Santa Monica

A seasoned and widely exhibited photographer of zany dioramas made from bizarre common objects, Boyd Webb began as a conceptual artist making photos to document his sculpture. Before long the photo became the art and Webb brought the savvy, subversive imagination of a surrealist painter to large color photos.

Current works mix a silly kind of grace and a faux Oriental sensibility to comment on our waning ecosystem. Webb creates rippling water from clear plastic. Out of this sprout thin green reeds whose tips erupt into clusters of inflatable plastic tigers carefully staged to look like exotic, wilting flowers. Two remarkable works feature a cross section of “water” in which floats a jellyfish made from a plastic bag. Trapped inside the “sea creature” is the cutest diaper-ad baby. The idea of our seas, our wild life and innocent, hapless humankind suffocated by its own artifice and debris is discreetly tucked into these luminous, overtly frolicking photos.

In contrast to Webb’s caginess, Canadian conceptualist Dominique Blain uses a sledgehammer. She makes a musty, tomb-like room with walls made from sand-filled burlap bags used to fend off floods or to make bunkers in battlefields. On one wall are ostentatiously framed 1917 photos of works of art and architecture wrapped in similar sand bags to protect them from damage during World War I. On the floor of the mute room is a large composite photo of dead victims of political violence. For Blain, values, priorities, indeed meaning itself are politically dictated: the dominant culture choses to define church facades as precious protectables, while it defines human life as expendable. (Meyers/Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, to Feb. 17.)