ART / AROUND THE GALLERIES

Active for nearly a decade, the performance collective My Barbarian has made a name for itself. Its peculiar brand of musical theater combines theory-inflected social critique and parody with high-school talent-show aesthetics and over-the-top glam-rock stage antics, all delivered with a weird enthusiasm that renders even the most obscure references giddily palatable.

In performances, recordings, videos and installations, most of them at least obliquely narrative, the three-member group (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade) draws on a bafflingly disparate array of influences, including ancient mythology, Broadway musicals, Noh theater and Jazzercise. The result is a distinctive visual and theatrical language that feels driven by a logic all its own.

Their most recent enterprise -- and the focus of their show “Suspension of Beliefs” at Steve Turner Contemporary -- is “Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT)”, a series of workshops conducted in multiple cities over the last year.

Building on the tropes of 1960s experimental theater, the group sought to train participants in a handful of principles encouraging self-awareness and interactivity, as outlined in a statement written by Segade. “Estrangement” is one, for instance: “the performer acts out the distance between themselves and what they are doing.”

“Indistinction” is another: “contradictory formal and institutional distinctions are set in oppositional motion. The performer does two things at once, such as singing a love song and paying taxes.”

In both the statement and the video footage contained in the exhibition, it is difficult to sort the satire from the sincerity, which is clearly part of the point -- and key to the canniness of the group’s approach.

The climate of irony that settled across the arts in the 1980s and ‘90s has made it a complicated thing to succeed, largely because it would seem to leave room for only two reactions: a dour, inflexible criticality on the one hand and blind, market-oriented enthusiasm on the other.

My Barbarian is one of an encouraging number of contemporary artists managing to forge a middle path, one that takes as a given the necessity for both criticality and enthusiasm, that embraces ambiguity and the confusion of referents as a reality rather than a strategy, that recognizes the value of humor, spectacle and visual pleasure.

That said, the exhibition itself is less than satisfying. The installation is a minimally coherent jumble, with half a dozen video projections scattered at varying angles around the gallery, cluttering the space without, somehow, seeming large enough to dominate it. Each of the four projections in the main space is further divided into two panels, making for a total of eight simultaneous frames of action, some scattered with subtitles, some not, and countless competing layers of sound.

The chaos might be interesting if the footage itself were compelling, but it rarely is. Most merely documents the activity of the workshops: groups of people -- mostly sans costume -- in bland institutional spaces either sitting and listening or engaged in various exercises, looking generally earnest and a little silly.

There are hints of intriguing conceptual issues: gaps in verbal and cultural translation; allusions to issues of globalism, collectivity, and political ideologies. But it would take a good deal of concentrated effort to draw these threads into a meaningful order.

The entertaining exception is a pair of videos screened on a monitor in the gallery’s narrow front room that were made in the more theatrical fashion of My Barbarian’s past work -- one that features the trio floating on a boat down the Nile, the other in the style of an Italian neo-realist film.

The impulse to bridge the gap between performer and audience, spectacle and interactivity, is a worthy one, and it looks to have been a success insofar as the workshops’ participants are concerned. But there remains the gap between event and exhibition, and the disconnect here is conspicuous.

It is a significant issue given the rising importance of the event as a medium in its own right, particularly in Los Angeles, and one that My Barbarian is certainly shrewd enough to engage.

Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-3721, through May 30. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.steveturnercontemporary.com

War, fire themes in sculpture

“Compliance Solutions,” Ben Jackel’s solo debut at LA Louver, is a testament to the power of a few well-chosen materials.

His primary medium is stoneware, a charcoal-colored material with a rich physical presence -- smooth but still tactile, hard and earthy but also delicate.

The choice is apt, even poetic, given the nature of his two principal themes: war and fire. Both are circumstances of disaster and devastation, in which what appears stone-like and solid -- whether the physical facade of a building or the psychological facade of a soldier -- can shatter in an instant.

The sculptures themselves are skillful reproductions of discrete objects, miniaturized in most cases but otherwise faithful -- the sculptural equivalent, say, of a Karl Haendel. The selection is focused and thoughtful.

The most engrossing is an installation of 256 miniature Greek soldiers, all bearing spears, arranged in a tight grid formation so that the spears curve into a single wave.

Also striking is an installation of seven miniature naval destroyers -- each representing an actual ship in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of World War II -- that spans the surface of one wall as if viewed from above across the surface of the ocean.

The fire theme plays out in a selection of firefighting objects, such as an ax, a fire extinguisher, a collection of sprinkler heads and a long, folded fire hose, all of which are reproduced to scale and enclosed in beautifully fabricated ebony cases. So unassuming at a glance that they could almost be mistaken for the real thing, they embody an exceptional degree of craftsmanship that illuminates the dignity of the original form.

Quiet, intelligent, elegant and concise, the show is an impressive debut.

LA Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., L.A., (310) 822-4955, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com

Real women and real lives

The photographs in “Room,” Carrie Yury’s lovely second solo show at Sam Lee Gallery, are a thoughtful play on the classic magician’s trick of sawing a female assistant in half.

Each piece is a diptych featuring a single female model, nude but for a pair of briefs, lying across her own bed. The gap between the two panels falls somewhere around the model’s waist, appearing to sever the figure in two. In most cases, her lower half is tilted toward the viewer, while the upper half is turned away, creating a subtle but unsettling sense of elongation and distortion.

The severed or manipulated female figure is a trope that extends far beyond the magician’s stage, of course, preoccupying visual artists from Pablo Picasso to Richard Prince, as well as countless feminist artists. (Nor is it limited to the level of iconography: Ciara Ennis’ essay for the show’s catalog points to the rather chilling example of the Black Dahlia.)

Yury’s approach is critically informed but also tender. These are real women, she takes pains to emphasize, with real bodies and real lives. She revels in their details and idiosyncrasies: in curves, tattoos, scars, the patterns of underwear, painted toenails and all the objects that fill their bedrooms.

The manipulation, as a result, seems less to belittle or incapacitate than expand and explore, challenging the viewers’ expectations of both the nude and portraiture.

Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., No. 190, Chinatown, (323) 227-0275, through July 3. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.samleegallery.com

Taking care, with one exception

The paintings of Katia Santibanez at Jancar Gallery are handsome if not exactly revelatory abstractions that build on a couple of basic motifs: grids, stripes and rows of jagged, grass-like tendrils, primarily. With a tasteful palette and meticulous sense of line, they speak of a careful, considerate approach, one attentive to the nuance of form and repetition.

Not surprisingly, however, the standout of the show is the painting that seems to throw caution to the wind. “Story of . . . Red” is a 20-inch-square panel featuring a thicket of delicate, undulating black lines laid over a brilliant crimson ground that’s modulated with touches of burgundy and orange. The cluster thins toward the center, suggesting a view into a cave whose walls are shaggy with the roots of nearby flora.

It is a dramatic painting, vividly seductive and sensual, with a spark of life that leaves one wondering what else lies beneath the veneer of control that characterizes all the others.

Jancar Gallery, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-2522, through May 30. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.jancargallery.com

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