In Kevin Sullivan’s show of simple paintings, silly poems, and objects that would not be out of place on a Hollywood set, the sleep of reason yields mild amusement rather than horrifying nightmares or dramatic disruptions of meaning. Titled “E. Krökus Crock,” this exhibition by the young, L.A.–based artist drew more from comic strips and kitsch than from Surrealism. Although concerned with chance encounters, random events, strange correlations, and the limits of rationality, Sullivan’s art nowhere shares Surrealism’s obsession with sexuality and the unconscious. His light-handed but hardly

Thaddeus Strode employs the Zenned-Out-Euphoric-Get-Stupid Principle to great comic effect. It is a way of thinking/not thinking, of messing with one’s playthings, that’s often misunderstood. Strode’s objects respond to the critical dig “Not going to learn anything big here” with a “You’re damn right and to hell with you”. But the work isn’t that rude. It’s kind of friendly and only demands close attention in order to charm and babble, not reprimand or elucidate. It’s a modest and astute body of work, loaded with and simultaneously drained of possibilities. Strode wants you to believe, to get

In its presentation of diverse male subjectivities, José Quintana’ series of photographs is conceptually as well as visually seductive for the viewer usually starved of male objects of desire. Photographed in color and with the calculated spontaneity of photojournalism, the images are positioned as artsy yet “anthropological” studies of American manhood. While hung with a sometimes heavy-handed didacticism in thematic groups, the work thwarted the potentially clichéd effects of this arrangement with the humor and empathetic impulse underlying these far-from-simply-celebratory images. White men,