The story unfolds slowly

Not all that long before the Internet made instantaneous communication a regular part of everyday life, people seemed to be a little less rushed and a little more patient. Stories unfolded a little more slowly, sometimes meandering all over the place before getting to the point, if they even had one.

Brian Bress takes visitors back to those glorious moments of storytelling -- to a time when communication was not cut-to-the-chase message-mongering and the texture, tone and tempo of whatever was being conveyed mattered as much as what was said, written or, more commonly, typed.

At Cherry and Martin, Bress’ second solo show in Los Angeles begins by creating a dreamy, down-to-earth atmosphere: a scrappy, do-it-yourself fantasy world that traffics in enchantment and generosity rather than in the over-dramatized self-satisfaction so prevalent on the Internet.

Visitors enter an extremely dark gallery in which a video is projected on a wall. The same actor, Bress, plays all the main roles, which include an astronaut, a boxer, a coal miner, a variety show host and a puppet. Several dancers, dressed in fabulous camouflage costumes, back him up, bounding around like human wind-chimes against an abstract landscape that resembles a souped-up version of Cubist collage.

The story is circular, so it doesn’t much matter when you walk in. Bress’ video intrigues from the get-go, exciting the imagination and drawing you into the lolling, singsong rhythms of its scenes.

Its costumes and props are homemade, not much more sophisticated or expensive than those crafted by third-graders for a school play. The dialogue is earnest, pedestrian, no-nonsense. And the acting is unpolished, not as slick or aggressively stripped bare as many tell-alls on the Internet, but warmer and more endearing, like home movies from the 1970s, before digitization made editing and reshooting so easy.

Think Pee Wee Herman meets Paul McCarthy. That gets at the fresh-eyed innocence and wondrous delight of Bress’ 19-minute video, titled “Status Report,” as well as its firsthand knowledge of life’s dark side, society’s ugly underbelly and the very real possibility that, even on good days, things can go very wrong.

Bress’ pointedly loopy story interweaves seemingly unrelated vignettes to describe the ways curiosity and knowledge pull and tug against each other.

And that’s just the first gallery.

In the second are props, drawings and spinoffs from “Status Report.” The best are three fantastically detailed inkjet prints and a primitive mask collage. All capture the quirky vivacity of the video.

On a small, wall-mounted monitor, a second video plays, its audio available via headphones. Titled “It’s Been a Long Day,” the two-minute quickie has a lovely light touch that efficiently generates a sense of doom. It’s as smart as “Status Report” and far more ominous. Its silliness intensifies its effect.

Both of Bress’ videos stick in your craw long after you leave. He shows himself to be an artist worth watching, a storyteller whose evocative works cannot be summed up quickly but are best when allowed to simmer slowly in the mind’s eye.

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Cherry and Martin, 2712 La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-0100, through Oct. 24. Closed Sundays and Monday. www.cherry andmartin.com.

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Making sense of being the misfit

I don’t know why tourists like to have their pictures taken with their faces peeking through oval holes cut in plywood sheets painted to resemble cartoon characters or local legends. It must have something to do with being in a new place, not fitting in and feeling both uncomfortable and amused by it all.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Dusseldorf-born, Antwerp-based painter Kati Heck turns the pedestrian experience of being a misfit into a powerful meditation on what it is like to live in a world out of sync with itself. Her six mural-scale paintings and two loaded drawings give stunning form to a harrowing place that’s not all that different from everyday life, except for the compression and clarity of their vision.

In terms of drama, nothing much happens in Heck’s paintings. The largest, “Rudi’s Angebot,” recalls Manet’s “Le dejeuner sur l’herbe.” It depicts three life-size figures lolling about in nondescript grayness as an Edvard Munch-style goblin steps, Keep-on-Truckin’-style, out from unpainted nothingness.

“Die Raucher” evokes the ghost of George Grosz and shows two men taking a cigarette break. “Der Kugelfrab” features a pair of nude models posing for a life-drawing class. And “Die Fratzenpleite” displays a fleshy old woman leaning or falling backward as a huge cartoon tear spills from her eye.

Heck transforms the formulaic deadness of old-fashioned Socialist Realism into a sort of skeptical humanism that is by turns biting and touching, scary and embarrassing, clinical and sensuous.

Her mixture of realistic illusionism, point-blank abstraction and goofy cartoons recalls the cheeky Postmodernism of David Salle and Eric Fischl.

But cleverness for its own sake has no place in Heck’s art. Her paintings reveal real passion for finding the cracks in the theatrical facade of contemporary existence, where individuality peeks out whenever it can.

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Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-9911, through Oct. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marc selwynfineart.com.

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The primitive as a playtime effort

Children and primitives have long fascinated avant-garde artists, particularly for the authenticity of their visions and the unwashed rawness of their expressions. New York artist Matthew Ronay turns this tradition upside-down, inside-out and backward, transforming a fetishistic fascination with supposedly unsullied otherness into an intimate exploration of the playful fakery and profound artifice at the root of all forms of art.

Ronay’s third solo show in Los Angeles, at Marc Foxx, is a dizzying trip that takes viewers so deeply inside themselves that they can’t help but come out differently.

Titled “is the shadow,” Ronay’s subtly understated exhibition plays off Carl Jung’s ideas of internal otherness. It begins by presenting two rooms filled with what appear to be primitive artifacts. On the wall hang four poncho-style cloaks, their neck holes resembling all-seeing eyes. Beside each hangs a matching hood or two. A single hand-carved staff leans nearby. (The beautifully odd objects can be seen in three enigmatic snippets on YouTube.)

On the floors of the two galleries lie what appear to be five ceremonial rugs. Each is decorated as elaborately as the cloaks, with irregular patterns, abstract stitchery and all sorts of lumpy feathers, matte gems, stylized shells, faux teeth and papier-mache stones. Each rug also holds an arrangement of talismanic artifacts, including golden rings, symbolic eyes, painted twigs, waxy rocks and a pint-size sepulcher.

The strangest thing about Ronay’s handcrafted works is that they are made of the materials a grade-school kid would get at a fantastic summer camp, especially if his counselors were obsessed with primitive rituals and knew a bit about Hopi kachinas.

At once cute and deadly serious, Ronay’s deceptively simple art superimposes childhood playtime and primitive ritual to short-circuit an adult’s ability to keep both at a safe distance. His army-of-one, let’s-pretend primitivism serves him well.

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Marc Foxx, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through Oct. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcfoxx.com.

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Lovely without losing the depth

Every part of every piece in Doug Aitken’s three-part exhibition at Regen Projects and Regen Projects II has had so much attention paid to it that you’d think the life had been squeezed right out of it. That’s what happens with lots of movies; as production value goes through the roof, emotional effect diminishes.

In contrast, Aitken’s 24-minute movie and suite of illuminated photographs demonstrate that gorgeousness and psychological resonance are not inversely proportional. In the L.A. artist’s works, the parts do not add up to tidy wholes but leave so many loose ends and send so many mixed messages that it’s impossible not to follow one or two out of the gallery, into the street, the city, the world beyond.

In the Almont Drive gallery, Aitken has installed a big but not quite full-size billboard on which “migration” is projected. No people appear in the movie, and no words interrupt the lovely soundtrack. From beginning to end, we visit generic motels and hotels, entering room after room as if we’re in some kind of pleasantly existential drama, a kinder, gentler version of Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Things take a turn for the Surreal, a la Rene Magritte, as animals appear in the rooms: first a horse, then a pair of birds, a raccoon, a buffalo, a fox, four rabbits and so on. Aitken’s isolated menagerie recalls the biblical story of Noah’s ark and Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic “Waiting for Godot.” Like those tales of ends and beginnings, Aitken’s visual poem -- first shown at the 2008 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh -- gives form to the sense that the landscape of the United States is not what it used to be and that what comes next is anyone’s guess.

In the Santa Monica Boulevard gallery, seven wall-mounted light-boxes, most in the shape of words, illuminate photographs of the Western landscape, including aerial views of suburban developments, a sunset over a Cadillac dealership and a partially demolished casino in an empty parking lot that seems to recede into infinity.

It’s difficult to read the words -- “free,” “fate,” “now” and “start swimming” -- while looking at the images. The disjuncture between seeing and reading opens just enough space to let you in the picture.

That happens more powerfully every night, on the outside walls of the gallery, where “migration” is projected as a diptych, from sunset to sunrise. The size of the images amplifies their power. So does the oddness of seeing the movie under the stars, in a parking lot. The fact that the movie is just there, free to be seen by anyone who happens upon it, adds to its melancholic majesty and bittersweet mystery.

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Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, and Regen Projects II, 9016 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 276-5424, through Oct. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.regenprojects.com