A sharp look, drip by dribble

The title of Jane Callister’s white-hot exhibition can be read two ways.

“Space rocks” refers to chunks of matter found throughout the cosmos. But it also captures the slangy sophistication and rock ‘n’ roll verve of Callister’s multilayered works. Her 12 new acrylics on canvas at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects transform the illusionistic space of painting into an eye-popping celebration of gravity-defying dynamics and time-warping speed.

Each work measures 1 to 6 feet on a side and combines the clarity of digital imagery with the soupy fluidity of gestural abstraction. The combination delivers the best of both worlds. Best of all, it makes dripped paint fun again, freeing this painterly detail from its overburdened associations with expressive authenticity.

Like digitally transmitted images, Callister’s crisp pictures have a hands-off quality. With laser-sharp contours that make your vision seem better than 20/20, astonishingly vivid passages and a palette that appears to have been mixed on another planet, her works abandon entrenched ideas about creative self-expression and instead throw their lot in with the impersonal cool of the virtual world. The creaky ideal of the artist’s touch goes the way of the rotary telephone.

She begins by laying a canvas flat on the floor and pouring runny puddles of acrylic on parts of its surface. She then tips, turns and twists the canvas, causing the paint to drip every which way.

Callister gets so many drips dripping in concert that they appear to be swaying to the same rhythm, like ecstatic dancers in a crowded club. Some compositions resemble the silhouettes of palm trees, sea anemones or unruly hairdos. Think Dr. Seuss for the generation that grew up on computers.

Callister also pours on deeper puddles of more viscous pigments in such unpalatable tints as cantaloupe, wasabi, eggplant, mustard and bubble gum. Using the wrong end of a paintbrush, she then stirs these queasy stews, stopping before they get murky but not before they resemble whirlpools of primordial ooze or vicious rips in the space-time continuum.

Shark-fin shapes punctuate several paintings, as do pink boulders, which could be the rocks of the show’s title or extraterrestrial rhinestones. Big burps of molten lava -- in sorbet shades -- splash across many of Callister’s gaseous landscapes. They add to the whiplash mix of metaphors in these gregarious pictures of energy in action.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through July 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com.

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The San Gabriels’ highs and lows

Art often chronicles life’s ups and downs. The Center for Land Use Interpretation avoids such existential roller-coaster rides, preferring more objective presentations. A new exhibition takes viewers on an evenhanded tour of the San Gabriel Mountains, visiting 11 of the highest points along the range’s crest and 11 of the lowest points at its base.

“Dissipation and Disintegration: Antenna Sites and Debris Basins in the San Gabriel Mountains,” produced by the center, is a digital video that runs about 20 minutes. It’s looped, and the story it tells is cyclical, so it doesn’t matter where you begin.

Each segment starts with a blank screen and title identifying the location, such as Johnstone Peak, Sunset Ridge and Mt. Disappointment, or Big Dalton, Fair Oaks and West Ravine Debris Basin. Then it quickly cuts to a wide or a tightly cropped view of the site.

The camera never pans or zooms, but instead provides a fixed point of view. This allows viewers to see single pine needles rustling in the wind or spindly antennas swaying gracefully.

Sometimes several views of one location are shown. This breaks the video’s easy rhythm, and you find yourself wishing that the center’s staff had edited more decisively, selecting the best view and sticking with it.

Each segment includes ambient sounds recorded on location or samplings of transmissions from the antennas. Blowing wind, gushing water, chirping birds and croaking frogs play off of police transmissions, weather reports, pop songs, amateur broadcasts and the screeches and squawks of digital technology.

No two peaks or basins look alike. Loop Canyon appears to be a futuristic heliport. Santa Anita resembles a survivalist’s bunker, surrounded by chain link and razor wire. Haines Debris Basin could be mistaken for a mountain lake. And Lincoln Debris Basin looks like a monstrous golf course that has been abandoned to the elements.

“Dissipation and Disintegration” draws no conclusions about the complicated interface between nature and culture. Instead, it draws visitors into the picture, leaving us to ponder our place in it all.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-5722, through Aug. 27. Open Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays. www.clui.org.

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Benefiting from a looser approach

Edgar Bryan’s new paintings are looser and goofier than the works he showed four years ago in his L.A. solo debut, one year after earning a master’s degree at UCLA. They are also more endearing, evocative and charming than his earlier pictures, which seem stiff, almost stilted in comparison.

At Regen Projects, Bryan has jettisoned painstakingly realistic depiction for the casual sketchiness of a New Yorker cartoon. That sounds silly, even dismissive, but it’s a great change. The new paintings are both unassuming and wonderfully nuanced in the emotions they lure into the open. They’re also painted with nonchalant virtuosity, filled with delicious little details and flick-of-the-wrist flourishes that are never precious but are well worth savoring. All are animated by a wide-eyed sense of discovery.

The centerpiece is an 18-foot-long triptych that depicts a plaster-covered wood wall on which a cartoon fresco has been painted in a palette of delicate pastels. Big chunks of plaster have fallen away, causing Bryan’s composition to function like a jigsaw puzzle viewers must complete in their imaginations. The scene is neither epic nor portentous, but it’s worthy of Norman Rockwell: two sweet-faced boys falling off their bicycles as a pretty girl glides by on an old-fashioned velocipede.

Another lovely painting shows a pair of weary museum visitors resting on a bench in front of a marble statue of beaming lovers cavorting amorously and, being sculptures, eternally. The similarities and differences between art and life take playful and profound shape in Bryan’s concise image, which includes graffiti-adorned columns and sagging seat cushions.

Just a touch of melancholy suffuses Bryan’s works, particularly the two that include images of vinyl records cherished by collectors. But his pictures, painted swiftly yet sumptuously, take a long view of little moments. They balance the excitement of fleeting emotions against the wisdom of maturity in ways that make it look easy.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through July 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.regenprojects.com.

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A passionate red-state manifesto

A long time ago, avant-garde artists wrote manifestoes. Then specialization set in: Artists let their work speak for itself as movements and schools splintered into a cacophony of individual expressions.

Today that’s changing. A polarized political climate and increasing Internet access are leading artists to make more vocal and social claims.

At Rental Gallery, a two-person, three-piece exhibition titled “Miss America” identifies Lisa Anne Auerbach as a talented manifesto-iste. Her “Take Red Back” is a love poem to the color and a fiery assertion that the United States is too complex a nation to be divided into red and blue states.

In various shades of pink and red, Auerbach has knit a big U.S. flag. Its stripes contain her incantatory polemic. It begins: “Red is ours and we want it back. Red, the color of passion, anger, love, and whores, was stolen out from under our feet, replaced with the serenity of ninny blue.”

The diatribe leaps from angry workers to stormy skies, hot sex to homegrown tomatoes, blood to justice. Extolling excitement, danger, speed and power, it links aesthetics and politics in a volatile cocktail that recalls manifestoes by the Italian Futurists, Wyndham Lewis and Claes Oldenburg. Philosophically, it is rooted in the work of George Orwell, Rosa Luxemburg, Jack Kerouac and Martin Luther King Jr.

On another wall, Aleksandra Mir has hung a huge black-and-white drawing of a Valentine heart set within the borders of the United States. Both are surrounded by a border of small hearts.

A third wall displays Auerbach’s 4-by-5-foot photograph of a sorority house. Competent but too tight-lipped, these pieces are overshadowed by Auerbach’s reworking of Betsy Ross’ masterpiece, which was also born in rebellion.

Rental Gallery, 936 Mei Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 617-0143, through Aug. 5. Open Wednesdays through Saturdays.