Art in thrift-shop setting

Henry Taylor is showing nearly three dozen paintings made during the past decade (most since 2005), but they are displayed as part of a lively, jampacked installation that goes a long way toward underlining their personal and public meanings.

The main room at Mesler & Hug has been turned into an artist’s studio and living space, complete with homemade sofa and bookshelves built from plastic crates, a thrift-shop coffee table, stained area rug, scruffy side chairs and a somewhat limp houseplant. Paintings, mostly small but a few as much as 5 feet square, are unevenly dispersed.

The rough-hewn canvases, almost all of them painterly small portraits and casual scenes of lounging men and women, are like a gathering of friends and acquaintances. Horace Pippin and Jean-Michel Basquiat are stylistically evoked in works that cross outsider art and graffiti.

Taylor is adept at conveying character with no muss and no fuss -- the self-assured presentation of a woman with enormous gold earrings, the faceless embarrassment of a portrait with a note that reads “Momma, I apologize,” the unceremonious aplomb of a bikini-clad (or maybe underwear-clad) young woman leaning back in a folding chair. He composes his figures in solid impasto hues, the forms interlocking with two-dimensional backgrounds.

Occupying a conceptual space midway between the paintings and the furniture are cluttered shrines and stacked-up totems that line the walls, a few of them venturing into the middle of the room. Made from painted cardboard boxes and bewigged mannequins mingled with found objects -- lumps of black charcoal in a white lotus bowl, framed snapshots, incense sticks, bundled paper-towel tubes, a paper cup filled with gravel, party whistles and much more -- they compose a pack-rat’s humble accumulation of used things. The assembly possesses an inescapably sociopolitical dimension, with leftovers given dignity through a simple gesture of paying attention.

Even the room’s lighting is a mix of the found (battered lamps) and the fabricated (cardboard box chandeliers). The ordinarily solitary distraction of television is mocked through a hand-painted cardboard TV set over in the corner, its screen permanently fixed with a painting of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in mid-attack.

Taylor emerges in this show -- his fourth L.A. gallery solo and his first at Mesler & Hug -- as a kind of hunter-gatherer artist. Part Robert Rauschenberg and part Jason Rhoades, the installation hums with an unpretentious enthusiasm for the satisfactions of engagement.

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Mesler & Hug, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 221-0016. Through May 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .meslerandhug.com

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All the news that’s fit to mock

Steve Lambert gained considerable notoriety eight days after last November’s elections when he collaborated with a group called the Yes Men in publishing a politically progressive hoax edition of the New York Times, its banner headline declaring “Iraq War Ends.” The debut Los Angeles solo show for the New York-based artist at Charlie James Gallery includes video documentation of that work, as well as well-traveled intersections between art and advertising.

The fake but thoroughly convincing newspaper, complete with an accompanying website that remains live, was dated in the future: July 4, 2009. Like James Ensor, the 19th century Belgian visionary artist who painted an enormous canvas showing Christ entering Brussels a year after he finished the work, the newspaper embodied hope.

In addition to the Iraq “news,” the 14-page edition included fake stories about the nation embarking on a plan to build a “sane economy,” the indictment of President Bush on charges of treason and a mea culpa and pledge to quit writing from multiple-Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Thomas J. Friedman, who “admits” to having been “fundamentally wrong” on the war. The fake column is among his best.

These made-up stories had punch partly because, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the actual newspaper had published many pieces by reporter Judith Miller that later proved false. Lambert and his cohort concocted a kind of unbroken (if enlarged) loop, then cleverly continued the fiction in responses to credulous newsmen covering their hoax: No reporters seemed inclined to question their outlandish claim that 1.2 million copies of the faux-paper had been distributed in New York and Los Angeles. (Imagine the cost! The pranksters made about 80,000 copies.) The short documentary video at the gallery is slyly, even scarily instructive.

Most of the show consists of fabricated commercial signs with flashing lightbulbs, giving the space a carnival (or used-car lot) flair. Lambert’s nine cheeky advertisements promise “Money Laundered,” offer “Everything You Want -- Right Now” and invite visitors to “Park and Spend.” The work’s intense cynicism about consumption is glum and ultimately misplaced, although the refusal to exempt art from the process is at least ingenuous.

The strongest element of the exhibition is the group of signs commercially painted on the gallery’s storefront window at the artist’s behest. They give the art space the look of a discount emporium -- a witty frame for the once-bullish art market’s currently bearish hibernation.

Loosely recalling Claes Oldenburg’s landmark Pop extravaganza “The Store,” from 1961, the commercial come-on in soon-to-be-washed-out paint on glass replaces absolute cynicism with healthy skepticism. The best one visually yells, “Limited Time Offer -- this art won’t last!,” a warning that can be read in a variety of productive ways.

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Charlie James Gallery, 975 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 687-0844. Through June 6. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.cjamesgallery.com

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Craft meets high-tech art

“Boolean Valley,” a collaborative installation by L.A. potter Adam Silverman and Boston architect Nader Tehrani, intersects traditional craft with digital art. Though the junction is conceptually intriguing, the result is visually inert.

Silverman and Tehrani, who met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design, made nearly 200 bullet-shaped clay pots, then sliced them horizontally at different heights. Their arrangement mingles dome shapes with rings of various sizes. The glazing is cobalt blue and graphite gray, each with a low-key iridescence.

A computer-generated logical system (the Boolean reference in the title) guided the placement of the nearly 400 resulting forms, which create a curved, undulating ceramic field in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s gallery at the Pacific Design Center. (The work was commissioned by the Montalvo Art Center near San Jose.) A wheel-thrown vessel creates horizontal strata of circular objects; a similar program describes the topographical landscape established in the room.

Ceramic vessels constitute art’s ground zero, historically speaking, and one can sense a parallel being drawn with the infancy of digital imaging today. And the militaristic overtones of the bullet-shape mingles with bodily references to a phallus or breast, colliding destructive and creative possibilities. But the physicality of the vessels and their rolling topography are not enough to sustain the piece. One is inevitably led toward wondering what might come next.

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MOCA at the PDC, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 289-5223. Through July 5. Closed Mondays. www.moca .org

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Abstract tributes to illusions

The 11 paintings by Nena Amsler in her debut exhibition at Kristi Engle Gallery come in parts -- 54 in all, suggesting that no painting, like no man (or woman), is an island, entire of itself. Painting as a material object is emphasized, while its conceptual interconnection with other art is acknowledged.

“Tree,” for example, has 18 sections -- two raw plywood sheets to represent the trunk and a limb, plus 16 stretched canvases of various dimensions for the canopy. The tree’s leaves are composed from linear green paint squeezed straight from the tube, its curves emanating outward from text written on the surfaces. (“In case it isn’t immediately obvious this is supposed to be a tree,” etc.) Each letter “I” and sentence-ending period take the form of a red paint-blob -- nominal apples, suggesting the work represents a tree of knowledge.

Amsler’s work is invested in pictorial word games. “Concetto Temporale” fills the curved cuts in a Lucio Fontana-style canvas with chunky white teeth, transforming the late painter’s anti-illusionistic abstractions into a representation of a laughing painting. “Be Very Afraid” puts an actual zipper in the center of a smaller, decorated version of Barnett Newman’s zip-painting, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue”; Amsler’s zipper is partly open, revealing a human spine inside the work.

The iconoclastic strategy in these paintings derives from Marcel Duchamp -- the show is titled “N. Mutt 2009,” merging Amsler’s first initial with Duchamp’s made-up signature on his 1917 urinal, “Fountain.” Duchamp was creating a new thought for an existing industrial object, but something gets lost in Amsler’s translations of existing art-objects into her own work.

Perhaps it’s because of the ubiquity of Duchampian art in the last 40-plus years, but their cheerfully informed rebelliousness feels conventional.

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Kristi Engle Gallery, 5002 York Ave., Highland Park, (323) 472-6237, through May 30. Closed Sunday through Wednesday. www.kristiengle gallery.com

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christopher.knight @latimes.com