Wilshire Center

Endangered Earth: “The Environment in Crisis” is an eight-artist group show organized to focus on the urgent theme of the endangered environment. Quality work and thoughtful organization give the show some resonance.

Each artist has a bone to pick with the state of the planet. Most poignant are Kim Abeles’ smog-stained pieces of clear glass sandblasted with images of lungs and President Bush’s portrait that quietly but elegantly make the problem and politics clear. Tania Lorenz’s paintings of endangered rain forest wildlife are coded with symbols for medicine and science and shielded behind images of dams and bulldozers to suggest progress and civilization.

Martin Betz’s upholstered pseudo-wildernesses add cutting levity, something definitely needed after reading the best and worst projections for the future written on Beverly Naidus’ haunting “Nightmare Quilt.” Far more subtle is Barbara Magnus’ wire womb “Freeze,” which links industry with the petrification of life.

All that hostility gets so heavy-handed it sinks Richard Roederer’s “Exxop” paintings. More effective on many levels is his black goo covered mailbox with dead fish and oil encrusted sea otter silently soliciting cut up Exxon credit cards. Sheila Pinkel and Genevieve Pacana’s assemblage pieces strive with mixed success to make abstract facts seem real. (Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., to April 7.)