Daydreaming With the Surreal Photographs of Edmund Teske

“Edmund Teske: Romantic Surrealist” provides a lovely thumbnail sketch of the experimental photographer’s oeuvre. Including more than 40 one-of-a-kind works Teske (1911-1996) made from the 1930s to the 1970s, this enchanting survey at Stephen Cohen Gallery casts a dreamy spell, reminding viewers of Surrealism’s soft side. At a time when this style’s legacy seems to be entirely defined by shock, aggression and blunt sex, embodied by movies and advertisements that look as if they’ve been spliced together by editors with attention deficit disorder, it’s heartening to see pictures that disclose their meanings slowly, like gentle whispers.

All of Teske’s hand-printed photographs consist of multiple images. But rather than generating visual dissonance, their diverse subjects seem to belong together, as if one naturally flowed into the other.

Part portrait, part landscape and part still life, one black-and-white work depicts a church steeple and row of tidy clapboard houses in Davenport, Iowa. Into the background and foreground of this peaceful scene, Teske has woven a close-up of Shirley Berman’s serene face and the torso of a reclining male nude. A fantasy of domestic tranquillity, his image resonates with complexity. Here, Middle America is not a one-dimensional world, and family values are a lot more complicated than politicians pretend.

In another work, Teske has superimposed a 1952 portrait of Kenneth Anger over a Gustave Dore print of the rebel angels from Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” With a striped scarf wrapped high around his neck, the young filmmaker appears to be an exceptionally mild-manner Lucifer. His pose recalls Oscar Wilde, whose public flamboyance has momentarily given way to introspective reflection.

Throughout the show, larger-than-life figures, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Greta Garbo and Jim Morrison, appear alongside Teske’s relatives (most often his mother), local legends (artist George Herms) and anonymous acquaintances (often wholesome young men lost in reverie). Cobalt blue and burnt umber tints give many images a fiery and icy intensity, the result of darkroom manipulations Teske perfected. The best prints are ablaze with the vividness of chemically induced visions, when the world appears with such crystalline clarity that words fall short of expressing its beauty.

In a sense, Teske’s photographs are the visual equivalents of daydreams. In these works the texture and nuance of memories do not fade with the passing of time but grow more poignant, haunting the moment with their ghostly presence.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (323) 937-5525, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Beyond Technology: “Amped” is a six-artist show that divides neatly in two. At Sandroni/Rey Gallery, three artists use high-tech devices to produce amusing diversions while three others do so the old-fashioned way--with simple videos and a straightforward audio recording.

David Beaudry’s “Navigable Sonic Landscape” occupies a side gallery the size of a large closet. Two copper tubes (like the pipes used by plumbers) hang vertically from the ceiling. When you enter the dimly lit space, music plays from hidden speakers.

Hold your left hand near the left tube and the punchy score Beaudry composed seems to rotate around you in a counterclockwise direction. Reach your right hand to the tube on the right and you experience the sensation of disembodied flight: zooming toward the source of the music in the same way a telephoto lens zooms in on an object. Pulling your hand away arrests the experience of motion, but leaving it near the tube allows you to feel as if you’re flying through wall after wall of sound.

Beaudry’s ingenious mechanism requires a bit of practice before you’re adept at it. But the payoff diminishes even more quickly.

The experience isn’t all that different from learning how to play a video game whose challenges you soon surpass. Although you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to appreciate the complexity of the computer programming that makes this piece possible, the software that went into it is more impressive than the results it delivers.

Far less compelling is Vincent Pruden’s remote control car, to which he has attached a compact video camera and screen. Titled “May I Pass Between Your Legs?” this boring toy makes a joke of interactivity.

Brian Van Klooster’s “Video Leach” strikes a nice balance between silliness and seriousness. Stuck with a suction cup to a TV monitor, this bug-like device made of tiny receptors, transmitters and speakers (as well as a rubber band and an uninflated balloon) transforms the light emitted from the screen into birdish tweets and twerps.

The less experimental half of the show begins with Johannes Auvinen’s silent video of a B-52 in flight. Inspired by “Dr. Strangelove,” his looped tape falls flat in the gallery. It might look better if it were projected above a dance floor, where its smooth, swooping movements would provide an eerie contrast to all sorts of dances.

Rachel Mason’s videotapes of herself dressed like a minimalist Power Ranger look too much like sanitized versions of films by Matthew Barney to stand on their own. And Mark Glover’s seemingly endless (reportedly 100-hour-long) tape of ambient sounds he recorded throughout Los Angeles adds nothing but persistence to John Cage’s embrace of happenstance.

The most promising pieces in “Amped” at least feel as if the artists who made them are onto something--that once they get beyond their fascination with the mechanical aspects of technology, they’ll be able to use it to say something interesting.

* Sandroni/Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney, Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Nov. 4. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

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Fitting In: Lezley Saar’s potent pictures of misfits look like hand-painted circus billboards that have taken on lives of their own. Rather than displaying the freakish attributes of a few individuals for the voyeuristic titillation of large crowds, these larger-than-life-size collages endow the people they portray with quirky, one-of-a-kind intimacy that isn’t the lowest common denominator of anything.

At Jan Baum Gallery, some of Saar’s paintings on cobbled-together clusters of found objects are explicitly religious. Modeled on funerary monuments and shrines to saints, “Ascension of a Lily Skin” has bouquets of plastic flowers attached to its rough-and-tumble surface of dissected books. Painted over their pages is the image of a light-skinned woman who doesn’t resemble the Virgin so much as she takes over her position in traditional devotional compositions.

Other works recall broadsheets emblazoned with the images of suspected criminals. “The Con Art of Peter Sewally” portrays a sad-eyed character whose alias, Mary Jones, is scrawled on a placard that hangs from her neck. Here, gender confusion is less a matter of let’s-pretend fantasy than the frighteningly real question of whether the authorities got the right man.

The elusiveness of identity takes harrowing shape in a large painting of a man’s face, whose ebony skin contrasts dramatically with his radiant blue eyes. Saar has attached actual harnesses and hinges to his image, covering his mouth with a metal cage and padlock. Muzzled like a dog, he exudes silent pathos.

Most of Saar’s paintings more directly address their sources in the big, brightly painted pictures that once advertised all manner of traveling roadshows. Her images of a bearded lady, a two-headed baby and a man whose skin stretches like elastic, however, do not exploit freakishness as much as they give voice to the vulnerability of the misfits they depict.

Several small paintings present the fugitive pleasures of itinerant performers, who prefer the risks of the road to the prejudice of home. In one, two scrawny giants share a moment of tenderness. In another, a piebald woman floats above the ground, a beatific expression on her face. In a pair of portraits, two youths stare at viewers with dignity beyond their years.

In all of Saar’s works, the pain of not fitting in gradually gives way to the strength to want something more--and the power to go out and get it.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through Oct. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Twisted Revisionism: Herbert Hamak’s candy-colored wall-works take a trip down memory lane by turning history on its ear. In the mid-1960s, during Minimalism’s heyday, sculpture got started where painting left off. Leaving the flatness of the picture-plane behind, geometric forms stepped out into the three-dimensional world, coming down off the wall in order to interact with viewers more physically than an image ever could.

At Christopher Grimes Gallery, Hamak’s slabs, chunks and bars of solid color take Minimalist sculpture back to its roots in painting. Like paintings, each of the German artist’s works hangs on the wall. Each consists of two or more layers of tinted pigment that have been suspended in a liquid medium and applied to a rectangular section of linen. And each delivers visual cues common to monochromatic abstractions: Playing opacity against translucence, these abstractions suggest illusionistic depths amid a wealth of surface incidents, both accidental and intentional.

Like sculptures, each of Hamak’s massive works hits viewers in the solar plexus, making you feel its weighty solidity and the downward tug of gravity. Each also sets you in motion: Viewing it from various angles and distances, you weigh partial views against one another in order to piece together a shifting picture of the whole.

Think of these category-straddling pieces as a desperate painter’s attempt to put the genie of three-dimensional form back into the bottle of two-dimensional shape. This will give you an idea of the rigorously formal--if profoundly academic--task they have set for themselves.

Thirty years ago, such an accomplishment might have looked like the future, a handsome way out of the impasse between painting and sculpture. Today it feels dated, prematurely aged if perfectly preserved. Made of wax and resin, Hamak’s works have the presence of embalmed abstractions.

Imagine what Peter Alexander’s early resin sculptures would look like on a diet of steroids, and you’ll have an idea of how unwieldy Hamak’s evocation of recent art history is.

Tying up loose ends too tightly, his style of historical revisionism strangles art’s mystery.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.