In Charles LaBelle’s World, Things Are Inside and Out

In his quietly quixotic new show at Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Charles LaBelle finds surprisingly diverse ways to skin a perceptual cat. Photographs, drawings and sculpture all pay attention to the rewards of acute consciousness.

Consider “Grasping at Clouds,” a group of three similar photographs of a hand holding a small oval mirror. The camera’s downward angle of vision shows scruffy urban backgrounds--a concrete sidewalk, a brick patio and a cinder-block wall, each abutted by a green patch of grass--none of unusual interest. But the mirror at the center reflects luminous blue sky above, studded with passing clouds; heaven and Earth get fused with an elegant simplicity that emphasizes the artist’s guiding hand.

A large series of watercolors records every building in L.A that LaBelle entered between Christmas 1998 and Valentine’s Day 1999. Wedged between holidays, LaBelle’s suite of 213 drawings (99 of them are displayed) performs a rare, insightful riff on Edward Ruscha’s classic photo series, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip.” The normal passages of daily life, rendered in simple yet precise pencil and watercolor, are brought to an abrupt halt.

Perusing these diary-like sketches that show his studio, Macy’s, various art galleries, Starbucks, friends’ abodes, etc., you know the artist had to stop, look and draw before entering. Casual experience, normally undertaken by rote, is turned into an act of keen awareness.

The drawings also establish a subtle hierarchy between outside and inside--between each building’s facade, considered prior to entering, and its interior, which goes unrecorded. This critical division forms the crux of the show’s central work--an ordinary shirt displayed on a torso mannequin inside a pristine plexiglass case, as if it were a precious modern relic.

Like a mule working in the illicit drug trade, LaBelle cut the plain white shirt into several hundred small squares, carefully numbered them, put each one into a balloon and then swallowed it. Eventually, when the pieces were expelled, the artist sewed them back together to re-form the shirt.

“Disappearer--Shirt that passed through my body” is funny and elusive. Clothes might make the man, but the journey through the artist’s interior world yields few useful clues, while also offering a small marvel to contemplate.

Disturbingly, one square (No. 707) is missing from the carefully reconstructed shirt. Imagine the possibilities.

* Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through April 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Ordinary Ghosts: Memory is the elusive material with which Bay Area artist Mildred Howard often works, and her new exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts (her second solo there) is no exception. Anchored by a fragment of an installation originally done for Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the show largely comprises only partly successful wall assemblages centered on old, family-style photographs.

On the glass panes of chipped, beat-up, salvaged windows, black-and-white snapshots of men, women, families, lovers and the like have been screen-printed. Paint has been daubed here and there on the glass, while some frames are adorned with old buttons, spoons, keys and other talismans of domestic life.

Howard plainly means to valorize ordinary lives over heroic or celebrated ones; the powerful continuity of the private world gets valued over the vaunted public sphere. The union of subject and material is seamlessly accomplished--yet the work feels remote and unengaging, perhaps because of its very ordinariness.

The installation fragment features gilded steel rails atop hefty wooden railroad ties, which still reek of pungent creosote. One set of rails is interrupted by a table covered by a white linen cloth, on which cannonballs flecked with red paint have been stacked. The other leads into a gallery wall, on which hangs a gilded oval mirror.

“S.S. (Slave Stealer)” obviously recalls the 19th-century underground railroad. It might also allude to the subsequent northern migration of African Americans, the union-busting efforts of the Pullman strike or the ballad of black folk hero John Henry, which symbolized the tragic battle with the white man in the Industrial Age. But these possibilities pile up more like accrediting footnotes than experiential markers. Perhaps the site-specific resonance of its original installation in Boston has been obscured by the current gallery context.

* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, through April 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Lost in Time: When Don Normark was just 20, he had a simple idea. It was 1949, and in the wake of the photojournalism boom fueled by World War II and exemplified by the narrative social portraits of W. Eugene Smith, he had decided to photograph the neighborhood of Chavez Ravine. It was soon to vanish under the diamond of green grass and asphalt expanse of Dodger Stadium.

Normark’s lovely photographs were published last year in the critically acclaimed book “Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story” (Chronicle Books). A selection of 31 recently printed black-and-white examples from the series is now at Fototeka, a gallery in Echo Park not far from the original site. They meld the casual curiosity of youth with the keen eye of a photographer surprisingly mature for his years.

Nothing much happens in Normark’s journalistic pictures, in which people come in many sizes, shapes and colors. Kids play ball. A stylish young woman arranges flowers out on the porch. An older woman sweeps the driveway. A shy girl poses proudly in her white Communion dress. A man with a lunch box climbs a well-worn footpath up a hill, the Art Deco tower of City Hall rising in the hazy distance.

But that’s the point. The absence of high drama or eventfulness adds to the cumulative power of this often moving group, which eloquently records daily episodes of life in a poor but lively neighborhood teetering on the brink of eradication.

Because photographs point to the world outside themselves, they naturally accrue retrospective resonance. Importing a legendary baseball team to L.A from New York meant to signal to the world the triumphal arrival of a new metropolis on the national scene. Knowing what happened in the big-money maneuver that wiped out the powerless community of Chavez Ravine just serves to add layers of resonance to Normark’s frequently captivating documents.

* Fototeka, 1549 Echo Park Ave., (213) 250-4686, through March 26. Closed Mondays through Thursdays.

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Unsteady Glow: “Shimmer” does--though that’s not necessarily the best thing. The eponymous group exhibition, organized for the Municipal Art Gallery by guest curator and CalArts dean Thomas Lawson, shines with the unsteady light announced in its title. While the overall glow is welcome, the inescapable unsteadiness is not.

Abstraction has been important to the renewed interest in painting in recent years, and it’s the focus here. Yunhee Min’s deft stripe paintings on shaped canvases use odd color combinations to generate subtle disorientation in your solar plexus. Mark Robert Lewis pours thick, bright, acrylic color down multiple panels, the color’s tangible form resonating against the ostensible emptiness in the spaces left between panels. Steven Hull grows plastic flowers from the synthetic clash between loosely painted plaids and oozing puddles of toxic-looking color in his big, jarring field-painting.

These compelling abstract paintings outpace the attractive but conventional nested squares of colored ink on translucent paper drawn by Melissa Thorne, which simply rehearse old pieties about visual similarities among folk art (such as quilts), modern design and abstract painting. Heidi Kidon forsakes abstract painting for an installation “about” abstract painting, in which a homemade cardboard slide projector, color photocopies of abstract collages pinned to the wall and painted foam panels strewn across the floor profess schoolroom worries about painting in a mixed-media world--worries that seem very out of date.

* Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581, through March 26. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.