AROUND THE GALLERIES

A broad thematic show spiked with quiet thrills is now at Arena 1 Gallery, bearing the vexing name “Illiterature.” The title cleverly suggests an intellectual U-turn, a kind of internal canceling out. But the word also carries the whiff of illiteracy and its connotations of ignorance, error and blunder. The show is far smarter than that. Steeped in intelligence of all kinds -- textual and textural, emotional, visceral, formal, cultural -- it presents work by 21 artists in a range of media. All engage with language, verbal coding and notation.

Like the absorbing group show on mapping (“Zoom +/-”) held here in 2007, “Illiterature” applies a light touch to fertile terrain. Consultant and curator Mark Carter has selected an international roster of artists at various career stages. The art speaks for itself, and much of it is highly eloquent.

Each of Michael Joaquin Grey’s ink drawings mines a specific moment, identified by date and time. Acts of reflection and meditation, they fuse scientific schema with a cryptic script, Surrealist automatic writing in private shorthand. The swirls, dashes, helixes and letter-like characters are laid down with fluidity and urgency.

Yael Kanarek creates ebullient visual poetry out of the single word “lemon” spelled in 32 languages, repeated, fanned out, gridded, curled and meandering. Her laser-cut black rubber wall work brings to mind the pieces of a craft kit gone renegade. The words explode in a seemingly spontaneous free-form web -- Babel as beautiful filigree.

Masako Takahashi embroiders human hair onto panels of antique silk in text-like rows of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. The patterns evoke ancient, perhaps holy script, but are based on the Fibonacci sequence, numerical keys to an underlying natural order. Mind and body converge in these exquisitely delicate testaments.

Word and image overlap and merge throughout the show, doubling or masquerading as one another. Communication is subverted more than encouraged (that intellectual U-turn in action) through erasure, fragmentation or an excessive density of symbols. Ed Ruscha’s print of blank street signs makes a canny icon out of the intersection of place and placelessness. Mike Patten’s inkjet prints from PalmPilot drawings are slight but poignant declarations (“I have to treat myself better,” “I think about you all the time”) that have been partially erased, as if retracted out of insecurity.

Apollinaire’s calligrams are invoked in places, as are the chance-derived scores of John Cage, the conceptual austerity of Joseph Kosuth and the landmark novels of Herman Melville and James Joyce. In Larissa Nowicki’s work, printed pages sliced in strips become the pulpy raw material of weavings. Jill Sylvia excises the entries from ledger pages, leaving delicate tracery scaffolds -- practical information morphed into pure geometric form. On separate sheets, she rearranges the tiny extracted notations into neat, equally abstract mosaics.

Words, both handwritten and typed, are converted to tonal values in the work of Linda Ekstrom and Mark Lawrence Stafford. Ekstrom inscribes lines by poet Edmund Jabes into dense blue smears of illegibility. The passages feel tight and intense, evidence of a kind of psychological endurance that corresponds to the writer’s sensibility. Stafford’s images are more whimsical. He types the classic speed-assessing line “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in multiple directions and repeatedly, so that his little 9-inch squares end up looking like monochrome cloud-scapes more than efficiency exercises.

The notion of language as a fundamental human impulse, akin to dance and song, threads through the show as well. In Stefana McClure’s small paper pieces, words double as rhythmic beats, pounding into and shredding the page. In Linda Hutchins’ tracing paper scroll, the words “right now” are printed continuously across front and back, making for a lovely metaphor of the perpetually unfurling present.

Not every piece in the show sings, but the whole is long on both ingenuity and nuance. Also represented are Pamela Birmingham, Vuk Cosic, Wolfgang Herbold, John Himmelfarb, Stephanie Lempert, Dan Miller, Greg Milne, Megan Murphy, Duston Spear and Cody Trepte.

Arena 1 Gallery, 3026 Airport Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 397-7456, through March 21. Closed Sundays to Tuesdays. www.santamonicaartstudios.com.

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KAWS dabbles in the familiar

KAWS is hot, judging by the size of his news-making opening-night crowd, but what the former graffiti artist and current media darling delivers to those making a pilgrimage to Honor Fraser Gallery is warmed over, at best. The show makes an excellent (if disheartening) case study of the phenomenon of branding. A review might better belong on the paper’s business pages.

Keith Haring was one of the first and best to develop a signature style on the street that then translated to the studio, went viral (pre-Web) and stayed vigorous. Dozens have followed. KAWS’ work has a touch of Haring’s childlike bounce and glass-eye-in-the-candy-dish subversiveness but little of its freshness and raw immediacy. “Chum,” one of KAWS’ trademark figures (available as a plastic toy, a tabletop bronze or in larger-than-life fiberglass) gives the rippled Michelin Man a skeleton-style face and goofy ears. A series of “Kurf” paintings riffs on the Smurfs, each piece featuring a variant of one of the little blue guys being silenced or seized, playing in the mud or eating a hot dog.

KAWS paints with the predictable graphic punch of mainstream cartoons, all vibrant colors, black outlines and exaggerated exuberance. Darkness, danger and ambiguity tiptoe through the work with coy self-consciousness, careful to leave no emotional residue. Commercial smarts trump the aesthetic kind, and predigested Pop culture blandness wins out. Another celebrity is born. Nothing new in that story, and nothing new in the art that illustrates it, either.

Honor Fraser Gallery, 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 837-0191, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.honorfraser.com.

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All is not what it seems at De Soto

Jeffrey Wells is a bit of a trickster, interested in the porous boundary between perception and deception. He has a sense of humor reminiscent of Bruce Nauman and a curiosity about visual processing akin to 1970s Light and Space artists. Not everything in his show of prints and video installations at De Soto Gallery (which now occupies Bandini’s former space in Culver City) feels well-realized, but the sensibility is vital and engaging.

In one corner, a video projection makes the walls appear to quiver where they meet. It’s a subtle, sporadic event, just destabilizing enough to heighten attention. Another projection, “Video to Accompany Staring at a White Wall,” has a similar mischievousness, girded by serious inquiry into retinal afterimages.

Each work seems like a staged exercise, a testing of preconceptions against direct experience. If you give yourself over to it, the “Video to Accompany Staring at a White Wall” induces a state at once hypnotic and hyper-alert. At one point, a barely visible pulsing of light assumes the mesmerizing insistence of a heartbeat.

Wells, who earned his master’s a few years ago from UCLA, now lives in Joshua Tree. It’s an apt locale for a self-described sky-watcher whose work involves sustained observation of phenomena both natural and contrived. His most affecting works are modest, participatory performances, using light, time, optics and always an element of surprise.

De Soto Gallery, 2635 Fairfax Ave., Culver City, (323) 253-2255, through March 28. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.gallerydesoto.com.

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Memories of a searching spirit

The “Poltergeist” in Rebecca Campbell’s scattered, sometimes scintillating show of that title at L.A. Louver seems to be the artist herself, wandering restlessly through her own childhood memories, unsure whether to wreak havoc or pay homage and ultimately doing a little of both.

Such memories are inexhaustible, and so is Campbell’s drive to find forms that capture their potency and resonance. She continues to paint, with a facility that ranges from airless to breathless, and now she also sculpts, shoots video and incorporates different media into installations that mimic domestic settings.

An avocado wall-oven set against a painted wallpaper pattern and packed with old books (formative titles including “Nancy Drew” and “Madame Bovary”) makes a powerful time capsule, its clock forever spinning backward. “Gretel,” a large canvas of a blond-braided girl in lush, dappled woods, is a portrait of innocence, a scene of pure wonder before the encounter with that other oven. The painting hangs like a domestic altarpiece, a balustrade extending out from either side of its free-standing support wall and a multi-toned carpet on the floor below. The treatment feels heavy-handed.

Campbell’s show itself wanders restlessly from sculptural sketches -- sprightly assemblages of piano keys -- to evocative, monumental gestures, such as a full-size tree flocked in black velvet, its branches dotted with glass birds glowing Windex blue. Paintings of utility poles dilute the overall mood; others, such as “The Wizard,” whisk us right back into the heart of Campbell’s tough yet wistful sensibility.

In the stunning 7 1/2 -foot-tall canvas “Daddy Daughter Date,” Daddy sits, soaking in the cool blue glow of an offstage TV screen, while teenage Daughter stands in the next room, haloed by golden possibility. She perches on the edge of what amounts to a flying carpet, a rug woven of sensuously frosted pigment that appears to hover over the more thinly painted glossy wood floor. The passage is transcendent, the moment both excruciating and beautiful -- Campbell’s mnemonic reach and aesthetic grasp in perfect sync.

L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through March 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com.

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