An artist mines her Ps and Qs

Sleight-of-hand magic, say practitioners, depends on diverting the audience’s attention. While a magician steers onlookers’ eyes in one direction, he or she performs an act of concealment or revelation somewhere else. Tauba Auerbach’s work has a marvelous, magical quality about it, but not puff-of-smoke, wave-of-wand, sleight-of-hand magic. Instead, it enacts a more profound perceptual trick, art’s oldest ace in the hole: awakening us to the amazements of the ordinary and familiar.

Auerbach doesn’t distract our gaze as much as she refines it, so that we’re actively rather than passively perceiving. Her work originates in the everyday magic of cognition, the miracle of mind and eye in concert, transforming what we see into what we know. Her tools are the letters of the alphabet. Her focus is on the consonance and friction between the letters’ dual roles as images and building blocks of meaning. In her subtly stunning show of works on paper at New Image Art, she reinvests those mundane modules of the alphabet with the power they were always meant to have but which has dimmed through regular, unceremonial use.

“Eye Exam #4� features rows of black block letters in diminishing size, typical of an eye chart, except every one is the letter “C.� With clinical cleanliness, Auerbach sets in motion a delightful, punning circularity. In “How to Spell the Alphabet,� each letter is written out in red, phonetically: ey, bee, cee, dee, ee, ef, djee and so on through ex, wai and zee. The self-reflexivity of language describing itself has provocative charm, and Auerbach’s use of a lettering style that’s vaguely retro gives the page an appealing graphic buzz.

Auerbach works as a sign painter in San Francisco, practicing old-fashioned techniques of hand lettering. The process, she notes in her artist’s statement, “is slow and beautiful and personal.�

Three large (about 4 feet tall) ink-on-paper pieces in the show read as love letters (pun intended) to the alphabet. Each is an extravagant calligraphic interpretation of a single letter. Exquisite swirling strokes are edged by fine scalloped lines and complemented by delicate geometric tracery. The letters themselves are nearly impossible to identify. They’ve been subsumed by the beauty of their own ornamentation, like the capital letters of illuminated manuscripts.

In another piece, Auerbach lays out the Braille alphabet as black dots in a pencil-line grid, again emphasizing the visual pattern of a code designed as a vehicle for meaning. Auerbach raises intriguing questions about the relationship between sign and signifier (a hot and heady theme among contemporary artists) with refreshing concreteness.

Her art immediately brings to mind the installations of the late Margaret Kilgallen. Auerbach shares with Kilgallen (a friend from overlapping years at Stanford) a dedication to craft, the work of the hand and a fascination with the vernacular.

In a few less penetrating pieces, Auerbach explores the differences between analog and digital representation. Those, along with a chandelier installation in a small, adjacent part of the gallery, are the only works of just moderate interest in the show. Otherwise, Auerbach carries us from piece to piece with humor and incisiveness, honing our gaze and attention.

A fantastic little accordion-fold book called “All True #1� is an experiment, she writes, “with using language to cheat itself.� The book begins with the word “yes� facing one of its synonyms, “consent.� On the next page, “consent� is paired with one of its synonyms, “permission.� These pairs of equivalent words continue one small step at a time up to the final word, “no,� which follows logically and yet comes as a shock. Has Auerbach performed sleight-of-hand, changing “yes� into “no�? No, the language has done it itself, all under our watchful eye. Auerbach has -- not merely but cannily -- acted as sculptor, massaging a material far more pliable than we ever imagined.

A debut show of an artist in her early 20s could hardly be more invigorating.

New Image Art, 1005 N. Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood, (323) 654-2192, through May 7. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

*

Making the flood of images diverting

One of the occupational hazards of the postmodern artist is a lazy pull toward recycling images that have come before, in lieu of generating anew. Too often the practice delivers a kind of clip-art collage that indulges in contemporary culture’s visual abundance without purposeful intent, criticality, poetry or humor.

The method, though, can also yield wonders. Richard Gate’s new paintings at Ruth Bachofner are highly satisfying stabs at making sense -- but not too much -- of our everyday condition of sensory overload. They reconcile fresh and familiar, building rhymes and resonances among various modes of visual description. Gate’s work is a matter of selection and combination as much as creation, and is guided by a sensibility that never goes slack. He edges each square panel with a crisp band of white paint that brings to mind the border of a photographic print or slide, a reminder that the artist is isolating something from a vast continuum.

Gate weaves together abstract lines and loops, photo-mechanically reproduced snippets of illustration and an assortment of opaque painted shapes and images in compositions that are consistently taut and texturally rich. Sections of rice paper collaged to the surface act as a veiling scrim, muting the volume in places. In others, pigment seeps into the grain of the birch panels and softly stains it. Patterns in nature, maps of force fields and medieval family trees might all appear in a single image. Gate’s appetite for the visual world is omnivorous but disciplined enough to offer much more than just an uninflected mirror of what’s out there.

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through May 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Political charge energizes group

“Propeller� inaugurates an annual series at Steve Turner featuring artists of African descent who’ve had little or no exposure in L.A. The first installment, organized by Brooklyn-based independent curator Trevor Schoonmaker, includes work by seven artists, most living on the East Coast.

Although “being black in America is undoubtedly a part of who they are,� Schoonmaker writes in the catalog, cultural identity is not the expressed theme of this uneven show. Nevertheless, all seven artists create work that is politically if not historically charged, revolving around issues of race and power.

Satch Hoyt takes on the controversial Jack Johnson in a sculpture and paintings that don’t benefit from the complexity of the boxer’s persona. Hank Willis Thomas is more successful in his wide-ranging work conflating slavery with the buying, selling and corporate “branding� of professional black athletes.

Marc Robinson presents a short video de-heroicizing Malcolm X and a powerful ink drawing of despairing masses. Adia Millett’s cross-stitched pieces recall the subversive embroideries of Elaine Reichek, but the imagery of “protective� devices such as bullets and a condom reads as simplistic. In her shaped collages, Deborah Grant channels pent-up rage through the busy energy of a high school art project.

The most nuanced works in the show are Roberto Visani’s gun assemblages, crafted of leather, feathers, shells and bells, and Marcia Kure’s paintings on paper reinterpreting Goya’s “Disasters of War.� Both adopt forms marrying rawness with sophistication. They skirt specifics but manage to evoke the complex intersection of trauma, power and beauty. Though not all of the work leaves such an enduring impression, it doesn’t diminish anticipation for the next batch of introductions.

Steve Turner Gallery, 275 S. Beverly Drive, Suite 200, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-3721, through May 21. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

*

The makeup is wearing off

For one of the wall pieces in her show at Shoshana Wayne, Rachel Lachowicz created a mosaic-style portrait of John Baldessari out of small pats of eye shadow in tones of blue, gray, black and ivory. From a distance, the colored tiles coalesce into a likeness. Nearer, the assemblage reads as abstract pattern.

A playful discussion could be had about the cosmetic function of the material versus portraiture’s ostensible goal, to capture not just surface but identity. The conversation could be extended to bring in Chuck Close, whose painting methods Lachowicz mimics, and also Baldessari himself, legendary for his wry dissection of the conventions of visual representation. Lachowicz does all the “wrong� things here, using a mundane, feminine material to render a heroic male figure. She’s upended convention several times over. So why doesn’t the work generate a sense of commotion? Why is the work so dull? Because it can be explained away so readily and completely, and because Lachowicz has told this same calculated joke too many times before.

Recasting minimalist sculptures in red lipstick deservedly snapped the art world to attention when Lachowicz first did it over a decade ago. She’s continued to spoof Modernism’s machismo by conflating its vigorous gestures (Kline) and sober profundity (Judd, Serra) using girl stuff, powders and potions made to enhance our rank in the mating game. The audacious, though, has given way over the years to the merely amusing, and this batch of wall works and sculptures, taking on Mondrian, LeWitt, Kelly and Serra, has trouble sustaining even that.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through May 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.