ART REVIEW : For Catherine Wagner, Every Home Tells a Story : Her photo-triptych project at the L.A. County Museum of Art documents a particularly American vision of domesticity.

In the home of Michael B. and Ron S., the canine is king. Here, paintings of dogs, dog statuettes, and dog tapestries abound.

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In the home of Coester T., everything hanging on the wall is crooked--from framed prints to drying socks.

Christine T. has nothing to eat in her refrigerator. Monica and Jack P. fetishize order. William F. likes a mess.

In every home, there are stories--hidden behind potted plants, stuffed under sofa cushions, in the wallpaper carefully selected for the guest bathroom. Catherine Wagner’s “Home and Other Stories,” a photographic project currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, doesn’t so much tell those stories as allow them to unfold--while enfolding us in them.

Wagner plays at voyeurism, but she is no voyeur. Her photographic triptychs are uniform in format, recording various aspects of people’s homes--rooms, parts of rooms, objects, tableaux. Yet considering the potentially charged subject matter, there is something remarkably affectless about these black-and-white images. Wagner glimpses private spaces, private lives. We, in turn, watch her watching. But there is no sense of transgression here--no sense that a line--any line--has been crossed.

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Compare Wagner’s work to that of French Post-Conceptual artist Sophie Calle. Calle excels at masquerade, taking a job as a chambermaid at a hotel for the express purpose of photographing the rooms and possessions of unknowing guests. Unlike Calle, Wagner is not interested in complete inventories, methodical analysis or narrative coherence. Nor does she take any prurient delight in spying. She has been invited into the homes she photographs; those homes have been prepared--to one extent or another--for her arrival, for her photographic gaze.

The difference between the work of Calle and Wagner, then, is that between a candid photo and a portrait. One is a kind of invasion; the other is more forgiving, a commemoration.

It is no coincidence that so many of these works feature portraits of the homes’ absent residents. At her home in Houston, Alexandra M. has at least two portraits of herself on view--one, a studio portrait of a very proper young woman, framed in gold; the other, a massive painting of a wild-eyed Alexandra looking like a sexed-up version of Diana the Huntress. These flank a central image of Alexandra’s fussy, oversized canopy bed--the whole a rather Gothic ensemble about fantasy and desire.

Alexandra’s portraits--like this project as a whole--are about the poses we affect to reflect our individual styles. “Home and Other Stories” suggests that our domiciles function not only as surrogate selves, but as spaces keyed to aesthetic adventure.

The most interesting triptych in this regard offers fragments from the San Francisco home of Ron S. and Peter A. At the center is a close-up view of a framed poster depicting a cozy living room complete with luxuriant potted plants. On either side are photos of oversized houseplants--one, smashed into a corner, the ceiling pressing down uncomfortably on its spiky leaves; the other spilling over a stairwell, its tropical languor compromised by the self-consciously urban, chrome and leather furniture arranged behind it.

What is familiar here is the extent to which Ron S. and Peter A. fashion their lives after images. What is at once poignant and disturbing is the extent to which such efforts are always already doomed.

In her close attention to our surrender to media-generated ideals, Wagner diverges quite dramatically from Walker Evans, to whom she is often compared. Like Evans, she is a straight photographer interested in documenting a particularly American vision of domesticity.

But Wagner’s work insists upon the social changes that have accrued in the intervening half-century, our expectations and aspirations negotiated by shelter magazines, television and a hyper-consciousness of the way others live. Thus, the profusion of cords in these images--plugging us in, hooking us up, illuminating dim corners with the bright light of consumerist munificence.

This works as an implied critique. Either Wagner or the curatorial staff errs by making it explicit--hanging the triptychs in darkened rooms, lit so that they appear to glow from within, like television sets. This is problematic, but not insurmountable. The lure of these images is such that they transcend their rather banal presentation.

“Home and Other Stories” is in some sense a departure for Wagner, who is best known for her photographs of large, public spaces. A series of these early images--of the George Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, chronicling each stage of construction, from excavation in 1979 to completion in 1984; and of the Louisiana State Exposition Complex, built in 1984--are concurrently on view at the Santa Monica College Photography Gallery.

In their geometry and precision, these images are quite astonishing. Like the other photographers associated with the “New Topographics” school, Wagner is interested in the aesthetics of contemporary urban and suburban space. But in contrast to the disdain sometimes palpable in the work of Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams, Wagner comes upon the construction sites she photographs as discoveries, as occasions for celebration.

Instead of chaos, she finds order in the constellation of cement, pipes, girders and arches etched against the sky. And if she seems to be performing the work of a future archeologist--revealing the structure underlying what is one day inevitably destined to fall into ruin--she does so with grace and sensitivity. It is this same grace and sensitivity that makes “Home and Other Stories” such an invaluable document, less concerned with typology than the vagaries of human psychology.

* Catherine Wagner, “Home and Other Stories,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Aug. 8. “Early Works,” at Santa Monica College Photography Gallery, 1900 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 450-5150. Closed Sundays, through June 12.