Charles Long

Stretching fifty-one miles through Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles River is often no more than a dribble of tepid water chastened by outsize concrete embankments. In Culver City, it gurgles between the galleries along La Ciénega Boulevard. It is nature “recategorized as infrastructure,” in the writer Jenny Price’s words, and the improbable site of inspiration for Charles Long’s seventh solo exhibition at this gallery. The artist documented the bright white spatters of bird droppings along the river’s concrete berm in a series of small albumen-print photographs, many on view here, then re-created some of those forms (to original scale) as unexpectedly elegant, untitled, mixed-media sculptures. Eight of these three-dimensional works, made of papier-mâché, plaster, white acrylic paint, and detritus recovered from the river basin and supported by narrow steel beams, populate the main gallery. They lend themselves easily to anthropomorphic readings: In one, at the center of the gallery, a large form trails tendrils like a jellyfish; another could be the skeleton of some horrid avian creature (perhaps the “knowird” named in the exhibition’s title), its wings drooping as it perches atop a thin stanchion. The spindly vertical forms and their mottled surfaces loosely recall Giacometti’s walkers, while the rectilinear steel elements evoke Sol LeWitt’s “Incomplete Open Cube” series. The relationship between the seemingly formless scavenged organic material and the rigidly constructed inorganic “support” is pleasingly varied. Long, whose last three exhibitions at this gallery have been equally dissimilar, is working with abundant and merited confidence.