Ansel Adams’s 1933 photograph Storeroom, M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, depicts an unruly crowd in the institution’s storage vault: smiling kouroi, draped Venuses, and other ancient statuary with legs and arms akimbo. Rather than to justly capture sculptural volume, Adams’s viewpoint from within the melee seems designed to obscure spatial relations and render three-dimensional form startlingly flat. It is this same curious effect that Matt Lipps sought to achieve in his latest series of staged photographs, “HORIZON/S,” 2010–.

Since 2002, Lipps has been developing a unique mode of photomontage

Mounted by a gallery better known for its specialization in works by blue-chip artists than for its fledgling LA-based contemporary program, Jacob Kassay’s first solo West Coast show seemed something of an anomaly. But L&M Arts’ interest in this young painter is no mystery: Regardless of their merit, Kassay’s silvery-reflective monochromes made a splash at auction last fall. Anticipating the cynics, the staff penned a press release that was quick to distance Kassay’s older output from the new work he made for this show. Calling attention to the differences in surface treatment, it announced that

What is there left to say about punk in 2011? Some thirty-plus years after the fact, the spiky-haired and safety-pinned look has taken its place right alongside that of the hippie as a Halloween-costume option, drained of any potential to shock or scare. One could go further and claim that if punk once marked the outer limit of subcultural rebellion, then its apparent loss of agency suggests it may no longer be possible to signify refusal in stylistic terms. Today, the punk rocker mostly appears as an endearing, Muppet-like caricature.

However, Honor Fraser’s recent exhibition of punk-rock