Coleen Sterritt informs the macho medium of wood sculpture with a tempering humor and an almost self-parodying embrace of furniture. Enmeshing banal things like stools and dowels and wood chips in her almost tornado-like constructions, Sterritt tames the concatenations more than they might seem, directing their energies into decorous orbits and implosions. Sterritt’s works on paper are no less bumptious, zigging from black dot to ochre swath to fizzy stick pile in the space of a large page.

Jeff Soto creates the same kind of unlikely gimcrack that Sterritt builds, but painting the thing allows Soto to send it into orbit, floating in some kind of funky outer space where it can whirl about, penetrate itself, grow all sorts of unlikely protuberances and generally morph into some sort of half-living object/creature. If only the real universe were this droll.

The art universe is a little bit less droll for the impending closure of Newspace, the nether-Hollywood gallery that has supported the local scene and its once-neglected artists for a third of a century. Joni Gordon is giving herself a sendoff with a salon-hung show of practically everybody she ever showed, and the roster is almost as amazing as the memories. Coleen Sterritt at d.e.n. contemporary, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City; 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; (310) 559-3023. Jeff Soto at Blk/Mrkt, 6009 Washington Blvd., Culver City; 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; (310) 837-1989. “Good to Go” at Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., Hlywd.; 11 a.m.–4 p.m.; (323) 469-9353. All thru Dec. 16.

—Peter Frank

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