Amid the celestial strands

With its concrete floor, high ceiling and tall windows facing a bustling stretch of Main Street downtown, the front room at Bank would be a handsome space no matter what sort of artwork the gallery happened to be exhibiting. The site-specific installation you’ll find there now, however -- Fran Siegel’s “Daylight Savings� -- is so attentive to its character, so delicately calibrated to its charms and so beautiful that it elevates the space altogether, inspiring a whole new level of appreciation.

Made with more than 400 strands of multicolored monofilament that are suspended above the length of the space and dotted with small cones of either transparent or reflective Mylar, the work fills the upper regions of the gallery like a thin, silvery cloud. Each strand begins at the center of a single square in a large grid taped to the window above the gallery door. Some of these strands stretch to the opposite wall, ending in an even line just above another doorway; the others fan haphazardly across the adjacent wall. Some are taut; others ripple softly.

The point at which each strand attaches to the white wall is marked with a silver cone on a short, bowed stem. These forms -- something like a forest of tiny desk lamps -- cast intricate and ever-shifting patterns of shadow across the wall. Look closer and you’ll find these actual shadows mingling with faint graphite markings recording the position of other shadows at different times of the day. Thrown into this melange are a handful of small, round mirrors mounted flat on the wall, each accompanied by a Mylar disk suspended like a flower blossom on a short piece of wire.

Like the best site-specific work, the piece is an ode to the room: a celebration of its vaulted ceiling and tall windows and of the warm Southern Californian light they collect. It gathers this light like a dewy, three-dimensional spider web, tossing it playfully from strand to strand and animating the typically neglected space above the viewer’s head.

Several smaller works in the back two rooms of the gallery reveal a similar degree of elegance across a variety of media. One, an installation called “Dispersion� -- consisting of 47 small, roughly hewn porcelain cones mounted like so many miniature megaphones across two adjacent walls -- feels as gentle and earthy as “Daylight Savings� feels sharp and ethereal.

Another, “Force Field,� is a large, beautiful drawing resembling a topographical map in which Siegel has employed an eccentric array of media and techniques -- pencil, ink, airbrush, cutouts, bas-relief -- to a singularly graceful effect. At the heart of each is an impressively sensitive approach to materials and an exceedingly delicate hand.

Bank, 400 S. Main St., Los Angeles, (213) 621-4055, through May 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A decoy auto, a singer and UFOs

The inspiration for “One Year Later,� a multimedia installation at TELIC by the husband and wife team Davis & Davis, was a neighborhood parking shortage. The actual installation is a three-dimensional re-creation of Robert Frank’s 1956 photograph “Covered Car, Long Beach, California.� More compelling than either, however, is the offbeat path between them.

The initial idea, outlined in a statement that is clever and succinct enough to rival the effect of the installation itself, was to build a collapsible decoy car to hold a spot on the street in front of the artists’ home while they were away. Long Beach-based photographers, they turned naturally to Frank’s photograph.

This sparked an interest in 1950s Cadillacs, which led them to stories of the Men in Black, the robot-like agents who are purported to appear on the scene of UFO encounters to intimidate witnesses and who are often said to drive 1950s Cadillacs, and then to Johnny Cash, who both drove Cadillacs and sang about them and who also happened to be known as the Man in Black.

Cash debuted at the Grand Ole Opry, they note, one year after Frank’s photograph was taken (hence the title of the exhibition), wearing all black, singing “Cry, Cry, Cry,� whose lyrics, the artists point out, “speak of surveillance, interrogation and threat, hallmarks of Cold War domestic intelligence operations.� The year was also, they add, that of the first Sputnik launch and, in its wake, a rash of purported UFO sightings.

Most of these details appear somewhere in the installation, which revolves around a life-size model of the covered car within which we see the silhouettes of several animatronic men singing along with a recording of the Johnny Cash song. Aside from the novelty of experiencing a familiar photograph in three dimensions, however, the installation offers little that one couldn’t gather more concisely from the statement.

The installation was an ambitious undertaking from a technical point of view, and it represents a significant shift in scale from the more intimate photographic tableaux of dolls and toys that have been the artists’ mainstay in recent years. But though the direction may be admirable, a degree of nuance was lost in the transition.

TELIC, 975 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 344-6137, through May 20. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

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Hunger meets mere consumption

The sculptures in Cynthia Minet’s exhibition “Hybrids� at the Solway Jones Gallery combine the forms of carnivorous plant life -- Venus fly traps and the like -- with the materials of an arguably carnivorous industry: young women’s fashion. The effect is menacing and seductive, creepy and playful in equal measure -- think “Little Shop of Horrors� set in a Claire’s accessory shop.

Minet’s are fascinating objects: spindly, biomorphic creations resembling tangled vines, stems, pods and blossoms, fabricated from glossy, sherbet-colored vinyl and fuzzy, girlish fabrics. Bound up with zippers, snaps and crazy diagonal seams, they’re bursting with erotic energy.

There are four in all, ranging from 2 to 11 feet high. Each is mounted to the wall, though all but one spill toward or onto the floor. Despite an air of gaudy haphazardness, they’re intricately constructed and gain much of their potency from a shrewd economy of means. Minet clearly chooses her materials carefully and sticks to only a few at a time, ensuring that each plays to full effect.

On view alongside the sculptures are four floral “drawings� made with a sewing machine and colored thread on thick white paper. Though considerably less substantial than the sculptures, these have their charms as well.

The political undertone of the work is subtle but suggestive, encouraging viewers to consider the more sinister side of fashion and to explore the ramifications of our consumer appetites.

Solway Jones Gallery, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 937-7354, through May 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A subject as big as all outdoors

With his barrel chest, thick hands and broad, earthy face, Australian painter Fred Williams (1927-1982) dominates most of the photographs in the catalog for L.A. Louver’s current exhibition of his late work. These include snapshots of the artist in his studio, at home reading and walking through a park with his family.

In the pictures that portray Williams painting in the field, however -- a routine practice of his -- his presence is almost diminutive, dwarfed by the vast, variegated landscape that was his principal subject. These two formidable forces -- the painter (a heavyweight in his own country, if not so well known here) and the landscape -- come into balance only in the paintings, all of which date from the last six years of the artist’s life.

They fall into three general categories: tightly cropped, sky-less depictions of waterfalls and streambeds; broad, open vistas; and aerial views. Each is exuberantly gestural, characterized by a showering of quick, dry, impulsive strokes across fields of smooth color. Each flirts with abstraction but retains a firm connection to at least one recognizable element of the landscape.

The most spectacular is a roughly 5-by-6-foot aerial painting called “Riverbed,� in which a smooth, fiery, red-orange field is bisected by a narrow, yellowish canal within which meanders a single black line so full of personality -- whether that of the painter, the river itself or some perfect fusion of the two -- that it nearly quivers.

L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through May 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.