AROUND THE GALLERIES

Now playing at the Frank Lloyd Gallery: an Oscar-worthy performance by an inert substance in a sculpture role. In Richard Shaw’s fabulous show, clay takes on a panoply of guises -- cigar box, paintbrush, animal skull, dollar bill -- and plays them all brilliantly. Under Shaw’s direction, clay is the consummate actor, channeling identities with such conviction that we forget, momentarily, what’s real and what’s a different kind of real.

The Bay Area artist has been creating illusionistic still-life sculpture for decades, porcelain renderings of things at once precious and pedestrian. The new work (most of it dated 2009, remarkably) is fresh as ever -- smart, technically stunning, in turns reverent and irreverent.

“Pastel Cabin on Paint Box,” just inside the gallery door, gives an extravagant hint of the riches beyond but could constitute a show in itself. Shaw has constructed a dense little hommage to art-making. The small structure is built, log-cabin style, out of pastel crayons, its pitched roof a splayed-open watercolor box, tinted with use. The cabin sits atop a brown case used for painting supplies that bears its own daubed surface. A few stray pastel sticks are strewn nearby, as well as a small paper plate, its corrugated ribs rubbed with pigment.

The entire ensemble is formed out of slip-cast porcelain, fired and glazed. Shaw makes silk-screen-type transfers of labels and such that give objects an even more palpable authenticity: Here, the business card of a coffee shop and a snippet of a printed horoscope are adhered to the paint case.

The verism dazzles. Beyond the sophisticated trickery, however, there is wisdom, humor and tenderness. The house, the box and even the little paper plate are all vessels of one sort or another, a subtle nod to ceramics tradition. (Many works by Shaw conceal actual jar-like hollows within.) The cabin, a sculpture sitting on its humble pedestal, also reads as a metaphor for the artist’s self-made world, a shelter and refuge shaped by hand. At the same time, it’s all an assemblage of everyday stuff from the studio, the product, perhaps, of playful procrastination.

In more than 20 other marvelous works, Shaw stacks books, teacups and more paint boxes. He builds houses of playing cards, and lays out a collection of sea shells. He creates and re-creates several detached book covers, personalized with bookplates, library tags and identification stamps. Autobiographical allusions pepper the work but don’t necessarily announce themselves as anything other than touches of specificity, giving the objects the patina of real-world wear.

Shaw has comrades within the modern ceramics world -- Robert Hudson and Marilyn Levine, to name a few -- but even more allies in other media and other times. In one piece, he pays direct homage to the personalized Pop of Jasper Johns, rendering in clay the paintbrush-stuffed Savarin coffee can Johns painted and cast in bronze. Throughout, Shaw’s autobiographical paper trail of labels, scribbled notes, price tags and other ephemera echoes the work of 19th century American trompe l’oeil painters John Haberle, John Frederick Peto and William Harnett, and before them, the Dutch letter-rack painters of the 1600s.

However laced with private clues, Shaw’s work remains utterly legible, accessible, amusing. It memorializes the material residue of life and honors the tools used along the way. It’s sly and it’s sweet. It’s a stellar performance.

Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .franklloyd.com.

--

The boundary here is nebulous

Varvara Shavrova’s first U.S. show is plagued by disproportionality. The artist’s background and her intentions for this project are rich and compelling, the work markedly less so.

Shavrova was born and educated in Moscow, moved to England in 1989 (dividing her time between studios in London and Ballycastle, Ireland), and four years ago relocated to Beijing. Borders, shifting landscapes and cultural collision are the stuff of her everyday life as well as her paintings, photographs and video work. At Morono Kiang Gallery, she presents two short video loops distilled from footage shot on or around the border between Russia and China and eight large paintings based on stills from the videos.

Shot from moving trains and buses, the videos are impressionistic records of the border region’s landscape and industry, its gorgeous, frigid stillness and its commercial bustle. As is true elsewhere around the globe, there is no real dividing line between the two nations other than that contrived by politics and culture. This unstated truth packs the imagery with social and economic significance, but it doesn’t give it any visual heft. Southern Californians are fluent in the ironies choking our own border with Mexico, but the subtle signs and symbols of the Russia-China divide are mostly lost in translation.

The paintings are underwhelming too. Edged on top and bottom by solid stripes to mimic the video format, they reduce the landscape to mosaics of shaggy, monochromatic forms. Some of the scenes are blurred, Gerhard Richter-style, to suggest the motion of the train. All have some tactile appeal (the surfaces alternately smooth and gluey-thick) but little of the energy latent in such a charged subject.

Morono Kiang Gallery, 218 W. 3rd St., L.A., (213) 628-8208, through March 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .moronokiang.com.

--

So very natural yet so theatrical

Strangeness abounds at Angles Gallery these days, where two technically exquisite, darkly fantastic bodies of work are paired. It’s been more than 10 years since Constance Mallinson’s last solo appearance in L.A., and this is Israeli-born Yuval Pudik’s first. The show is noteworthy on both counts, but mostly for its enduring, disarming qualities.

Mallinson’s approach to the natural landscape has long braided the contemplative, critical and collage-like; here she ventures into related terrain, with a more concentrated focus. In her four figurative paintings on paper, measuring up to 8 feet per side, human forms are defined entirely in terms of wood and natural debris: patches of bark, frizzles of roots, slender, twining twigs. The visual gamesmanship harks back to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous composite portraits as well as to the spell-induced transformations of fairy tales, but with a more subversive edge.

One pair of figures is locked in intercourse against a stained white field, a shriveled apple core beside them. Another couple enacts the biblical consequence, expulsion, striding forward naked out of ashen depths. With tremendous acuity, Mallinson renders human anatomy out of the anatomy of trees -- gnarled burls, sinuous knots and fungus-blooming bark. The gorgeous offsets the grotesque; hommage tempers horror.

The beautiful “Wallpaper” comes as something of a reprieve, invoking far less psychic duress. In direct tribute to the sensual integrity of the dead and dying, Mallinson traces arabesques out of dried branches, split seed pods, faded blossoms and rotted pomegranates. The painting is bittersweet and ravishing.

Pudik’s graphite drawings, in a range of sizes, are a curious mix of the carnivalesque and cartoonish, with a little sexual deviance thrown in for spice. No figure or scene is carried to a logical conclusion. Instead, figures starting out with thigh-high boots and riding crops end up with palm trees for heads or twin cars jutting out of their collars. The rendering is skillful and convincing, a performance that matches the theatricality of the vision.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .anglesgallery.com.

--

Script could be better developed

Charlotte Smith’s moderately absorbing, slightly frustrating installation at Cirrus Gallery is called “THE UNTITLED SCRIPT OF The Janes’ childhood semidetached suburban nuclear family home pantry under the stairs, Acts I and II.” Yes, the installation is called a script. And to add to the confusion, the printed version of that script is subtitled, “A book performance.” The fluidity between disciplines is evocative, to a point.

The two environments that make up the installation appear to be a pair of stage sets, partially activated by the written or spoken word. In the large main gallery, a rug and three hanging wallpaper panels are incised with fragmented text, while additional projected snippets from the script scroll across the walls. In the side gallery, a makeshift hide-out made from a child’s bed frame, sheets and toys is overlaid by the sound of the artist’s voice in recorded monologue.

A sense of difficulty is intentional, a strategy to splinter narrative and muddle the roles of audience, subject and performer. One of the characters in the script, for instance, is named YOU.

None of the elements is well enough developed, however, to elicit any real emotional or intellectual traction. The work is too much about its own conceptual genesis and not enough about anything else. The texts are too broken, the characters too elusive. The text-perforated wallpaper is an elegant take on the quip “If these walls could talk,” but the rest of the sculptural elements are too slight and unaltered to be interesting.

Smith, a recent master of fine arts graduate from UCLA, will close the show March 7 with a live performance.

Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., Los Angeles, (213) 680-3473, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .cirrusgallery.com.