Making words sensuous

Whether you’re reading this in print or online, it’s likely that the meaning of these words matters more to you than their visual form. The elegance of written language’s delivery system has largely become secondary to its efficiency.

Not so for the three artists in “Palimpsests,” a thoroughly intriguing show at Tarryn Teresa. Each explores the sensual presence of words in time and space. In their work, message and medium resume an intimate relationship, not one that is sacrosanct but pliable, in turns surprising, self-referential, contradictory, charming, wry.

A palimpsest is traditionally defined as a parchment or other material whose writing has been effaced to make room for a new entry. The show’s guest curator, Elizabeth Williams, applies the term more broadly to art that subjects written communication to a variety of re-purposing and retooling strategies.

In a marvelous little etching by Christine Wong Yap, densely inscribed Gothic print fills the top portion of a lined page. It reads, at first glance, as the concluding section of an ecclesiastical text, but the crowded letters actually spell out a recitation far more secular and mundane: a shopping list for milk, yogurt, turkey and cheese. Yap, who lives in Oakland, stages another amusing temporal and stylistic dislocation in a hand-inked scroll of graph paper that ends in a curl on the floor. In elegant calligraphy, she transcribes gang-speak banter peppered with challenges, curses and threats.

Annie Vought, also from Oakland, takes handwritten correspondence and translates it into stunning new form -- sheets of meticulous, cut-paper tracery, verbal lace with negative space excised. A few of her works, in colored paper, are stationery-size and two are an impressive 5 or 6 feet high. Floating slightly away from the wall, the cutouts double as fantastic drawings in space, the words mingling with their own shadows. Vought eliminates the space between written lines so the rows of words stack tightly and, though legible, read also as pure idiosyncratic design.

One letter, written from father to son in the 1980s, is newsy, conversational and affectionate. It concludes with a few lines of parental advice -- “Keep patient. Size up the situation and then react with restraint!!! Keep cool like James Bond.” -- and a private joke of a postscript.

It’s not evident whether Vought’s texts are found or contrived, but either way they evoke personal artifacts conveying distinct voices and particular moments in time. Spectacularly crafted objects, they pay homage to the tenderness and intimacy of handwritten correspondence, the physicality of the link between sender and recipient. Vought is also represented by an installation of individual cut-paper words and marks, pinned to a large wall in an improvisational scatter, a delightful convergence of found and concrete poetry.

Houston-based Cara Barer (like the others, in her first substantial appearance in Southern California) enacts gorgeous transformations of her own by soaking a variety of reference books in water, manipulating the pages, then photographing the results. Her color pictures render books as textural landscapes, sculptural abstractions. In most of the images, Barer opens the volumes excessively wide, so their spines make a U-turn and their pages splay in moody bursts of angles and curls or tendrils of elaborate filigree.

“Piece of Cake” shows a thick wedge of a book (seemingly a volume of “Who’s Who”), its contents humbled into rippled and sliced layers. In spite of the destruction and distortion involved in her process -- she states that she never harms “important” books -- Barer’s work comes across as utterly respectful, a tribute even to the expanded potential of the printed page.

The reciprocity between text and image goes back all the way to pictographic communication, with text as image getting a boost from Conceptual artists since the ‘70s and interpretations of images as texts central to critical theory for at least as long. The field of aesthetic inquiry that Yap, Vought and Barer have ventured into is already rich and diverse, but their contributions are invigoratingly fresh and in this moment of digital dominance, especially poignant.

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Tarryn Teresa Gallery, 1820 Industrial St. No. 230, (213) 627-5100, through Oct. 29. Closed Sunday. www.tarrynteresa gallery.com

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The healing powers of the arts

The work of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison falls somewhere between prophecy, poetry and proposition. For nearly 40 years, the Harrisons have identified places where we’ve torn the life-web and devised strategies for its repair. They are healers (in the spirit of the Jewish mandate tikkun olam, repairing the world) as much as they are artists, but in their practice the two impulses are inseparable.

Though they have sustained a substantial presence in Europe for the last 15 years, the California-based artists have long been neglected on their own turf. Cardwell Jimmerson has applied a small patch to that gaping hole with an exhibition surveying recent projects, as well as a few stretching back to the ‘70s, including Newton Harrison’s solo contribution to LACMA’s landmark Art and Technology project of 1971.

Because of the scope and complexity of the Harrisons’ work, any such sampling is bound to feel grossly abbreviated, but the show does a respectable job introducing the artists’ methods (conversation, meditation, narrative), formats (maps, texts, diagrams) and most important, their key concerns (restoring the integrity of ecosystems, encouraging collaborative solutions).

It’s the ideas, the articulate framing of issues and possibilities that most seduce in their work, not the visuals, which used to have more of a homespun touch but now rely chiefly on digital maps and press-on letters. Each project is a petition of sorts, for expanded awareness and, more practically, new forms of governance -- a “trans-regional watershed authority” in the European Union, for instance, to address the drought expected to creep across Europe in the next 100 years and render farmland unproductive.

“We are facing a force majeure mostly of our own making,” the Harrisons assert. Their work diligently and provocatively sets about unmaking it.

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Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through Oct. 31. Closed Sunday and Monday. www .cardwelljimmerson.com

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From the ‘80s, with vigor

Roger Herman’s paintings of the 1980s, at Jancar, hold up well a generation after being swiped, streaked and scumbled into existence, better than many produced during that decade’s Neo-Expressionist surge. The German-born Herman lived in Northern California for five years before settling in 1981 in L.A., where he has taught (at UCLA), exhibited frequently and made paintings, woodcuts and ceramics prolifically.

The show’s two rooms divide Herman’s output neatly into figurative subjects (his parents, himself, a skull) and architectural (an apartment facade, bungalow, parking structure and auditorium). All of the canvases are painted with vigor, the forms distilled and generalized, the brushwork swift and strong. Most compelling is the friction between the physical, passionate, performative aspect of his work and his imagery of a cerebral, cool, even banal nature.

“Building,” for instance, presents an oblique view of the facade of a generic multistory apartment building, the windows and balconies defined in blocks of monochrome light and shadow. The institutional anonymity of the subject runs head-on into Herman’s brusque layering (emeralds, blues and violet beneath the black, white and gray), heaving textures and overall sense of visceral urgency. His empty “Auditorium,” a sober scene in black, white and shrill yellow, generates a similar shocking charge.

In these paintings of interior and exterior spaces, even more so than in the more emotionally laden imagery, Herman seems to be addressing fundamental questions about where painting derives its power -- from mind, body or soul? From the interpretation of immediate experience or the filtering of memory? The questions remain relevant, and Herman’s manifestations of them potent.

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Jancar Gallery, 961 Chung King Road, (213) 625-2522, through Saturday. www.jancar gallery.com

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Playing with

light and time

Farrah Karapetian works inventively with photography’s elemental ingredients -- light and time. In her show at Sandroni Rey, the recent UCLA MFA presents striking, memorable work alongside efforts that haven’t quite gelled.

A DVD projection visualizing the artist as human sundial, for instance, starts with a nice concept but realizes it in a slight and tedious way. Another video, viewed through an actual car door mounted on the wall, feels under-conceived and overproduced.

The centerpiece, in terms of scale and interest, is “Stowaway,” a stunning six-panel photogram that spans 20 feet in width.

Photograms are physical traces, made by placing an object directly on sensitized paper and exposing it to light; this one, depicting a soda truck with a passenger amid the cargo, is necessarily life-size, a ghost image in translucent graphite tones. Karapetian has constructed the scene more like a metaphor than a record, absenting the driver and setting individual bottles in rows on shelves rather than in cases. The man stands among them in gleaming white silhouette, an emblem of displacement. Karapetian’s fascination with surveillance and the hidden comes across as well in a series of photograms of signs, notices that the premises are being videotaped or patrolled. She double- or triple-exposes the prints so that each sign overlaps itself in a disorienting stutter or, in the case of “Caution,” spelling a darkly poetic epigram.

Two signs warning drivers of people crossing the freeway on foot -- horrifically absurd responses to illegal immigration to begin with -- overlap to suggest the word “cautionaut,” an apt description of one who travels through dangerous space.

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Sandroni Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 280-0111, through Oct. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .sandronirey.com