LA Weekly

Renée Lotenero’s sculpture, drawing and painting may not be strictly site specific, but they blend in quite specifically at their current location. Lotenero has picked up on the tile patterns that clad the gallery building and subjected them to her elaborate process of what appears to be literal deconstruction, realizing almost animate structures that seem at once to be in states of collapse and regeneration. Lotenero’s graphic work can’t convey the same sense of abjection as her poignantly disintegrating objects, but in their own animated elaborations they further the overarching notion of an organic — even sentient — architecture, part building, part bird. Upstairs, Lynne Marsh’s video Stadium contemplates the design and history of Berlin’s Olympiastadion, last celebrated cinematically by Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on the 1936 Olympic Games. Marsh riffs on aspects of Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi-commissioned work, but her own elegant piece mostly muses on the regimentation informing stadium seating itself. Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.; Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru April 12. (323) 931-3721.

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Tony de los Reyes, Eclipse (2008)

Tony de los Reyes’ own musings have led him to Moby Dick. That intractable monument of American literature has inspired, and daunted, countless artists of all kinds and all complexities, but de los Reyes’ approach is at least on one level relatively straightforward. In slathering bloody red paint across portions of text, de los Reyes conjures the blood lust that permeates the story. The aura of violence continues in the sculptural work, commingling skulls, stars (i.e., five-pointed American-flag-type star symbols) and other tropes that point to America’s heart of darkness — sheathed, as de los Reyes intimates, in a skin of whiteness. Carl Berg, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.; Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru April 12. (323) 931-6060.