‘Rebecca’ creates a frozen tableau

The front door of the Happy Lion opens into a long, dark corridor. Feel your way to the end, turn a corner and the darkness envelops you. You begin to notice the faint chirping of birds. The concrete beneath your feet turns to soft, thick carpet, and it feels like stepping into another world -- one you’re not entirely sure you should be stepping into. Just ahead, you see a door standing slightly ajar and a chill goes down your spine.

It’s an exquisitely unnerving buildup with an appropriately creepy payoff. Peek through the door (it won’t open more than a few inches) and you see the eerily realistic figure of a mostly nude woman, sprawled across a bed in a large, fully furnished room.

A pink chiffon dressing gown spills out beneath her; on her feet are what look like ballet slippers, with ribbons that wind up around her ankles. There are pink roses strewn everywhere, and a vase on its side on the floor. There are four empty glasses with straws on a side table, and a book with photographs of ballerinas lying open on the carpet.

The installation is the work of Australian-born, L.A.-based artist Kristian Burford, whose last show with the gallery, in 2003, was a similarly staged tableau involving a young male figure, “Christopher.� The short title for this work is “Rebecca�; the long title, which you’ll find on a printout near the entrance to the installation, takes up an entire page and explains the scene in curiously specific narrative detail.

The story is less horrific than you might first imagine (she’s not dead) but may be ultimately more distressing, thanks to the eloquent and tender realism with which it’s relayed. There is a worthy tradition of pointedly sensationalistic three-dimensional tableaux, descended from Duchamp’s “Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas� and Ed Kienholz’s “Back Seat Dodge ‘38,� but this is something different: more along the lines of a character study. Though startling at a glance -- the graphic immodesty of the woman’s posture is difficult to ignore -- the work aims less to shock than to elicit empathy, and in that regard it succeeds admirably. It’s disturbing not because it’s graphic but because it’s absorbing and has such a convincing air of truth.

“Rebecca has returned to the house in which she grew up,� the story begins, “to convalesce after waking from a coma three months ago. She awoke to discover that her body was paralyzed from the neck down.�

She sustained the injury in a diving accident, the text explains, and spent 164 days in a coma. Her attitude in the wake of the accident, though never outlined explicitly, seems to waver between despondent and sardonic.

Since returning home, “she has endured a sparse but consistent pattern of visitations from friends and family brave enough to witness the wretchedness of her condition -- or innocent enough to fail to comprehend it.� On this particular afternoon it is the latter, in the form of twin 7-year-old nieces who’ve developed a game that involves dressing and arranging Rebecca’s immobile body to approximate imagined characters.

Just now, with a perversity that only she seems fully able to appreciate, they’ve chosen to make her a ballerina. At the moment we happen upon the scene, one girl has disappeared to the garden, where she will be caught pillaging her grandfather’s carefully tended roses, while the other hides in the closet behind her aunt’s bed.

“Recognizing that Simone has taken an excessively long time to return to her room,� the text concludes, “Rebecca has correctly surmised her circumstance and now considers the certainty of her own discovery with satisfying indifference.�

Between the unsettling prologue, the absorbing atmosphere, the carefully wrought detail, and the resounding punch line, with its clever ensnarement of the unsuspecting viewer (since it is the viewer, of course, who will discover the spectacle), the piece has all the magic of a good short story and leaves you with much to ponder.

The Happy Lion, 963 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 625-1360, through June 17. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.thehappylion.com

Elegance springs from much stimuli

Imagine a machine in a textile factory that’s programmed with every pattern the factory produces -- dainty florals, sweeping arabesques, intricate mandalas and jagged constellations of geometric lines and shapes. At one setting, it churns out country house bedding; at another, Indian saris; at the next, retro prints for club-hopping hipsters.

Now imagine this machine going haywire, jumbling all of these patterns and spewing them out in long, mangled clusters across blurry, dye-smeared stretches of fabric.

Substitute wood panels for the fabric, oil paint for the dyes, and the result would look a lot like the work of San Francisco-based painter Reed Danziger, now on view in her second solo show at Michael Kohn Gallery.

That she pulls it off so beautifully is a testament to the virtuosic precision of her technique and her impeccable sense of rhythm and balance. In an ARTnews article several years ago, she described her interest as lying in “the place where there’s both an attraction to and a repulsion from too much information,� and she’s certainly found that place here. These aren’t paintings for the ornamentally faint of heart, and there are moments when the sheer density of visual stimuli would seem enough to, if not repel then at least exhaust the eye of even the most forgiving lover of baubles.

Invariably at this point, however, something enticing darts up around the edges -- an elegant curve, a sprightly coil, a playful spray of multicolored dots -- to lure the eye back. And because these clusters of pattern float against soft washes of pale blue and white, the compositions have a comfortable sense of spaciousness that encourages one to linger through the fluctuations, as one might to watch storm clouds pass overhead.

What should be a series of visual train wrecks, Danziger thus spins into spectacles of exceptional complexity and elegance.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 658-8088, through June 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kohngallery.com

Temporary state of desert dwellings

There are few places in America where the fragility of human endeavor is more palpable than in the deserts of Southern California. We go to great lengths, as a culture, to deny it: We blanket this dry, rocky soil with golf courses; we build swimming pools and air-conditioned resorts. But disable the pipelines that supply these developments with water and they’d shrivel to dust in no time.

The photographs in Mark Ruwedel’s third exhibition at Gallery Luisotti focus on a handful of the desert’s humbler casualties: single-family dwellings, mobile units and makeshift shelters (one simply an A-frame made from three old mattresses), all apparently abandoned. Strewn across the landscape like so many forgotten tin cans, the structures speak to the deep-seated American desire to stake out a piece of the wilderness and also of the capacity of that wilderness for reclaiming itself. Ruwedel positions these buildings at the center of the frame, and the elegance of his dry, crisp gelatin silver prints lends each a sort of dignity. Their peeling paint, tattered curtains, broken windows and graffiti, however, suggest that whoever’s dream this piece of the landscape was has long since moved on, and the process of decay and regeneration has commenced.

Also on view in the show is a trio of larger color prints from “Crossing,� a series that explores the terrain along the U.S.-Mexico border. These also document shelters, but of an even more transient sort. At a glance, they seem to depict only patches of scrub. Look closer, however, and you find signs of temporary habitation: jugs of water, scraps of clothing, an abandoned Guatemalan passport. Hauntingly understated, the images illuminate the hopes and fears that lace through even this most treacherous landscape.

Gallery Luisotti, 2525 Michigan Ave. A2, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through July 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Crystal, chiffon, ceramics at play

Beverly Semmes’ second solo show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery greets viewers with a dazzling sight: 12 glittering crystal vessels, each centered on its own white pedestal and brilliantly illuminated by a single, low-hanging light bulb. Made from thick ropes of molten crystal coiled together as ropes of clay are coiled to make a pot, the vessels have a loose, expressionistic grandeur, giving the impression simultaneously of muscularity and weightlessness. Grouped in a tight cluster at the center of the gallery, they suggest a spectacular explosion on the surface of a pool of water.

Titled “Blood Shot Pot,� the exhibition is billed as a tribute to Annie Oakley, though the connection is somewhat obscure. The show’s invitation sports a great photograph of Oakley peering down the barrel of a pistol, and the crystal works, titled “Shot 1-12,� are situated opposite one of Semmes’ absurdly long-sleeved velvet gowns, which is titled “Prairie Dress,� and positioned as if to have fired those shots.

The conceptual rationale, however, seems little more than a pretense for the real drama of the show, which lies in the energetic interplay of materials. The fluid, sparkling crystal; the fluorescent orange chiffon of the sleeve that stretches from the shoulder of Oakley’s garment into a massive pool on the floor; the Play-Doh-like character of the show’s several roughly hewn ceramic vessels; the thick, jaunty brush strokes of the one large painting -- they transform the gallery into a playhouse of color and texture, feeding the senses in a way that keeps one from thinking too hard about what might or might not be going on beneath the surface.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. B1, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through June 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.shoshanawayne.com