Painter Fashions a Thoughtful Commentary

Visiting contemporary art galleries is a lot like window-shopping: You don’t have to spend a dime to have a good time, and every once in a while, something you see changes the way you see things. Amy Wheeler’s abstract paintings begin with this wisdom, using it to catch viewers in thoughtful games animated by shifting perceptions and heightened self-awareness.

Her acrylics on canvas are spare. At Shoshana Wayne Gallery, six consist of evenly painted fields of elegant charcoal grays (some of which lean toward smoky browns) and rich, creamy whites (some with a hint of beige).

Atop these tasteful shades, Wheeler paints rectangular planes of similar tints, sometimes aligning them with the picture plane and at other times arranging them diagonally, so that they appear to recede into the background. Some stand alone, recalling reflections in glass doors as they open and close. Others are juxtaposed and clustered, creating abstract shapes that resemble counters and display pedestals.

To stand before Wheeler’s radically simplified images is to feel as if you’re on a sidewalk, staring into a beautifully arranged boutique, whose smartly designed interior, stylish staff and gorgeous goods make life look picture-perfect. Painted from memories of visits to Costume National and Katayoni Adeli stores in Los Angeles and New York, the works reveal that Minimalism and Light-and-Space art have influenced the world of high fashion at least as much as they have shaped the world of contemporary art.

While the grounds of Wheeler’s canvases are smoothly painted, brush strokes appear in the semi-translucent and loosely rectangular shapes. Drawing equally upon Mary Heilmann’s casually confident abstractions and Gunther Umberg’s tight, impeccably refined monochromes, Wheeler is something of a slacker connoisseur, a painter for whom just a little of just the right thing goes an awful long way.

The two best paintings, whose foregrounds are vertically traversed by crimson and burgundy bands, take you inside the stores. Recalling the sexy stripe paintings Tim Bavington makes with an airbrush, Wheeler’s hip versions of this newly fashionable style position viewers behind racks of expensive dresses, each of which hangs with plenty of space separating it from the next one. This allows you to see most of the store’s open interior, and to look out its front windows, through which diffuse sunlight spills.

Whether you’re on the inside looking out or on the outside looking in, Wheeler’s paintings highlight the sense of drifting attentiveness that sometimes accompanies window-shopping. A touch of melancholy suffuses her sensitive works, whose understated gracefulness ensures that they are not shop-till-you-drop celebrations of consumerism but poignant meditations on contemporary art’s place in the system.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through July 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Mixing Messages: Fred Stonehouse’s compact paintings of suffering saints, dissatisfied devils and tormented humans depict an out-of-whack world in which there’s no hope for redemption--otherworldly or otherwise. Nevertheless, despair and hopelessness are nowhere to be found in his acrylics on panel, which resemble the unholy offspring of traditional religious icons and hand-painted advertisements for carnival sideshows.

At Koplin Gallery, a pair of framed pictures functions like bookends to the mishaps and misfortunes chronicled by the show as a whole. “Va Voir” depicts a Catholic missionary who stands in a bone-strewn wasteland, smoking a cigarette with his eyes closed in contentment as he holds a banner emblazoned with a French idiom.

“Mirror” portrays the devil, who looks a lot less debonair and diabolical than usual. Dressed in a frumpy blue suit and standing on a fiery plain under a smoke-choked sky, the puffy-eyed fiend blows soap bubbles and holds a banner on which the same message is printed in reverse.

French for “Go look outside and see if I’m there,” the phrase is a polite way of saying “get lost.” Together, Stonehouse’s votive paintings suggest that the established representatives of Good and Evil are burned-out bigwigs, ineffective leaders and clueless figureheads who can’t be bothered with the mundane struggles of ordinary folks.

Such trials and tribulations animate all of the Milwaukee-based artist’s weirdly endearing works, in which forlorn figures sweat and shed glistening tears as they strive to make sense of a world in which ships sink, alligators abscond with castaways, artists are punished, dolls sprout dog’s heads and men turn into serpents.

A second pair of paintings, featuring a human-headed cow and a cow-headed human, gives comical form to the disparity between ideals and reality. Although the first captioned picture lists seven Christian virtues in Spanish and the second spells out the seven deadly sins in French, neither reveals how our bodies and minds might reconcile such contradictory desires.

In the cosmos that takes shape in Stonehouse’s paintings, things never go as planned and rarely work out for the best. That isn’t all that different from the real world, where the ability to laugh at life’s absurdities--and at oneself--provides something like saving grace.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A., (310) 657-9843, through July 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

No Room for Reality: In the 1980s, Peter Halley’s schematic paintings of the exteriors of blocky cells brought Minimalism up to date by making its abstract forms refer to both batteries and prisons. Today, Miriam Dym’s elaborate diagrams build on this precedent, providing interior views of imaginary laboratories, research facilities and information-processing centers.

Just inside the entrance of Post Gallery, three page-size inkjet prints depict the floor plans of three fictional spaces. Neatly printed patterns, in a patriotic palette of various shades of red, white and blue, present two-dimensional overviews of rooms whose oddly angled architecture and specialized hardware appear to have been designed for precise purposes.

Each of the gallery’s three remaining walls is covered by a hand-drawn, mural-scale translation of one of Dym’s prints. The three-dimensional illusionism of these huge, labor-intensive ink drawings allows them to convey a lot more information than their two-dimensional counterparts.

For example, a series of small concentric circles attached to three straight lines in “Ground Plan for Scooter Room” becomes a tall pole from which three banners fly in “Scooter Room.” Likewise, life-size doors, stairs, railings, work stations and banks of computers take on weight and volume as they are rendered according to the rules of one-point perspective.

Titled “Means of Conveyance,” Dym’s exhibition is a map-reader’s delight. It’s easy to fall into the virtual world her six works create as you look back and forth between the two views of each room, piecing together an overall view and noting inconsistencies between them.

Sometimes, these “glitches” are small, as when several components that are not depicted in “Red Ramp Room Ground Plan” mysteriously appear in “Red Ramp Room.” At other times they are obvious, as when the pinwheel configuration in “Ramp Buckets Room Ground Plan” is nowhere to be found in “Ramp Buckets Room.”

In both cases, Dym’s prints and drawings absorb your attention in the same way that computer games do: When you’re under their spell, you don’t mind leaving the real world behind.

* Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, L.A., (213) 622-8580, through Saturday, June 30.

Fleeting Glimpses of L.A.: No bigger than the ceramic tiles in stylish old bathrooms, Nolina Burge’s exquisite oils on aluminum panel have one foot firmly planted in the world of traditional landscape painting and the other firmly pressed on the accelerator. Rendered with the precision of a miniaturist, each jewel-like image packs vast expanses of space into tiny dimensions while suggesting that the landscape of Southern California is best seen through the window of a speeding automobile.

At Ruth Bachofner Gallery, the young L.A. painter’s second solo show is considerably more complex than her 1999 debut, which featured treetops silhouetted against various skies, including crystal-clear blue ones, hazy gray ones and others tinted with the dirty orange glow of smog-filtered sunlight. To this attractive if limited format, Burge has added horizon lines and a much wider variety of cloud covers, ranging from dense marine banks to sunny afternoon skies punctuated by towering cumulus and softly lit evenings accented by wispy cirrus.

The skyline of downtown Los Angeles appears in about a third of her pictures, always seen from at least 15 miles away. Set amid tree-covered hills and far-off mountain ranges, it is suffused with the dreamy splendor of Oz.

Most of the rest of Burge’s landscapes present panoramic overviews of the L.A. basin. To her credit, she steers clear of high drama, avoiding the sort of spectacular sunsets and pristine naturalism of calendar imagery. Instead, her unpretentious paintings recall the quick glimpses you steal out of the corner of your eye as you drive the winding roads in the hills above the city.

The tiny size of Burge’s square panels (each measures only 3, 4 or 5 inches on a side) emphasizes the fleeting nature of L.A.’s beauty, the fact that it often looks best in an instant--flashing by almost as swiftly as a single frame of film in a movie. And, like the best previews, Burge’s works leave you wanting more. Her subject and talent merit bigger pictures.

* Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through July 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.