Roy Dowell’s paintings and collages contain an abundance of odd visual elements that normally would never be caught dead together on the same picture plane, let alone in the same artist’s brain. But Dowell performs an amazing and astute feat of integration. His garish profusion of colors and shapes could easily be misread as kitsch, irony, or artistic commentary on notions xyz. But they’re not any of those things. The show, entitled “The Grand Order of Things” and consisting of 6 large paintings and 11 small collages, is very much alive and intelligent, and it presents a load of valuable

Ann Preston’s recent work continues her ongoing deconstruction of the so-called transcendental, non-representational artwork into a repetitive series of contingent and rhetorical figurative motifs. In this case, the contingency is based upon a corporeal consciousness instilled by the Creation Myth. By titling her installation of wall- and free-standing sculptures “In His Image,” Preston simultaneously underlines and questions the predominant patriarchal ideology not only of representational encoding itself, but perceptual experience as a whole. Preston’s lowest common (signifying) denominator

Dan McCleary’s recent portrait paintings and pastel drawings share an affinity with works by the old masters. His small oil paintings of Michael Abatemarco, for example, are strongly reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture. McCleary depicts his subject only from the shoulders up, yet reveals much about the person’s character. Abatemarco looks like a boy in late adolescence, with an unlined, almost innocent face that nevertheless is marked by a look of defiance verging on belligerence. In one of the works in this series, the youth’s face is portrayed almost straight on, with just a slight turn to

In his work Shoichi Ida conducts an ongoing meditation on the relationship between process and material. Employing time-dependent physical interactions (absorption, evaporation, staining) and materials such as cloth, earth, water, bones, and handmade paper, Ida explores notions of what constitutes surface and image in art. Are the two twin brother and sister? When does an object resting against a surface cease to be on that surface and begin to enter it? Is an image always something between the paper and the viewer? Ida often inscribes an image on the back of a semitransparent surface so that

China-born, Los Angeles-based visual and performance artist May Sun has produced work at such disparate Los Angeles venues as the Woman’s Building, City Hall, and the Japanese-American Cultural Center. Her latest installation, L.A. River/China Town, was installed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. In collaboration with director Peter Brosius and composer Tom Recchion, Sun created a multimedia installation that melded myth and history. The work revolved around a symbolic search for the old L.A. Chinatown that was demolished during the building of Union Station. Sun wove together four stories that