Print Ed

The remainder of the actual prints are riddled with an incredible number of thrown-off ideas, from the utterly weird pun photography of Sweets, Meats, Sheets, to the unguarded rural melancholy of Let’s Keep in Touch, the unsettlingly exquisite fallen light of Western Vertical, and the radioactive iconography of Ship and the other mid-’80s nonverbal silhouettes. The kicker is the closing suite of four 1998 pieces using the silent-film title-card motif The End,which constitutes the most gratifying example of holography by a visual artist ever.

As if this wasn’t enough, two adjacent galleries present another whole body of work — Ruscha’s self-published books of photographs — that stands on its own as a major artistic achievement. Beginning in 1963 with Twentysix Gasoline Stations (containing the artist’s snapshots of exactly that, taken on a road trip along Route 66 between L.A. and Oklahoma City), Ruscha invented a new category of artistic activity — mass-produced paperback artist’s books — that has since become a vigorous ongoing genre of its own. Ruscha himself made over a dozen books between 1962 and 1972 (1978 if you count a late collaboration with Lawrence Weiner), ranging from the legendary fold-out Every Building on the Sunset Strip of 1966 to the goofy narrative collaboration with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell entitled Royal Road Test, which forensically documents the effects of hurling a manual typewriter out the window of a 1963 Buick travelling 90 mph. With examples of each of the books displayed, as well as laminated copies mounted to a reading table, and several excellent series of recent print editions deriving from the same images, the book section of the exhibit is worth the price of admission alone.

Often, when an artist expands the scale of her work, the result is a dissipation of the work’s energy. In her last show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Marnie Weber’s elaborate collages of Arizona Highways– style landscapes populated with erotically posed female animal/human hybrids were voyeuristically scaled. Her new exhibition, “Sleepy Weepy Stories,” not only expands the dimensions to imposing proportions, but throws in a couple of extremely idiosyncratic multimedia sculptures. The collaged C-prints are gorgeous, mining the artist’s peculiar pagan archetypes of childhood animism for reliably startling psychological effect. The larger size is matched in several pieces by an escalation of baroque intricacy in the design that recalls the collage work of Bay Area artist Jess. Particular standouts are the Conan Doyle wet-dream The Fairy Tree and the haunting, multilayered Swan Song. One of the sculptures, Siren Song, is dreamlike in its alien simplicity, a small sailboat covered in green and white feathers, nestled in a bed of smooth stones and emitting a groaning keen. The other, a cartoonish mountain cabin with two video monitors and a polar soundtrack, shows a pair of cryptic super-8 narratives involving a masked Red Riding Hood/nurse figure ineffectually ministering to various sickly forest creatures, and a sequence in which a bloody snowman is birthed from the very alpine hut in which the video is being displayed. The dark side of childhood imaginative life has seldom been so complexly or entertainingly portrayed.

MARNIE WEBER: Sleepy Weepy Stories At ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., B4, Santa Monica Through July 8