L.A. Weekly Critics' Choices

The good news is that McMillen's first solo gallery show in almost seven years opens September 15 at L.A. Louver, and it promises to be another triumph of the kind of installation-as-theater we have come to expect from the Blade Runner model maker. "Lighthouse" will consist of two chambers nested within the reduced white-cube panopticon ride of L.A. Louver, one displaying a series of illuminated oil paintings and bronze sculptures cast from found materials; the inner containing the titular installation showing a raggedy-ass building stuck in a tar pit, with a whited-out billboard acting as a drive-in screen for McMillen's flickering dream-within-a-dream projections. One of McMillen's earliest mentors was a neighbor who made the Tesla coils for James Whale's Frankenstein (1931). McMillen's installations are a kind of avant-garde walk-through cinematic experience with one foot there — in predigital Hollywood-effects culture — and the other in the criminally uncharted postmodern legacy of West Coast assemblage and installation. The scary thing is ... it's alive! —Doug Harvey

L.A. LOUVER | 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice | Sept. 15-Oct. 30 | Reception Wed., Sept. 15, 6-8 p.m. Screenings of McMillen's digital films: Wed., Sept. 22, 2-5 p.m. & Sat., Oct. 9, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. | RSVP: (310) 822-4955

Alberto Burri, Legno e Rosso 3 (1959), from "Combustione: Alberto Burri and America," at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, opening Sept. 10

Paul McCarthy, Train, Mechanical (2003-2009), at L&M Arts, opening Sept. 25

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Mimi Lauter just finished her MFA at UCI, but has been showing samples of her talent in group and small solo shows around town for a few years. She drew inspiration for her latest works — small to large pieces in oil and soft pastel, oil paint and colored pencil, with fine detail carefully scratched into the surfaces — from Bible stories and Russian folklore. You likely wouldn't know that from looking at her images, which are equal parts abstract, familiar and otherworldly, as Lauter takes the imagery, and the sense of light, space and color she intuits from source tales, and runs far afield with it all. But one thing that is clear is that she also didn't take her cues from the de rigueur of academia or the du jour of the marketplace. She neither is, nor pretends to be, an outsider, a folk artist, or, in the quaint and sometimes demeaning way in which the term is used, a visionary. But she's visionary enough to see the worth of the terrain visionaries tread, and both empathetic and savvy enough to know that the rest of us might have a place for a more secularized, abstracted dose of the visionary in our hearts and minds, and on our walls. Simultaneously timeless, placeless and yet just right for the here and now, Lauter's works are in ways rough and raw, and wide-awake, and yet they issue something of a calling to that part of each of us that is able to be sensitive, that might dare to be fragile, and that might be willing to dream. —Christopher Miles

MARC SELWYN FINE ART | 6222 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. | Sept. 10-Oct. 23

You should know about Alberto Burri. He was traumatized into art during World War II, his gnarly, blowtorched, gashed and cracked canvases, often punctuated with clots of blood-red paint, positioning him as a key postwar Italian artist, an instrumental part of the arte povera movement and a major influence on the young early-'50s minds of American masters like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. The Santa Monica Museum of Art's presentation is timely and important, offering a slightly obscure modernist painter ready to be discovered anew. Wild and shell-shocked, Burri's paintings make Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still look polite and boyishly naive. —Ed Schad

COMBUSTIONE: ALBERTO BURRI AND AMERICA | Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica | (310) 586-6488, smmoa.org | Reception Fri., Sept. 10, 7-9 p.m.

Brad Eberhard is equally proficient as an abstract painter and collage artist — not to mention rock & roll, as the hulking leader of local post-garage idols Wounded Lion (who just concluded a successful West Coast blitzkrieg and are playing UC Irvine and the Smell next week). In his two previous shows with Tom Solomon (one each of the paintings and collages, and both last year!), Eberhard seemed on the brink of merging the two traditions, melding his meticulous abstract-formalist modulations with the wit and narrative evidenced by the cut-and-paste work.

In new works like Whaler (2010), he seems to have made the leap, carefully recreating the improvisational patchwork geometry of a torn-paper collage in oils, and passing the threshold into deliberate pictorialism — in this case the titular sailing vessel. Other works pull back from easy legibility, with fragments of landscapes and figures flickering among the layers of luminous blobs, inserting a bit of grit in the Kandinskian idealism of his purely abstract concoctions, which at times seem to come too easily to him. Sometimes it's beneficial to allow the outside world to intrude a little. —Doug Harvey

THOMAS SOLOMON GALLERY @ COTTAGE HOME | 410 Cottage Home St., L.A. | (310) 428-2964 | Sept. 11–Oct. 9 | Reception Sat., Sept. 11, 6-8 p.m.

"Monster," wrote Alfred Jarry, "is the unfamiliar concord of dissonant elements, the centaur, the chimera." By Jarry's definition, sculptor Carlee Fernandez traffics in monsters. She builds curious taxidermy figures that combine the organic and the man-made (a buffalo-head suitcase, for instance) to, at the very least, underscore crass consumerism. Her new show at ACME goes a step further in realizing Jarry's concord, with even larger pieces and more complex contrasts (a bobcat mash-up!) — objects that stand beyond hierarchies, labels and aesthetic order. Nevertheless, they somehow veer toward classical painting. —Paul Young