Exhibit houses modern relics

When Jeffrey Vallance builds a container to house a relic, such as a lump of coral painted with the likeness of former television news anchor Connie Chung or rhinestone-studded brooches secured from Las Vegas souvenir shops, three things are certain: The shard has autobiographical meaning for the artist; the reliquary’s formal style resonates with the relic; and the eccentric enterprise makes very strange yet perfect sense.

Take the rhinestone pins, which are among 18 new reliquaries in Vallance’s gratifying exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery. Collected when the Los Angeles artist lived for a few years in Las Vegas in the mid-1990s, they include the expected celebrities -- Liberace, Elvis -- as well as two unexpected ones, Nixon and Jesus. These juxtapositions fuel a grin.

But the pins, fabricated in sparkly rhinestones set against a black velvet background, also form a social constellation that represents a celestial projection of human needs and desires. Vallance has installed them in a black-lacquered Neoclassical receptacle with an ornamented broken pediment, plainly referring to Caesars Palace. These are “The Gods of Vegas.�

The pins recall the maps, small objects and art reproductions inside a Joseph Cornell box, and a similarly condensed universe of dreamlike whimsy unfolds. The tone is different, but the urge to construct a poetic narrative is the same.

It’s disconcerting to start drawing connections between, say, Jesus and the resurrection of Elvis’ faltering performance career in the showroom at the International (now Hilton) Hotel. From there, it’s but a short, if decidedly bizarre, step to Nixon, whose election and swearing-in as president also represented a comeback -- one that roughly coincided with Elvis’ in 1968 and 1969.

Vallance “signed� the reliquary with his own rhinestone-encrusted name pin, fully democratizing the display. The hierarchy of saints and sinners collapses with a Liberace flourish.

Another box, titled “Holy of Holies: Lutheran Relics,� is filled with medallions, pins and other religious emblems gathered during the artist’s San Fernando Valley childhood. The marvelous dissonance between a reliquary, meant to hold a saint’s fragments, and Lutheranism, born of Protestant dissent, is inescapable. So it seems entirely sensible that Vallance’s little sanctuary (its title comes from the Hebrew Bible) is designed in the elaborate shape of a Buddhist shrine. Another curveball is gaily thrown into established concepts of personal piety.

Vallance’s reliquaries are being shown with a Conceptual work, “Drawings and Statements by U.S. Senators,� which the artist initiated as an undergraduate 30 years ago this month. (The framed works on paper constituted his first solo exhibition, held in 1978.) Thirty-four senators responded to Vallance’s letter of inquiry, which asked for their thoughts on art and, if possible, a drawing.

Judging from the replies, many if not most of the solons seem to have assumed the letter was from a kid in elementary school. They cheerfully talk down to the college art student about their own lack of artistic interest or aesthetic skill.

“I am not an artist,� Adlai E. Stevenson III demurred. “I dare not hazard a drawing.�

Barry Goldwater sent a contour rendering of a cactus beneath a blazing sun, and William Proxmire drew a curvilinear abstraction in felt-tip pen. Hubert Humphrey enclosed a photocopy of a speech he delivered on the 10th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The responses run the gamut -- funny, touching, peculiar, maddening, sometimes even informed. What connects this precocious early work to Vallance’s latest reliquaries is their shared cheerfully revealing collision between the intensely private and the resolutely public, the personal and the institutional. It’s a place we all inhabit.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through Dec. 19. The gallery is closed Sundays and Mondays. www.artnet.com/ gallery/174240/margo-leavin-gallery.html

Stencil work a nod to Richard Pryor

“No Room (Gold),� the handsome new suite of stenciled paintings by Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects II, represents the third time the African American artist has employed the lacerating wit of Richard Pryor as text in his work. The recurrence makes structural sense. Ligon’s art is a meditation on stereotypes, a term that derives from the repetition produced by modern printing techniques.

Pryor’s racial and scatological humor marked a generational shift. In brilliant albums such as “That Nigger’s Crazy� (1974) and “Bicentennial Nigger� (1976), released when Ligon was a teenager, Pryor used comedy to challenge prevailing assimilationist politics.

The New York artist repeats a Pryor joke to devastating effect on 33 of 36 square canvases, each painted gold and arranged as part of a continuous line around the gallery. (The jape can’t be repeated here, but it ends with a raucous assertion of a change in identity necessary to succeed in American society.) Three additional Pryor jokes turn up just past the midway point, complicating the sequence.

Ligon’s use of stenciled, often smeared black letters on glittering gold grounds is stylistically queer, derived from Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. The use of jokes as imagery also recalls Richard Prince’s 1980s appropriation paintings, which often record middle- and lower-middle-class sexual mores. Combined with the Pryor references, these seemingly simple paintings weave a surprisingly rich network of class, race and sex, simultaneously sanctified and muddied.

In the back gallery, neon tubes bent into a printed typeface spell out “Negro Sunshine.� The phrase comes from Gertrude Stein’s first published work, “Three Lives,� which told unexceptional but bittersweet tales of three working-class women, two white and one black. The juxtaposition with the paintings is pointed, since the hubbub over Pryor’s vulgar humor arose from the social and cultural reverberations in the transit between “Negro� and “nigger.�

Ligon’s silent neon tubes are painted dead black, but tiny chips in the paint here and there reveal golden light burning inside. The impossibility of blocking out the illumination speaks volumes.

In the nicest touch, the sign is installed about 10 feet up the wall. You can easily read the text from across the room, but to fully experience the art you must come close and look up to “Negro Sunshine.�

Regen Projects II, 9016 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 276-5424, through Dec. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.regenprojects.com

Three views of the modern landscape

Utopia isn’t what it used to be.

What it used to be was an optimistic dream of an ideal future, brought to you by scientific progress and modern technology. Now that we’re living in that once far-off time, things have not quite turned out as planned. A small but compelling three-person show at the Anna Helwing Gallery picks through the debris, salvaging nuggets amid the ruins.

Berlin-based Michael Hakimi makes black, white and gray inkjet prints on an architectural scale, their cool metallic surface-shapes suggestive of a bleak, vaguely authoritarian landscape of elegant yet grim PCUs and giant audio speakers. Berliner Bernd Ribbeck paints shifting planes of glowing acrylic color on small panels, their familiar references to Russian Constructivism and mystical abstraction defaced but not fully sullied by repetitive, scraping strokes of ballpoint pen.

Danish artist Jacob Dahl Jurgensen, who lives in London, continues the theme in the most poignant piece -- a tall black tripod whose three limbs don’t touch but are held upright and in place by tension cords. The shape suggests an exploded prism. It’s festooned with a garland of colored lightbulbs in pale pastel hues, like a tamped-down celebration.

On the day I visited, the electrical transformer was on the fritz, an ironic yet appropriate temporary problem. But even unlighted, Jurgensen’s sculpture managed to squeeze low-key pleasures from the most ordinary materials.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles (310) 202-2213, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.annahelwing.com

Off-kilter design in Mueller’s shapes

Stephen Mueller’s brightly decorated stains, stripes, patterns and other abstract geometries revel in the handmade and quotidian. Shapes often allude to vessels, which hover in vaporous colored space. The New York artist has been working in this mode for several decades, fusing Pop and abstraction in a manner that anticipated a host of younger artists working now.

There’s an appealing scruffiness to Mueller’s 14 paintings at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, an ever so slightly unkempt quality that keeps the work from feeling earnest or prim. The edge between a flat shape and an atmospheric ground isn’t necessarily crisp, for example, while a purple quatrefoil is smeary. Canvas edges are painted battleship gray, which has the effect of emphasizing their homemade quality -- especially that of the small paintings, which are about a foot square.

Key to the paintings’ success is their off-kilter design. Mueller paints orbs, portholes and ewer shapes against or around checkerboards, clouds and plaids. But the meditative or ritualistic shapes are typically not quite centered on the field. The image seems to be in transit, passing before your eyes -- a journey that a viewer is enticed to join.

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through Dec. 15. The gallery is closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cardwelljimmerson.com