LA CIENEGA AREA

Susana Lago stresses that her mixed-media paintings don’t attempt to illustrate the poems of Emily Dickinson so much as they are inspired by them; nonetheless, Lago’s work still seems to wander rather far afield from the spirit of the neurasthenic New England poetess.

Though some of Lago’s imagery is on target--a bird escaping its cage, a small plastic replica of the human heart, a tiny figurine of a child curled into the fetal position--she tends to encrust her pictures with thick, gooey passages of riotous Day-Glo color that are at odds with the whispered fragility central to Dickinson’s work. Moreover, Lago’s materials--chicken wire, plastic toys, color photographs--seem a bit too coarse to achieve the object at hand. The results are more akin to folk-art fetishes than the gossamer meditations that Dickinson’s work would seem to evoke. (Mekler Gallery, 651 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Sept. 30.)