LA Weekly

Judging by this selection of eight artists at Milo Gallery, everything is up to date in Kansas City — and beyond. Ricky Allman’s digital-architecture-on-acid renditions; Orly Cogan’s luscious figurative embroideries; the limpid paintings Mary Ann Strandell makes of Rococo and Beaux Arts decorative detail; the similarly decorous, doily-embossed paperworks of Heather Smith Jones; Anne Pearce’s intricately, obsessively drawn and painted monster figures; David Ford’s soft, strange dream-image painting-drawings; the endlessly burgeoning, endlessly fascinating childhood/stoner images rushing at you in Barry Anderson’s videos; and the weird, hilarious sign paintings of Archie Scott Gobber (A Chimp Painted This, Art for Christ’s Sake) all together constitute a delightfully dizzying iceberg-tip tour of Cowtown postmodernism. Milo, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.; Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; thru May 24. (323) 935-3662.

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Steven Seinberg, Cases (2008)

A confluence of four painters at Bill Lowe Gallery brings together gestural abstraction from New York, North Carolina, Germany and Venice beach. Such notational work — part Pollock, part Klee — derives its energy from the “personalized universality” of handwriting. Gary Komarin choreographs a broad formal language of clots and spots and lines and strokes into remarkably tight and handsome compositions. Some of the same kinds of markings float in Steven Seinberg’s placid, open drawings, in contrast to the misty, drippy fields he conjures on his canvases. Sabine Kloss sets opaque, brightly colored linear formations, some suggesting real-life objects, to dancing on relatively small panels, while more scribbled, angular forms hinting at the figure agitate across Amadea Bailey’s rough surfaces. The work together comprises a forest of signs and lines animated by texture and color. Bill Lowe, 2034 Broadway, Santa Monica; Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru May 31. (310) 449-0184.