Shapes and shadows of skateboards

Photographer Arthur Tress has covered a lot of ground in the course of his nearly 50-year career, from sultry black and white to vivid color and back again, from social documentary to allegory, spontaneous street scenes to meticulously staged tableaux. In his latest series at Louis Stern Fine Arts, he takes a surprisingly formalist turn, producing elegant sepia toned prints reminiscent of Stieglitz, Weston and Strand.

His subject, however, is not what you might expect. These aren’t sand dunes, clouds or nude women’s bodies but the peaks, ridges and canyons of California skate parks.

Tress isn’t the first to merge these unlikely cultures. Mainstream skateboard photographers have always relied on the stark geometric and industrial shapes -- cylinders, arcs, tubes and planes -- that make up the preferred environment, and they owe much to the Modernists for being the first to identify the photographic potential of such forms. These were the sort of landscapes Modernists sought out, and if Strand in particular were alive today it would be easy to imagine him in Tress’ place.

What distinguishes this work from mainstream skate photography is the degree of artistic self-consciousness with which Tress focuses on the landscape. Although skate photographers, like most sports photographers, tend to focus on bodies and movement, Tress lingers on static properties -- line, shape, texture and pattern -- often to the exclusion of the skaters, who appear primarily as shadows and blurs.

Tress brings to the project years of photographic experience, much of it working with still-lifes and inanimate objects, and achieves a degree of refinement that few skate photographers could hope (or perhaps would want) to approximate. Rarely has such a landscape been treated with such elegance.

Although the physical environment is Tress’ primary focus, the skaters (or in a few cases, BMX riders) do have a presence, and it is the faint element of nostalgia they seem to inspire in the artist that is the work’s other distinguishing quality.

Beneath the formal precision, there’s a sweet, almost fatherly feel to the show. Tress’ rapt attention to the details of the space suggests a man looking back to youth -- his own and, perhaps, given the elements of Modernism, the youth of his medium -- with tenderness, admiration and longing.

Also on view is “Embedded Histories,” an exquisite exhibition of sculpture by Maddy LeMel. The shows have little in common but for a mutually exceptional caliber of craftsmanship, which makes them happily complementary.

Tress’ photographs deal in heavy materials -- wood, iron, concrete -- and thick, solid, architectural forms; one thinks of Richard Serra and the Earthwork artists. LeMel works with paper, Plexiglas and thread; her touch is light, and many of her pieces are so delicately constructed that a stiff breeze would likely topple them.

The titles of several of the works suggest a political subtext, but the implications aren’t readily apparent. One senses, rather, that these are objects in which a great number of things could be buried. We see keys, photographs, fragments of text, and bits of metal and wire preserved in cocoons of paper and plastic while threads dangle seductively, waiting to be unraveled.

Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, www.louissternfinearts.com, through Sept. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Potent view of artist’s memory

San Francisco-based artist Geof Oppenheimer’s first solo show in Los Angeles, at MC, takes a form that has become familiar among artists of his generation (he was born in 1973): the quirky, mixed-media installation spun loosely around a theme relating to memory and the historical period of the artist’s youth. Oppenheimer isn’t immune to the dangers of such a formula -- a certain self-indulgence, an excessive obscurity of reference and a lax approach to materials, to name a few -- but he shows signs of moving beyond them, toward the refinement and clarity that make such conceptually oriented work potent.

The questions at play in the exhibition are ambitious and compelling, revolving around issues of obsession, spiritual longing and the roots of political violence. The central figures are John Hinckley Jr., President Reagan’s would-be assassin, and former Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, with whom the artist maintained a yearlong written correspondence.

One frustration of the show is that so little of Oppenheimer’s apparently extensive research emerges in the work. Rather, the exhibition spins a loose net of largely generic associations -- images of Reagan’s motorcade, an Oriental rug or a stick of incense; copies of fliers advertising New Age services around Marin County (where Lindh was raised); a reenacted scene from the film “Kramer vs. Kramer.”

The intention, it seems, is to create a sense of cultural ambience -- an impressionistic illustration of the context from which each of these men (as well as the artist) emerged -- but the result often feels bland and insubstantial.

I know that “Kramer vs. Kramer” signifies the onset of the era of divorce; what I want to know is what Lindh and Oppenheimer discussed in their letters and what sort of impact it had on Oppenheimer.

The strongest piece in the show, the one in which these associations cohere into a genuine insight, is “Rapture,” an installation consisting of a record player and a square of carpet strewn with an assortment of albums, which viewers are invited to change. The pattern on the carpet is an enlarged detail of the spot on a Washington, D.C., street map where Hinckley’s assassination attempt took place, and the album titles are those that investigators found in Hinckley’s hotel room. A short video projected on a nearby wall portrays the artist in a rather ridiculous disguise, attempting to stand on the carpet but slipping repeatedly on the album covers and falling, slapstick-like, back to the carpet.

Although initially concerned that my fondness for the piece rested too heavily on the fact that it was blaring Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” at the time I happened to be in the gallery, I now suspect that this was precisely the appropriate reaction. In offering viewers the contents of Hinckley’s record collection, thus recontextualizing music we’ve probably loaded with our own meanings and associations, Oppenheimer opens a path into the mind of his subject at this critical moment in his degeneration, conveying with this and the video, not only an idea but a distinct physical sense of the nature of his desperation.

MC, 6086 Comey Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 939-3777, through Saturday.

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Exposing paint’s bare essence

The mid-1950s was a heady time for painting in America, and it’s difficult to view a room full of works from that era -- in this case paintings by Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith, on view at Margo Leavin Gallery -- without a pang of nostalgia.

This is paint stripped to what was once romantically believed to be its essence, pursued for its own sake and applied with an assurance approaching religious zeal.

It’s easy to see why Smith, best known for brawny works of welded metal, would have been drawn to painting as well. One senses him churning through sculptural concepts. The brushstrokes are thick and distinct and piled onto the canvas like so many bits of clay; step back and they congeal into heavy, interlocking forms, balanced against one another with architectural precision.

Unlike his sculptures, however, the paintings are light, quick and mostly small. It must have been exhilarating for the artist to shed so much weight.

It is in the show’s dozen drawings, however, that Smith really takes off. Made with a mixture of black ink and egg yolk, they’re delicate, wispy things, floating across the walls like so many tumbleweeds. The paintings deepen one’s sense of Smith’s career as a sculptor, but the drawings -- the highlight of the show -- lend it a whole new dimension.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 273-0603, through Aug. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Six journeys of imagination

Jacques Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” released in 1974, is a thoroughly baffling but enchanting film that follows two women following each other on a circuitous path through Paris. The exhibition of the same name now at Anna Helwing Gallery doesn’t address the film directly but was conceived in much the same the spirit and exudes a similar charm.

Here, in place of the director, we find a male curator (Michael Ned Holte) following six female artists along the circuitous paths of imagination, through a variety of complementary and occasionally interwoven projects.

A translucent purple mural by Marie Jager, installed on the gallery’s glass entrance, sets the stage, suggesting a cloud obscuring the mouth of a magical cave in a fairy tale. Inside, Tamara Sussman and Alice Konitz fill the space with large, dynamic sculptures: Sussman a delicate pair of mobiles, and Konitz an elegant construction of thin plywood.

Jennifer West and Corrina Peipon contribute documentation of individual and collaborative performances, most clever and playful. Emilie Halpern’s “Disappearing Act,” a video, and “Lost at Sea,” a sculpture, two of the most memorable works in the show, hold sheets of fun house-like Mylar up to nature, jarring the viewer’s sense of perception.

The exhibition is far from tidy or coherent, but that may be for the better. The winding path through it makes for an enchanting summer jaunt.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 202-2213, www.annahelwinggallery.com, through Saturday.