While Ivan Morley has often included hand-lettered “anecdotes”—textual cocktails of oddball California lore and fantasies dreamed up by the artist—as nebulous primers and legends to his disparate work, no such guides were present in his recent show, leaving viewers to fend for themselves. But four works here, made in 2005 and 2006, all titled Tehachepi (sic) (a folksy misspelling of the name of the mountains that separate the Los Angeles basin from California’s Central Valley), make Morley’s modus operandi clear.

One Tehachepi (sic), in oil on canvas, is an allover composition packed with

In the penultimate lecture of his course on “The Neutral,” Roland Barthes considers “anxiety,” which he is quick to differentiate from “fright.” (“There is something about anxiety,” Barthes writes, pace Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “that protects its subject against fright and so against fright neurosis.”) He relates the example of a white mouse, dropped into “a circular empty space, without nooks, without markers: it feels exposed, vulnerable to predators; and above all anxiety: the conflictual situation (cf. double bind) . . . divided between the need to eat and the need for flight.”

In their video Faustus’s Children, 2006, Michele O’Marah and collaborators Tim Jackson and David Jones draw from a variety of sources, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, 1948, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, 1990, and John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, 1990, to create a tense supernatural thriller. Their primary text, however, is Donna Tartt’s bestselling novel A Secret History, 1992, in which a group of classics students murder one of their pals at an elite New England college.

Like O’Marah’s earlier video Valley Girl, 2002, Faustus’s Children is concerned with the appropriation of