Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor, "Installation View, No-Names: Recent Sculpture, 2008,  at David Salow Gallery

Melinda Ring/Jennifer Nelson at THE BOX
A raw wooden roost, built into the high gallery ceiling, houses white, brown and gray pigeons during choreographer Melinda Ring and artist Jennifer Nelson's month-long collaboration "For the Birds." They have reserved a small nook of an office for the gallerist up a makeshift stair, synchronizing the business of art with the flights and cooing of the temporary occupants, themselves professionals in their field. These birds are commonly "rented out" for weddings and the like and have an instinctual script the artists have capitalized on. I am reminded of the way a large flock of white birds was captured in flight by CNN's cameras during the Inauguration and released perfectly on cue by editors. The artists, with the help of volunteers, present daily videos made in their temporary basement/studio/bedroom. On the seeded floor, Aretha Franklin's huge bow hovers to her soaring rendition of the National Anthem. Other videos featuring a day of "psychedelia" and daily maintenance of the installation are more obtuse but no less poetic when you stand there feeling the gentle wind of wings and watch the attitude of the birds themselves, at once curious about you, accepting of your presence and difference, and busy with their own motions of society.

Lisa Adams at Lawrence Asher Gallery
"The Future of Paradise Past" imparts ambiguity and curiosity as the semantic trickery of the show's title echoes a Proustian contradiction, one that arouses the viewer.

However, they must also contend with works that question the state of nature — as if looking to the past from 50 years in the future. After the Deluge establishes the first of many tentative moments. The handling of a High Amateur face with a single brush stroke is remninscent of a forgotten sketch left on Picasso's studio floor. Deluge introduces the tentative line accomplished by dipping paint on an illustration board and then applying it to the canvas without a ruler. The technique is implemented on several of Adams' canvases and reveals the unsteady, imperfect hand of the artist. We destroyed the things we loved, whose title means that destruction has already taken place, is the only work to include spray paint. Adams tags her own work, nearly destroying an à la prima glacier with the word "Albedo," a climatology term designed to measure the light reflected from the solar ice caps. The irony is reiterated by the fractured and drifting iceberg nearly obliterated by glistening silver spray paint. Adams' work celebrates the near-moment entangled in its own uncertainty, contradictions and possibilities.

Martin Gunsaullus at Western Project
Martin Gunsaullus' first solo exhibition at Western Project is rife with singularity, inventiveness and fierce human longing. It's a true pleasure to see work that mines a more narrative field, especially at a gallery that has historically exhibited more traditional abstract work. Comprising both drawings and paintings on wood panel, Gunsaullus' work translates a personally derived psychological terrain into a richly complex and sometimes difficult social mythology, strangely Kubrickian at times, wherein everyone stands gazing outward, their Eyes Wide Shut.

Drawings like Untitled (October 2006) are fundamentally explosive as the main figure in the work holds his hands up, one of which is clearly maimed, his face twisted into a Bacon-like scream, though Gunsaullus' work has more in common with artists such as Ben Shahn, whose best work speaks directly to both social and political issues. Gunsaullus has the same gift for simplicity and understated power.

Paintings like Ceremonial Offerings offer a highly charged narrative of a man smoking a cigarette and standing in a rocky, mountainous landscape. The tension here derives from the fact the figure seems oblivious to his surroundings, ignoble, yet vaguely haughty. The theme of human responsibility runs through all of Gunsaullus' work. In Polarity, for example, another vague man of affectation sits with his back to the melting polar ice caps. His coffee is getting cold while the rest of the world heats up around him, though his disillusionment is more a result of arrogance than deep personal reflection.

Farrah Karapetian at Sandroni Rey
As the third endeavor of her self-portrait series, Los Angeles-based artist Farrah Karapetian offers the installation "Tragic Muse" at Culver City's Sandroni Rey Gallery. The large-scale suite of nine sepia-toned photos features a central panel that presents the artist's own likeness surrounded by panels of other anonymous figures. Karapetian enhances their anonymity by contrast of method: Her self-portrait is created from a nearly full-scale negative, while the company she keeps is merely faceless, life-sized photograms. While she (made slightly smaller than in real life) gazes at her viewers with a fixed expression, the figures around her dance, walk and wait, oblivious to the audience. Her own image appears neither attractive nor unattractive, formally dressed in a suit with signature unruly hair. Despite all her depicted specificity, Karapetian comes across as decidedly lifeless. Her presence among these paper dolls perhaps exists to show her alienation from the masses, her feeling of being uninvolved in the world that surrounds her. The viewer clearly senses the tension of such disconnect, but the somewhat modest installation could benefit from the support of more related pieces. The limitations of this suite make Karapetian's theme seem overly accessible, leaving plenty of room for deeper, heartier content.

David Stone at Charlie James Gallery
David Stone has a sense of humor that might not be apparent from the title of his show "Unanticipated Despair (Despite Prior Naïve Optimism)," but his work is full of such blunt surprises. The video still TV Car Chase 2 has ended in a wreck and Bugs, Dead, a sprawling photo of a windshield, personalizes the icky moment when a butterfly — now head height and the size of a face — has exploded across a field of vision. The clean conceptual strategy is executed without fail, like a clean drive on a nail punch to inset what has already been hammered into the mind, and thus forgotten, by our use of daily objects and language. The titular gesture in white neon Eventually You Will Die (plus more words) antagonizes the viewer with the enviable life and materiality of "signs." After Easter Dinner — food scraps clogging a sink — suggests the resurrection of image despite bodies and vision becoming compost. Stone is from an older generation that still has much to teach upcoming generations before he runs his own time. His broken-glass game Precarious Twister (State I) is a puzzle that dares your body, an image of play and engagement.

Michael Arata at Cabrini Gallery
Michael Arata's installation, "Obstacle Course," at Woodbury College's Cabrini Gallery, is the little show that could. Arata is well known as the curator of the late-'90s' "One Night Stand" shows at the Farmer's Daughter Motel in LA. In "Obstacle Course," Arata employs the same fascination with the banal that made him famous at the Farmer's Daughter. Arata incorporates the gallery's fabric-covered walls and found coffee cups, creating a piece that pulls down the pretense of institutional space and begs for audience participation. The paintings in the installation are hung deliberately off-kilter in various dimensions. The individual canvases are meant to be arranged and rearranged by gallery visitors, making light of their modest surroundings. On the floor, biomorphic sculptures seethe from the ground in concentric rings. Near the rings, sculptural stones painted with female faces are strewn on the floor for audience members to toss around. On a nearby table, large striped phallic forms sit nested like baguettes in free promotional coffee cups.

Arata's amusing show mocks the obstacle course of human relationships in a provocative and unpretentious way, leaving us begging for another "One Night Stand."

NEW YORK

Jeff Davis at KS Art
Evanescence as a stand-in for the concept of divinity is an old trope — perhaps at least as old as the old bearded man in the sky (best epitomized by Michaelangelo's version). These are absurd, cartoon-y clichés at this point, and their evocation in the work of Jeff Davis somehow reminds me of the sense of perplexity that the New Yorker cartoon caption contest evokes (without much resembling New Yorker cartoons stylistically.) Bearded figures of varyingly incongruous sizes perform bizarre feats such as vomiting up rainbows while a set of disembodied cartoon eyeballs appears in the unlikeliest of places: the backside of a bearded figure, just above his buttocks, for instance.

In terms of draftsmanship, this is just plain wrong — although his touch with watercolor is generally virtuosic in an offhand and off-kilter sort of way (though a little too removed, emotionally, perhaps). Figuratively, though, here is the trickster manifest — a shamanic force, viewing life from a skewed perspective: cheerfully reminding us of the intractability of certain metaphysical paradoxes, the impossibility of reason, and our inherent inability to see our own selves clearly. What's the punchline? — you may wonder.