Often perplexing, and pointed in the titling of his works, Roger Hiorns has made various pieces in strikingly different media—from one deploying dark steel plates sprayed, at crotch level, with the tony scent of Jean Patou’s Joy to another with fire tongueing through a metal grating—all dubbed Vauxhall, 2003. As writer Siobhan McDevitt points out in the brochure accompanying Hiorns’s UCLA Hammer Projects show, “If the word Vauxhall can mean, among other things, a London tube stop, the seventeenth-century pleasure garden for which the tube stop is named, a car company, a Morrissey record . . .

Albrecht Dürer would have seen a reason for drawing, meticulously, the subjects of Patrick Lee’s “Deadly Friends.” The men in Lee’s pictures look like they understand, firsthand, that looks can kill, or at least inflict a serious bruising. Drifters, outlaws, parolees, gangbangers; guys with thick necks, shaved heads, and broad chests, parts emblazoned with tattoos (“Fuck All Haters”; “Trust No Bitches”; “Bad Influences”), the warnings and braggadocio of member status, make up this forbidding posse. Although Lee has photographed hundreds of men, met on the streets of Los Angeles, over the course

A collage sensibility is central to the concerns of Los Angeles–based artist Brian Bress, even as the collage medium was thoroughly subsumed into photography and video in his recent show. In the thirteen-minute twenty-second video Under Cover, 2007, that sensibility pervades the sets, props, and costumes with which Bress, ambitiously assuming a variety of oddball personae, indulges the camera. The video begins with a seemingly flat image of vibrant color bars, initially assumed to be electronically generated, that are revealed to be handmade when the artist, posing as a sleazy narc, complete

Whether grafting a house onto an airplane (as he did in Cargo Plane with Crate House, 1996), constructing stacks of domestic-style couches, or, in what has become a signature move, gutting, upturning, and slicing and dicing Dumpsters, Rob Fischer has developed a practice that links two established sculptural traditions: the found object and the post-Minimalist environment. For his recent exhibition, Fischer filled the space with a single work that fits nicely within his oeuvre, which habitually pits clunkiness against elegance, movement against stasis, and whim against rigor. This work, however,