Dinh Q. Lê at Shoshana Wayne Gallery

The 12 powerful new photographic collages by Dinh Q. Lê in his fifth solo show at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery advance the trajectory of the artist’s work. They add a layer of complexity missing from most of the earlier collages I’ve seen.

Lê emigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. with his family in 1979 (he was 11), and later he did graduate art study in New York; now he lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. His binational personal history has underpinned earlier series of pictures, which showed such things as documentary images of the Vietnam War cut into strips and physically woven together with strips of stills taken from Hollywood movies about the conflict.

The new work layers recent history into the mix, including 9/11 and the Iraq war, and for the first time his weaving technique seems more than merely a clever Conceptual art maneuver. The effect is heartbreaking.

“The Locust” shows Muslim men and women in head scarves walking diagonally toward the viewer, while a soldier escorting shackled prisoners seen from behind walks away. Between them in the upper registers of the large work -- it’s roughly 4 feet high and 8 feet wide -- a phalanx of military fighter jets bears down at us. The scene is reddened with the swirling colors of a fireball.

Lê’s weaving technique makes the details of an obvious holocaust difficult to see. You strain to make out faces, detect postures that might be revealing and determine precisely what is happening, where. But only the most general contours of the conflagration can be understood.

As a metaphor for the chaos and disorientation that characterize the fog of war, it’s remarkably successful. It also favors tactile physicality -- the human connection afforded by evidence of the handmade -- over disembodied imagery.

The blips of color created by the weave are an obvious reference to pixels, which are the dominant mode of pictorial communication in our electronic universe. But the handwrought weaving is pre-technological, while its allusion to textiles recalls the introduction of heavy industry. The hand, the machine and the computer fuse.

A similar sequence of layers informs the imagery. Television pictures render the heavy machinery of fighter planes, which the artist likens in his title to a plague of locusts. When they swarm, migratory grasshoppers cause unimaginable devastation to crops. Lê’s collages portray individual human ruin on a global scale, making it seem simultaneously immediate and remote.

In “The Relic of Our Time,” a soldier with a gun faces off against a jet. A figure at the right clutches a flag, another at the left holds up its hands to frame a face, which is abstracted as if it were a rudimentary, prehistoric stone head.

Within the flaming background, the principal colors of the collage are red, white and blue. As in all the works, the woven strips have been fused around the four edges of the picture, like something seared in an inferno.

A group of 5-foot-tall portrait heads dispenses with color, relying instead on black, white and silvery grays. The individual male and female heads are merged with solarized landscapes, yielding haunted faces both metallic and hard. They are also ghostly and ethereal -- a slippery and disturbing visual contradiction that is another testament to Lê’s evolving skill.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Oct. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.www.shoshanawayne.com.

Right before your eyes -- isn’t it?

Edgar Arceneaux‘s new installation isn’t merely low-tech, it’s practically no-tech. Therein lies its principal charm.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, “Circle Disk Rotation” is the centerpiece of a sizable show of recent paintings and two more installation works. Yes, it employs a video projector, recorder and camera, but those items are now so common they’re ubiquitous at any big-box store.

Besides, all the attention of the home-video equipment is focused on a big cardboard disk hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room. Made from two half-circles taped together, not unlike a freeway panhandler’s sign, it’s the star of the theatrical show.

Two floor fans blow enough air to cause the disk to rotate. A live camera opposite the entrance records the spinning disk and whoever enters the room, while tapes from the prior two days of video recording are projected simultaneously.

“As the world turns,” layer upon layer of time is projected into the space. The difference between what is live and what is not blurs, pops, expands and becomes a puzzle, as visitors project their own perceptions onto the experience.

Arceneaux’s format here shares something with the perceptual tropes of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, including the willingness to expose rather than conceal the optical machinery. But rather than relying on abstraction, Arceneaux is also interested in how mythology is created through such projections, both natural and technological.

Arceneaux’s paintings are made on large sheets of heavy brown paper, which is roughly sliced. Several are tacked onto gallery walls, but a dozen are rolled up and presented in a configuration reminiscent of the biblical Last Supper. The splotchy colors suggest galactic swirls and night skies. Made from graphite, dirt, enamel, charcoal and gesso, the paintings use dots of color and meandering lines to suggest dragons, constellations, the zodiac and gods’ eyes staring back at us.

In the installation, the movement of the disk and the projections are interrupted by your body as you move around the room, crossing in front of the fans, camera and projectors. These interruptions are integral to revealing what is actually right before your eyes. Mythologizing a hunk of cardboard is no mean feat, although we’ve been doing it for years.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Oct. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com.

Dizzying, yet also marvelous

The eight large photographs from the last three years by Simone Nieweg at Gallery Luisotti show landscapes so lush, so densely packed with visual life and so richly engorged with brilliant color as to momentarily destabilize your perception. Mounted on aluminum panels, the images continue the now-standard practice, especially common among German photographers, of approximating the scale and visual interest of paintings.

Nieweg compensates for photography’s lack of tactile surface texture -- one of camerawork’s most obvious differences from painting -- by turning up the volume on luxurious visual profusion. (It’s a technique that was perfected by Andreas Gursky.) Photographically manufactured, Nieweg’s optical abundance is paired with nature’s cultivated cornucopia. The result is dizzying, marvelous and not a little strange.

A plum tree has deposited one full harvest of fruit on the ground while a second crop weighs heavily on its branches, waiting to drop. The scene is framed on two sides by ripe hibiscus blossoms.

A field of beet roots looks like a cartoon swarm of small and cheerful animals, not vegetables, while a curtain wall of cascading pea pods in another work forms a veritable -- or vegetal -- Niagara Falls. Nearby, a Van Gogh-style sea of blossoming sunflowers is threaded through by barbed wire fencing, a slash of pain beneath the delirium of golden light.

All the pictures were shot in France. The only one that’s vertical -- a format emphasizing figurative rather than landscape allusions -- shows a delicate peach tree propped up by birch sticks. The fragile tree is so heavily laden with luscious fuzzy fruit that it needs crutches to stand.

Abundance can be not just a burden but crippling, these unusual and compelling photographs suggest. Feast on their beauty for solace.

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Oct. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Creating tangled, airy interlaces

Patrick Nickell has long been deft at stripping out the religiosity that built up, perhaps inevitably, around Post-Minimal art. His recent sculptures at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery -- made from linear plywood squiggles joined by strips of corrugated cardboard, screwed together and painted in the good-natured, pastel-heavy hues of a nursery or playroom -- continue the theme with skillful aplomb.

What’s new here are the pale graphite drawings, which blow a clear breeze through the denser renderings he has shown before. Several are as much as 7 feet tall. They create tangled but airy Baroque interlaces that are both controlled and contrived -- about as far from natural and organic as they can get.

Nickell draws a serpentine line; stops; draws a second parallel line; fills the space between; adds a few feathery marks, as if the shape was fraying; and then moves ahead with a more serpentine line. Eventually the sheet is filled. The method might plod, suggesting thoughtful labor, but the contradictory result is anything but a slog.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Saturday. www.rosamundfelsen.com.

christopher.knight@latimes.com