial ruminations and puns).

Tyson’s formal methods, when parsed out individually, are not terribly original. David Salle is a particularly visible and rather peculiar influence on the figurative works, as are a striking number of Californians, including Bruce Connor, John Baldessari, Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw. The “Nature Paintings,” though visually striking, play out a drama so basic to painting -- fascination with the material and chemical processes of various pigments -- that it can hardly even be called a trope, much less a revelatory insight.

From somewhere beneath this mimicry, however, a compelling quality of philosophic interrogation emerges. An uncomfortable sense of pictorial, thematic and linguistic confusion reflects a kind of existential unease.

In the “Operator Paintings,” Tyson seizes mathematics as an ostensibly reliable system of signification -- a stable framework through which to view the universe. But he litters his equations with incongruous words and phrases (“chandeliers,” “roller skating,” “girls I have adored from a distance”), rendering them nonsensical and thus ultimately useless.

The absurdity of these juxtapositions evokes a poignant sense of failure, illuminating the potential futility of all knowledge construction, despite the basic human longing for meaning and coherence.

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Blum and Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 836-2062, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blum andpoe.com

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Fantasy visions with little vision

Jeana Sohn’s third solo show with Taylor de Cordoba follows a generally pleasing but increasingly well-worn model: daintily executed paintings of silent, nymph-like female figures adrift in a world of flora and fauna, rendered in a folklorish manner with mythical undertones.

Sohn presents her girls among birds, insects, flowers, peacock feathers and tree branches, often wound in long, umbilical-like cords, against flat, solid backgrounds. The palette is mild and muted; the brushwork, precise. In a noteworthy but still rather timid departure, she also includes a sculptural element: a stiff, papier-mache figure of a girl, with a rope pinned in a long, winding line to the wall behind.

The connection forged in this and similar work between girls and animals is an interesting one, replete as it often is with tenderness and violence. Rubio Osorio, Cathy Akers, Mel Kandel and Carrie Yury all come to mind in this vein, as does the taxidermy work of Carlee Fernandez.

Sohn’s version, however, is particularly polite, emphasizing the decorative aspect of the fantasy while leaving the dark side largely unexplored, and offering little of substance to chew on.

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Taylor de Cordoba, 2660 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-9156, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .taylordecordoba.com

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