Santa Monica

Four artists using photography to jump into conceptual concerns makes for a generally quiet show, but there are some fascinating flashes. Pyrotechnics are provided by Alan Rath’s mechanized, video screen contraptions--raw technology tamed by wit. Like Nam June Paik’s elaborate video presentations, they join high-tech film work to castoff television sets. Rath uses still photographs manipulated by computer on small video monitors that appear to have been ripped from larger systems. Rath’s sculptures tend to leave all the technology exposed. This physical rawness is abetted by the rudimentary simplicity of flickering images which meld parts of the human body into the media system. With wit and irony they achieve a parody of humanity where desires, religion and economics have all gone robotic.

The rest of the show doesn’t have as much flair. Richard Rothman’s stark black and white photo montage images of flowers--some silk, some real--are strangely mute. Sokhi Wagner’s three-dimensional photographs turn the photo into an curling object instead of a flat surface. They just don’t have much else to offer besides their conceptual twist.

There’s so much going on in Charles Gaines’ large plexiglass grid paintings of photographed trees that the viewer is left spinning. Compositions are overlaid with a systematized layer of colors in tiny numbered daubs, joining multiple trees into one seasonless, eternal tree buried in the work. Explanations and meaning are frustrated by a private code that generates even more questions. For such a dense layering of time and energy the results are oddly cryptic. (Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., to Aug. 26.)