AROUND THE GALLERIES

We’re all feeling squeezed in this economy, but try navigating the interior of the trailer parked inside the Samuel Freeman gallery and you’ll feel the effects of downsizing in a whole new way. There’s a comfy, cushioned seat at one end, but getting to it requires a sideways slide -- breath held, arms raised -- through an inordinately narrow slot between stove and nonfunctional fridge. The dining nook at the other end looks equally charming but can’t accommodate humans with knees (or legs at all, for that matter).

Blue McRight’s hyper-economical living space brings to mind the “comfort units” and “living units” that Andrea Zittel made in the ‘90s, except McRight’s is more emblematic than practical. She’s taken an already abbreviated, provisional form of housing -- a 1958 Mascot trailer by Holly Travel Coach of Holly, Mich. -- and compressed it further, italicizing it right out of the realm of viability. She literally took a slice out of the middle of the original trailer and patched the parts back together, seamlessly. The vehicle, striped in retro aqua, looks complete from the outside, but at 3 1/2 feet wide, it registers inside as a storybook environment, cozy quarters for a smaller species.

“Holly Mascott” is endearing, down to its deliberately misspelled name, and it bears the L.A. artist’s trademark sensibility: an appealing, accessible fusion of the poignant and goofy. But it’s not much more than a crafty one-liner. The other works in McRight’s show flirt more convincingly with substance.

In 50 small oil paintings on paper, McRight touches on birth, otherness and a variety of longings while maintaining a tone of quirky, offbeat humor. All of the impeccably rendered scenarios are untitled, but each has a parenthetical title that serves as a catalyst to thicken the image’s meaning or launch a pun. “You Haul” pictures a barefoot woman crouching as she grasps the hitch of a trailer. “Someone You Know” issues a blunt reminder of mortality with its representation of a single human skull amid greenish atmospheric haze.

Trailers crop up frequently in the paintings, as home bases and vehicles of escape; as structures to be occupied; and as anthropomorphized entities in possession of their own personalities and temperaments. “Tramp” leaves its door open at night. “Rumor” sports a teasingly jaunty striped awning.

The works fall somewhere between sketches and snapshots. They are tightly crafted but also have an air of casualness, painted on pages torn from a 6-by-9-inch spiral-bound sketchbook. Many feel slight and silly, but plenty are tender. For instance, there’s one showing two boys, heads on pillows, lying beneath slender trees, subtitled “More Than You Bargained For, Less Than You Wanted.” Another replaces a woman’s head with an egg-filled nest. McRight’s splendid color scheme oscillates between chalky, flat, old-fashioned hues and vibrant tangerines and chartreuses.

If there is an undercurrent of loss in some of these works on paper, it emerges as full-fledged brooding in another section of McRight’s show. In a separate side gallery, she has suspended (or mounted on the wall or pedestals) 11 birds that originated as plastic models but have been wrapped in black elastic bandages and thread. The effect is haunting. The forms have a strong presence, whether suggestive of tribal fetishes or funerary votives. Most trail thick plaits of black thread, like inky, linear shadows.

McRight has long proved herself versatile with materials. In addition to painting, sculpture and installation, she has completed numerous public art commissions. With “Flock,” a chamber piece in a decidedly minor key, she demonstrates the breadth of her emotional range as well.

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Samuel Freeman, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .samuelfreeman.com

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Mesmerized by clashing effects

In his first solo show, Cal Crawford puts the twin forces of attraction and repulsion to work. And work they do -- on your vision, your viscera, your pulse. As uncomfortable as it is to stay in the space he’s created at Sister gallery, it takes a monumental act of will to leave it. Crawford is an unabashed mesmerist, using tricks of various trades to seize attention and hold it hostage.

The installation throbs with light and sound, transforming the gallery into a perversely seductive endurance test. A black-and-white striped vinyl banner partially blocks entrance to the room, while strobe flashes and a relentless, hypnotic piano melody beckon you farther inside.

In the far corners of the room, video monitors hurl out the phrase “Threats You Can Keep,” one spinning, flashing word at a time. On a small upright panel on the floor, projectors sustain an image of a perpetually rotating striped panel, a dizzying, twirling band whose rate of speed appears warped by simultaneous strobes.

Crawford, a recent MFA graduate of the Art Center College of Design, practices a highly schooled, self-conscious sort of chest-thumping in this piece, titled (with consistent insistence) “POSSIBILITIESOFFISTS.” It’s all about modes of manipulation (commercial, theatrical, musical, optical) layered to an absurd extreme -- all means and no end. Dense and daunting, but at the same time coyly tongue-in-cheek, the installation’s mishmash of not-so-special effects piles together to make for an amusing self-parody.

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Sister, 955 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through June 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .sisterla.com

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Many meanings of unmade beds

As a subject of art, the unmade bed comes preloaded with a psychological charge. It’s the site of sexual aftermath, a platform for dreams, a stage for intimacy or a frame around intimacy’s flip side, loneliness. In Frank Ryan’s new paintings at Walter Maciel Gallery, the bed is less a spur for emotional excavation than the object of thoughtful, sometimes invigorating formal exercise.

A slightly elevated view of the young L.A. artist’s bed dominates each of the 15 modestly scaled panels. The sequence reads as a chronicle, a daily record of observations: the way bedding rumples or masses, how a window barely contains the light and greenery beyond it, how a cat settles in compactly against navy blue sheets or a dog nestles into a white duvet. The brush strokes define each scene with a studied looseness.

Ryan takes more risks in the five larger paintings on canvas. Deviations from convention invest the work with complexity and throw it, usefully, a little off balance. In one painting, he lays a florescent light fixture down the length of the bed like a landing strip, a Newman zip or a nod to Flavin’s neon sculptures. In the same piece, the near edge of the bed devolves into a Richter blur.

The show’s most compelling work (bearing the unfortunate title “Tussle Tango”) has a nervy, provisional feel, with its window-blind of skewed olive and dusky violet streaks, the duvet yearning to one corner where it gives way to blurry diffusion, and the corner behind a dresser radiating a surprising magenta. The bedroom scene itself is as familiar as ever, but any painting this vital and complex is a new thrill.

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Walter Maciel Gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 839-1840, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .waltermacielgallery.com

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The hair makes

a statement

Two of Castillo’s three installations at Tarryn Teresa Gallery are made of synthetic hair, and the third evokes flowing tresses but is made of rope. Hair -- including its surrogates and artificial substitutes -- is a perfect post-minimalist material, pure in line and rich in bodily and cultural associations. That suggestiveness helps give Castillo’s otherwise subdued work a measure of power.

“Strand” is the simplest but the most affecting. It consists only of a length of industrially heavy rope looped around an iron hook in the ceiling. The rope twists around a few times on its way down; then, at about chest height, it unfurls, separating into what must be hundreds of wavy strands that fan out across the floor in a giant wedge, ending in a curly rim.

The relationship of part to whole is rendered with beautiful immediacy. Strength divides into delicacy and vulnerability; grace, multiplied, produces formidable heft. The unraveled rope emits a musky smell, that of its raw, fibrous nature. At the same time, it conjures the fabled plaits of Rapunzel.

In “Divinia,” a haloed curtain hangs rather mutely over a small pile of fake black hair. In “Ecliptic Eccentricity,” Castillo (one of this year’s City of Los Angeles, or C.O.L.A., fellowship award winners) dangles five huge hairballs, each 3 feet in diameter, from rusted chains. The spheres hang in a row, four sheathed in black synthetic hair and one matted in platinum blond. They make an imposing presence, like planetary orbs in a schematic display, or oversized, feminized cannonballs. Castillo practices a canny kind of truth to materials: The hair’s function is to beautify, but amassed in this quantity and format, it verges on the grotesque.

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Tarryn Teresa Gallery, 1820 Industrial St., No. 230, L.A., (213) 627-5100, through June 18. Closed Sundays. www.tarryn teresagallery.com

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