A wooden creation, as lovely as a tree

If a tree falls in an art gallery and the entire art world is there to hear it, what kind of sound does it make?

That’s one question that comes to mind in the presence of Charles Ray’s strange, evocative new sculpture, “Hinoki,” which inaugurates a second space opened by Regen Projects. It’s Ray’s first L.A. gallery show in a decade, and he’s spent the better part of those last 10 years working on this monumental piece. The sculpture is a hand-crafted doppelganger of a hollow, 32-foot-long oak log the artist stumbled upon rotting away in a field.

One answer to the question might be that in the presence of “Hinoki” you hear the sound of silence. Perception falters in a commotion. Any profound work of art commands a hush to allow experience to ripen fully.

“Hinoki” is a puzzle. The sculpture is assembled from scores of interlocking blocks of laminated Hinoki cypress, a wood native to central Japan, where it is used in the construction of palaces and temples. Each block was carefully carved in Osaka under the direction of master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his assistants. Every detail of the once mighty, now fallen oak, outside and inside and including wayward limbs, is reproduced, right down to worm holes and termite trails.

The sculpture’s exterior is like the surface of the ocean -- a sea of small, rippling chisel marks -- but the linear seams in the blocks’ joinery are not hidden. The log is an organic shape, yet the geometric suggestion of a three-dimensional grid is inescapable. The virtual form might even have been plotted on a computer screen.

The cypress blocks on which the sculpture rests further describe the idealized, rational grid. They form a nominal pedestal, reverently elevating the work just above an earthbound plane.

The color of “Hinoki” is peculiar -- a sort of flaxen orange, like raw chicken skin, with a slight iridescence depending on the light. Over centuries the wood will slowly mellow and the color darken, until finally it is almost black. And because it is wood, rather than stone, metal or a synthetic, this is one sculpture destined eventually to fall to pieces. Art, like nature, inevitably decays.

Among Hinoki cypress’ many appealing characteristics for its traditional, distinguished uses in Japanese construction is the wood’s hardy resistance to rot. Using it to create a ghost double for a rotted oak tree underlines Ray’s thematic arc. The blunt and inescapable impact of mortality is expanded, stretched out, slowed to a nearly imperceptible crawl.

The sculptor is a latter-day Mary Shelley, jolting artificial life into a corpse. That the sculpture is alive is further revealed by the presence in the gallery of several humidifiers, quietly churning out just the right amount of atmospheric moisture to allow the cut, carved, distressed and laminated wood to relax, settle down and regain a measured stability. A log is a segment of a tree trunk, but it’s also a record of events. Ray’s log embodies both.

“Hinoki” recalls Ray’s last extraordinary show at Regen, 1997’s “Unpainted Sculpture,” which was an exact duplicate of a violently crashed American automobile rendered in spectral gray fiberglass. And it further brings to mind his earliest student work, known only from a pair of 1973 photographs: He propped his body high up on a wall -- not unlike a painting -- by wedging it against the wall with a wooden plank.

“Hinoki” doesn’t possess the almost melodramatic appeal of “Unpainted Sculpture.” It’s more Eastern in contemplative tone and feeling than the Western expressiveness of a car crash. But “Hinoki” is distinctive as a log of Ray’s career as an artist, which is easily among the most important of the last 20 years.

Regen Projects II, 9016 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through June 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.regenprojects.com.

Illuminating digital video

Washington, D.C.-based artist Brandon Morse has titled his appealing L.A. solo debut “Turbulent State,” which aptly characterizes this moment in time. He gets even more specific in “Burning Bush,” a digitally animated video that is both oracular and politically barbed.

The three video projections at d.e.n. contemporary show abstract forms in states of perpetual transition. “1 ppm” -- parts per million, presumably -- is a light, airy, computer-generated white blob, which hovers in dark space, casts an illusionistic shadow and changes shape like diaphanous fabric held aloft in an unseen breeze. “Sentinel” essentially multiplies that form by five.

In both, the perpetual flux is endowed with a sense of interminable imminence -- as if something is about to happen but never does. As you watch the hypnotizing forms flutter and morph, “something” is already always happening, a fact that endows the work with a Zen-like sense of enlightenment. The glowing forms become gigantic representations of the tiny flickering pixels of light from which they’re made.

“Burning Bush” is a floor-to-ceiling diptych in which mirror images each show five blood-red square pillars lined up across a black field. The top of one, then another and eventually all five begin to bubble and billow, a deformation that gets steadily larger and devours its own form. Finally the entire visual field is engulfed in rippling red liquidity.

Without describing the World Trade Center towers, “Burning Bush” evokes the events of 9/11 and after. Running on a continuous loop, with an audio soundtrack like pulsing sonar, the six-minute projection develops a cyclical rhythm of loss and redemption that is by turns horrific, illuminating and consoling.

In a rear gallery, Morse also shows a pair of digital works on flat-panel monitors. They suggest computer screen-savers as a surprising source of inspiration for the marvelous visual koans in the front room.

d.e.n. contemporary, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-3023, through May 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.dencontemporaryart.com.

From small pieces, impressive images

British sculptor David Mach has been using mass-produced objects to make figurative sculptures for more than 20 years. His best work creates a sharp resonance between the chosen material and the figurative form.

Mach’s show at Forum Gallery includes a terrific bear’s head, mounted on the wall like a hunting trophy, assembled from thousands of colorfully tipped wooden safety matches that together imply the potential for sudden, devastating violence. Though much smaller, this modest but exciting art-bomb blows away a larger-than-life pair of standing nudes cleverly -- and inexplicably -- built from wire coat hangers. Some riff on the nakedness of Adam and Eve, perhaps?

The remaining seven works are 6-foot-square postcard collages. Some are jokey, like a portrait of Elvis Presley -- the King -- built from thousands of scissored pictures of Queen Elizabeth II, in a goofy display of the bond across the pond. “Starstruck” is the Statue of Liberty’s crowned head, composed of Carol Channing’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Others are more sober. A grinning golden Buddha is slyly made from glittering pictures of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

The standout, though, is a robust, rippling American flag put together from thousands of pictures of Pamela Anderson in her signature red “Baywatch” swimsuit. The cards have square holes in them, like old IBM punch-cards or Florida voting ballots. Titled “Tour of Duty,” it’s a winningly vulgar Betty Grable pinup for our current flag-waving time of war.

Forum Gallery, 8069 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 655-1565, through June 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .forumgallery.com.

Emerging from inky darkness

“Dusk” is a lovely suite of photographs made from 2002 to 2006 by Brian Forrest that play time’s passage against itself. Large light-jet prints are mounted on 4-foot sheets of black plexiglass; on first glance, they appear to contain no image.

Spend a moment, and out of the inky darkness landscape imagery slowly comes into view. Dusk dawns.

The dense black pictures have the sooty feel of charcoal drawings. The foreground in each work is a tangle of underbrush, tree limbs or cascading leaves, through which one glimpses a rustic, enveloping middle-ground. (The photographs were shot in canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains.) Backgrounds are flat specks of gray light -- an infinity.

As the raw landscape comes into view, so does something wholly unexpected. Plexiglass reflects light. A viewer standing in front of the black picture becomes a shadow-figure reflected in it, appearing to move through the underbrush.

Like light-and-space sculptures, paintings and installations, Forrest’s photographs engage perceptual phenomena to revelatory effect.

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through May 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.