AROUND THE GALLERIES

Why stop at 50? As Dan Mills points out in the mock manifesto accompanying his terrific show at Sherry Frumkin, these United States of ours cohered over time -- starting with 16 territories in the 18th century, adding 29 in the 19th, and five more in the 20th.

“As we consider U.S. history,” he writes, “a pattern of expanding by at least five states every fifty years exists, with the exception of the last fifty or so. We clearly have some catching up to do.”

Should the government want to keep the pattern going, Mills has kindly -- well, speciously really -- done the groundwork. He has taken the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Afghanistan as models and made a case for assuming control over dozens of other nations and incorporating them into the United States. In a series of 35 collages, he combines maps, paint and handwritten text into tight little arguments for adding noncontiguous states to our growing family of dependents. These new U.S. Global (USG) states would accrue to our good old United States of America (USA) to form the U.S. Empire, aptly abbreviated as USE.

Iceland would be renamed “Thermia” and give us access to its ample thermal and hydro-energy stores, not to mention acres of available space for parking missiles and setting up military bases. Albania would be absorbed as “New Albany,” Venezuela as “New Venice” and Tunisia transformed subtly into “Tunisiana.”

Onto each sheet, Mills collages a map of the future state and compares it to an existing (“sibling”) state to indicate scale but also, in a pseudo-strategic act of persuasion, to normalize the new adoptee, to relate it to the known and accepted. He paints atop the maps, sometimes delineating travel routes and sometimes mimicking topographical patterns, covering the land in question with concentric bands of color or patches of flat, opaque hues.

Beneath a brief history of each country, Mills offers a motive/rationale for taking it over. “Why” largely transmutes into a matter of “why not,” as he lists natural resources to exploit, GDPs that promise to boost our own, populations to impose the glories of democracy upon and -- the most pervasive of all -- new areas to increase our military presence and, er, protection.

Wonderfully ludicrous in its entirety, the project is frightfully credible in its details. Mills exaggerates to the point of parody opportunistic foreign policy doctrines already in place -- at least those that prevailed during the heart of the Bush era, the years Mills compiled this “Atlas of Global Imperialism.” The work reeks of truth and shimmers with humor.

In his page on the new state of “Formosa Taiwan,” Mills accedes that greater China is too big and powerful for takeover but that Taiwan can be our very own “little China.” It’s on record as wanting independence from China, he reasons, but there’s no proof it wanted independence from the USA. Why not?

“USArctica” would be a novelty -- the “first democratic ocean,” a prospective new acquisition simply because it’s vulnerable. No one has grabbed it yet, and “preemptive protective doctrine” is the tautological rationale of choice: taking over a region to protect it from being taken over.

Mills’ subversive project comes across as a “Colbert Report” segment writ large -- witty and wry and delivered with (mostly) deadpan earnestness. The new name of Somalia can’t be pronounced? No problem -- we’ll call it Acronym. A national holiday celebrating the “liberation” of “Chosen Again” (formerly South Korea) is declared “Pendance Day,” since “Dependence Day” sounds a bit too honest, and anyway, Mills quips, the ambiguity of the new term is perfectly suited for a state where English isn’t the primary language.

Mills lives in Pennsylvania, where he directs the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University. Long active as both a curator and artist, this is his first solo show in Los Angeles. His “Future States” project (recently published by Santa Monica’s Perceval Press) was born of anxiety. Mills channeled that into razor-sharp hilarity and drew the thoroughly engaging series to a close (as Bush himself prepared to leave office) with what must have been exhilarating relief.

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Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 3026 Airport Ave. in Santa Monica. (310) 397-7493, through Nov. 7. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.frumkingallery.com

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Crafty with his craftsmanship

Kiel Johnson is crafty in the best senses of the word -- both clever and great with his hands. In his amusing and gently provocative show at Mark Moore, he counters our current infatuation with devices small, sleek and hi-tech with contraptions that are cartoonishly large, insistently handmade and powered by nothing but rollicking ingenuity.

Cardboard, chipboard, tape and glue are the L.A. artist’s sculptural materials of choice, and with them, he builds likenesses of mechanical objects whose vintage designs correlate to his homespun, analog sensibility. His double-sided boombox (more than 3 feet high and 4 feet wide) stands in a puddle of cardboard cassette tapes.

A “Twin Lens Reflex Camera” (5 feet from top to bottom) hangs from a homemade strap. Unwieldy and uncalibrated, the camera does function: a group of blurry landscape photographs made with it hangs nearby. “Publish or Perish,” the artist’s elaborate, DIY take on a printing press, spits out sheets of paper dense with tiny renderings of all of Johnson’s belongings, from hangers to houseplants.

There is charm in Johnson’s tinkering, as well as a wistfulness, a slight despair reverberating beneath the humor. Proliferation is vexed, he seems to be saying. We’ve made ourselves captive to a self-perpetuating process that yields endless amounts of stuff. In one of his marvelous ink drawings, an orb consisting of continuous machinery floats in space, a metaphor for our planet, where the wheels we’ve set in motion keep turning for their own sake, a hive of industrial busywork. We’d be better off taking things back into our own hands (literally) and shaping them with something like Johnson’s idiosyncratic care.

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Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Nov. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday. www .markmooregallery.com

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‘Only violent in its persistence’

In “The Tremble Series,” a short narrative joined with photographs, Tamara Sussman imagines the effects of a local earthquake “only violent in its persistence.” The tremor never exceeds 3.2 on the Richter scale, but it also never stops. It fissures the pavement, uproots plants and tilts foundations, but the people of L.A. simply adapt. Incremental change doesn’t claim the headlines; slow-burning disasters don’t terrorize like fear of the single massive event.

Sussman’s fictional spin has resonance and is the most enduring part of her show at Rosamund Felsen. In this piece as in the others on view, the L.A.-based artist muses on weakness, vulnerability, mistakes made and regretted; but throughout, she compromises emotional intensity by succumbing to the gratuitous (making the text overlaying the photographs unnecessarily tricky to read) or, in the case of her collages, the exhaustively confessional.

Each collage page features an individual letter formed by photographs of posed and arranged arms and legs, combined with text (printed in letterpress) that reads like a diary entry. Grouped together so the pages spell out words (“Little Aches” and “Tremble”), they make a distinctive visual statement from afar, as of childlike, tentative poetry. Up close, however, the accounts of humiliation, yearning and disconnection feel more self-indulgent than innocent.

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Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Nov. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.rosamundfelsen.com

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The emergence of a sexual side

Raw sexual energy is not what we’ve come to expect from Gwynn Murrill’s work. The L.A. sculptor has, for decades now, portrayed animals -- tigers, cougars, cats, dogs, eagles, deer -- with the dignity of ancient Egyptian statuary and the distilled elegance of early modernism. Her show of maquettes at L.A. Louver is filled with their concise essential gestures, primarily in bronze and ceramic.

But the nature of the human animal intrigues Murrill too, and in exploring it, she resists her characteristic impulse toward purity and idealized form. Nine small bronze tabletop “Wrasslers” are complex, vital knots of physical intimacy.

In each, two figures couple, some with balletic grace but most with a messier, more naked urgency. The messier, the more interesting. The most vigorous and compelling are lumpen, pinched forms, one with a mint-green splotchy patina like lichen on sea rock. Vigorous and untamed, the sculptures are viscerally rather than conventionally naturalistic.

Another odd and compelling surprise in this show of nearly 100 small pieces (some of which have been translated into full-size sculptures) is a shelf of four identical forms in different materials -- white plastic, pinkish ceramic, bitter brown bronze and bronze with a milky, calcified patina. A strange little hybrid, the seated female nude with legs tucked classically, sensuously to one side has broad shoulders, undefined, paddle-thick hands, and a triangular, bear-like head with protruding snout.

In spite of its compact size (just under 4 inches tall), the figure -- alone and especially multiplied -- has a powerful presence. Works like these stand out refreshingly among Murrill’s oeuvre as undomesticated curiosities, private and primal.

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L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Nov. 7. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.lalouver.com