AROUND THE GALLERIES

Jennifer Steinkamp’s five new pieces at ACME are so individually absorbing that a lot of time can go by before you notice the magnitude of her achievement. She almost single-handedly transforms the medium in which she works -- projected digital imagery -- from a one-at-a-time, one-after-another setup into an all-at-once immersion in a stimulating environment that leaves you with more freedom than you came in with.

I love it when that happens.

Here’s how Steinkamp, who has been exhibiting projected imagery for more than 20 years, makes it work: She treats each of her meticulously engineered animations as if it were a painting.

Not because of what it’s made of. There’s no mistaking Steinkamp’s gorgeously composed constellations of shining light as oils on canvas.

And not because of what it depicts. The swirling leaves, budding blossoms, undulating trees and jiggling squiggles in her pulsating pictures never pretend to be anything other than what they are: super-sophisticated computer animations.

Steinkamp’s pieces instead function as paintings because of the ways they get visitors to interact with them.

One of the best things about paintings is that you can look at a roomful of them in any order whatsoever, skipping and jumping back and forth among as many or as few as quickly or as languorously as you like, for as long as you want and as intensely or as informally as it suits you.

One of the worst things about conventional video projections is that they don’t play well with others. In general, each demands that you pay exclusive attention to it, from start to finish, before going on to the next one.

Steinkamp’s floor-to-ceiling fields of dancing light throw their lot in with the every-which-way simultaneity of a roomful of paintings. In the first darkened gallery, four projections on each of the four walls make you feel as though you have stepped into a high-tech house of mirrors. It’s fascinating, befuddling and inspiring to try to make sense of the rhythms, patterns and sequences that take shape between and among “Orbit #2,” “Orbit #3,” “Orbit #4” and “Orbit #5.”

Sometimes symmetry happens, as parts of each of the approximately four-minute-long animations pair up with one another. At others, chaos reigns, especially when each of the four projections seems to be marching to its own beat.

What happens between these extremes is endlessly fascinating, particularly when standing in the first gallery and viewing the abstract projection “Sharpie #4” in an adjacent gallery. Time and space collapse and expand as you zero in on details, scan the rooms swiftly or sit back, space out and take in an overall view of the whole.

Every once in a while, serenity is thrilling.

--

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Nov. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com.

--

Playing off a Tijuana groove

Josh Kun’s smart exhibition in a small upstairs gallery at Steve Turner Contemporary focuses on two types of popular music made in Mexico and the United States in the 1960s. With great clarity, “Last Exit USA” demonstrates that culture is not a conventional commodity: Neither imported nor exported like ordinary goods and services, it instead grows out of back-and-forth exchanges that are far more fascinating than those accounted for in terms of trade deficits and surpluses.

Best of all, Kun’s exhibition is a lot more fun than that sounds. There’s plenty to look at, plenty to listen to and plenty to think about, all presented in an easy, see-for-yourself way that leaves visitors free to go at their own pace and make up their own minds.

Narrow shelves on each of the four walls display 44 album covers from the 1960s. Most have “Tijuana” in their titles. The imagery falls into three groups: women with come-hither eyes, bands dressed in mariachi costumes and barely road-worthy cars. Sombreros abound. Other cliches, such as tequila, banditos and burros, appear frequently.

All of the albums were made in the U.S. by big record companies. All followed hot on the heels of “The Lonely Bull,” a 1962 hit record by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which is also displayed.

Collectively, the albums created and cashed in on what became known as “the Tijuana Sound,” a lively trumpet-and-marimba combo that played up standard south-of-the-border fantasies.

On two walls, two listening stations allow visitors to tune into 16 songs from the 1960s. The playlist features bands probably unfamiliar to contemporary listeners, including Los Dug Dug’s, Los Rockin Devils, Los Tijuana Jet’s and Javier Batiz and the Famous Finks. All were active in Tijuana in the ‘60s, playing and recording music inspired by such north-of the border rock ‘n’ rollers as Fats Domino and James Brown.

Listening to Kun’s selections is like visiting a world both familiar and strange, a sort of parallel universe that is disorienting, eye-opening, exciting. Spanish and English intermix, as does slang and proper diction.

Riffs on such rock ‘n’ roll standards as “Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin and “Hush” by Deep Purple are often comical and always playful.

Overall, it’s an eclectic grab bag of rock, pop and folk.

The two halves of Kun’s show, its visual and audio components, add up to a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

No matter where you start, art happens when adventuresome individuals fantasize about something different from their daily grinds. What happens next is anyone’s guess. But that’s where culture comes from: the impure mishmash of imagination and reality and the verve to bring together the two.

--

Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 931-3721. Ends Nov. 14. Closed Sundays to Tuesdays. www.steve turnercontemporary.com.

--

A weak grasp on memories past

The bittersweet pang of days gone by is not easy to capture in art. Alexis Zoto’s sculptures and monotypes at Overtones are too generic to give such nuanced sentiments their due. Visitors are left with a general sense of standard-issue melancholy, which fades all too quickly because it lacks specificity and precision.

Zoto makes found-object assemblages out of lacy doilies, old jewelry, a religious statue, a family member’s oven, broken furniture, ostrich feathers, buttons, branches and artificial birds. These objects probably mean much to Zoto, who recently changed her surname from Weidig to her mother’s maiden name.

But they do not go far enough to convey the particularities of their passions, glossing over the conflicted combination of regret and indebtedness that forms any contemplative individual’s relation- ship to her past.

Zoto’s prints, depicting the silhouettes of little birds in faded pinks, blues and greens, also come off as cliches. Like her sculptures, they’re too bland to do much more than scratch the surface.

--

Overtones, 12703 Venice Blvd., (310) 915-0346, through Nov. 7. Closed Sundays to Tuesdays. www.overtonesgallery.com.

--

Worlds collide and take shape

Crossing boundaries has been such a staple of modern art for so long that it has produced a slew of academic works whose sole purpose is to pass as something else. Paintings pretend to be sculptures, videos masquerade as installations and photographs pose as paintings.

It’s far more interesting when works are so peculiar that they make you forget about categories altogether; instead, you get so caught up in their details that they become worlds unto themselves -- expansive spaces too big to be bothered by what names they might be given.

That’s what happens in Brad Eberhard’s 11 works on paper at Thomas Solomon Gallery. Made of torn and cut paper and oil and acrylic paint, the L.A. artist’s visually dense pieces jam together solid chunks of basic colors, delicately incised lines, leftover bits of printed images and a cornucopia of abstract passages.

They include whiplash scale shifts, radically fractured picture planes, carefully composed collisions and enough casual happenstance to give even world-weary viewers some gee-whiz delights.

Sometimes Eberhard keeps things simple, cutting and juxtaposing 50-year-old flashcards into concise yet mind-bending fusions of a tube of toothpaste and a painting by Mondrian, a hot dog bun and a dirigible or a watermelon and a Suprematist painting by Kasimir Malevich.

At others he lets complexity rip, building tautly structured compositions made up of so many interlinked pathways that your eyes never travel across their funky surfaces the same way twice.

There’s always something new to see, some new discovery to make, some mesmerizing detail to savor and contemplate.

“Fish Finder” puts one in mind of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels, its dots and curves taking your eyes on gently spinning rides through the cosmos. “Unfurling” is the visual equivalent of a deep breath, its becalming expansiveness as refreshing as a summer breeze. And “Inflatable Decks/Air Molecules” is all jumpy, pumpy Pop, its bright gum-balls of color standing in as a polka-dot sea that floats four rubber rafts.

Eberhard has titled his exhibition “Cross Sections,” evoking illustrated diagrams that give viewers a different perspective and, literally, a deeper view of things. It’s an apt metaphor for his art, which does not strive to be a multitasking, multimedia hybrid, but stays home, sweats the details and gets the job done, no matter how the results end up being categorized.

--

Thomas Solomon Gallery, 427 Bernard St., (323) 275-1687, through Nov. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .thomassolomongallery.com.