Julia Roberts made her Broadway debut in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain,” and the current revival of the play at South Coast Repertory suggests why (beyond her obvious inexperience) she may have fizzled: The drama belongs to the actor playing the parts of Walker, the gay, neurotic son stricken with wanderlust, and Ned, his diffident architect father, whose life was an enigma his death refuses to resolve.

These roles are assumed in David Emmes’ rewarding production by Kevin Rahm in a performance so assured and honest that it clarifies the complicated emotional through-line of Greenberg’s bifurcated play. Perhaps you’re familiar with Rahm from “Desperate Housewives,” “Mad Men” or “Judging Amy.” I know him only from his appearance at SCR in Kate Robin’s “What They Have.” His work here — adroit in handling the play’s cascade of glimmering language, utterly genuine in exposing old psychological wounds — is unforgettable.

“Three Days of Rain” revolves around the legacy of an important architect, and the play’s own design is akin to one of those strikingly modern houses that are as seductive as they are alienating. The great accomplishment of Emmes’ production, which also stars Brendan Hines and Susannah Schulman, is that he makes the drama not just habitable but comfortably inviting.

Although her career predates Pop Surrealism by several decades, painter Margaret Nielsen operates in a similar vein, bending Old Master techniques to decidedly dream-like purposes. With works dating from the 1970s to the present, her current exhibition at Samuel Freeman traces an idiosyncratic path.

Most delightful are ink and colored pencil drawings from the 1970s that juxtapose bland modern interiors with the impertinence and mystery of nature. Executed in pointellist accretions of tiny black dots, they play with the visual tropes of landscape, decoration and photography. One drawing, above, features two framed pictures of domestic interiors, turned toward each other. A carpet with a vegetal pattern in the picture on the left playfully sprouts a vine that exceeds its frame and curls over into the picture on the right, blending into similarly patterned drapes. The vitality of nature exceeds efforts to capture it as home décor, literally bursting out of the frame; yet paradoxically, it’s still contained by Nielsen’s breezy, almost cartoon-like drawing.

In later years, however, these light, whimsical tableaux give way to more ponderous oil paintings. There are some lovely moments — a hand holding a flaming match next to a small golden bird in mid-flight, an enigmatic skeleton of a Dodo done in a brushy, burnished sepia — but more often the imagery shades into the sentimental or the cliché: a snake wrapped around a spinal column, a heart entwined in vines. There’s something of Frida Kahlo in these small, lovingly executed images, but they lack the startling freshness of her vision, failing to shock or surprise.

-- Sharon Mizota

Samuel Freeman, 2525 Michigan Ave., Suite B7, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through June 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.samuelfreeman.com

Photos, from top:  "Untitled," 1974; Margaret Nielsen, "The Dodo," 2011. Credit:  Samuel Freeman. 

The paintings in Jim Shaw’s latest exhibition, “Cakes, Men in Pain, White Rectangles, Devil in the Details,” are precisely what the title alleges. Each of the works on view at Patrick Painter begins with an ink-jet print of a 1950s image of a cake, which is then painted over in gestural Abstract Expressionist strokes. That background is further layered with a near photorealistic painting of a shirtless man grimacing or squirming in the face of a large, white, painted rectangle. Each rectangle is echoed by a second panel of the same size, covered in swirling gray brushstrokes, hanging beside the first. Shaw has enhanced these strokes in most cases with tiny ink or pencil lines that pull out the barest hint of cartoony faces, body parts, or googly eyes from the muck. On the threshold of perception, you’re not sure the doodles are even really there or just something you invented out of the corner of your eye.

From a certain perspective, the whole shebang is one big art historical joke, a kind of summary of styles from the latter half of the 20th century. The cakes epitomize 1950s domestic achievement and are fodder for Pop art. The raw, gestural fury of Abstract Expressionism is famously macho, but is topped by realistically rendered, vulnerable men. Then there is the negation of the Minimalist white rectangle, the quiet absence that seems to afflict the men. And finally, the murky second panel that “fills in” that absence is gray and mushy like brain matter, where images emerge on the edge of cognition.

At the risk of reading all of this too literally, the paintings sum up tensions between artistic poles — action versus negation, complicity versus resistance, mind versus body — that surprisingly, don’t cancel each other out, but feel alive and prickly. Esoteric artistic debates may indeed be cringe-worthy, but they also prod us to keep looking and searching, in hopes of finally making something out.

-- Sharon Mizota

Patrick Painter, 2525 Michigan Ave., A8, Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through June 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.patrickpainter.com

Photos, from top: "Cake (Jim Head Clutch)," 2010; "Cake (Jim Bent)," 2011. Credit: LeeAnn Nickel,  Los Angeles.

 
Executed in sludgy browns and grays, Charles Karubian’s paintings at Jancar Gallery tweak the genre of the studio nude. At first, they look like images of naked women standing in piles of trash, contorting their bodies in front of a draped backdrop. Then it becomes clear that embedded in Karubian’s broad brushwork are faces — the walls and floor are lined with the crumpled, distorted visages of politicians. It’s an odd combination — throwing female nudity and political portraiture into the same muddy morass — and it’s troubling, but perhaps not for the reasons the artist intends.

To Karubian’s credit, his work brings to mind the deadpan physicality of Lucian Freud’s posed, desultory nudes. But whereas Freud’s works are usually intimate, unvarnished images of people he knows, Karubian’s feel distant and generic. The figures are in some cases almost camouflaged against the unruly background. And though one could argue that the politicians depicted — including Ted Kennedy, Sarah Palin and Hosni Mubarak — are people we all “know,” that recognition, however delayed, only makes the women’s bodies seem more symbolic than specific.

This is where the work becomes problematic. It’s not because a naked woman is squatting over a portrait of John Boehner. It’s the use of the female body as a symbol of the denigration that such an act implies. The female nude has traditionally stood in for any number of abstract ideas, from music and poetry to sex and debauchery, but that's no excuse. It seems to me that the broader critique or ridicule Karubian appears to be angling toward could be just as well conveyed by any naked body — regardless of sex — and the work might feel less stereotypical.

-- Sharon Mizota

Jancar Gallery, 961 Chung King Road, (213) 625-2522, through May 28. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.jancargallery.com

Photo:  "Figure, Poised Over Boehner and Another," 2011. Credit: Jancar Gallery.

Kim Beom likes to turn things upside down. In his latest exhibition at REDCAT, titled “Animalia,” the Korean artist upends the natural order, questioning whether it is in fact so natural. Sheathing a preoccupation with power dynamics in a wry sense of humor and a penchant for the absurd, his installations, drawings and videos question the distinctions we routinely make between ourselves, animals and objects.

This tactic of inversion is most obvious in the video “Spectacle,” in which a popular scene from nature documentaries — a cheetah chasing an antelope — is doctored so that the antelope is chasing the cheetah. It’s a simple reversal of what television has framed and reinforced as “natural.” Of course, Kim isn’t suggesting that antelopes could or should chase cheetahs; rather, by altering the video, he raises a question: Why, of all the natural dramas captured on camera, is this the one that resonates?

Perhaps it’s because we’re bloodthirsty exploiters. In the installation “Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools,” Kim takes education to task as an instrument of social control. The piece is essentially a schoolroom for small consumer goods in which a fan, a teakettle, a bottle of dish soap, and other sundries sit on little wooden chairs in front of a chalkboard. The instructor appears on a small television, his head cut off at the top edge of the screen. He talks about the history of human rights, and the workings of capitalism and consumerism but this lecture is intended not to inspire, but rather to tamp down aspiration. The objects are told that no matter how much people become attached to them, they have no “essential value” outside of their economic use. The idea of teaching consumer products not to rise up and seize their destinies is comical, but the familiar educational format makes it easy to imagine children or employees sitting in the seats instead. In treating objects like people, Kim reveals the hard logic under which people are often seen as tools.

This installation is given context by a selection of fantastic drawings and blueprints of imaginary prisons, a lighthouse, an immigration office and a school. Kim envisions these structures as diagrams of power: prisoners fuel the lighthouse by riding bicycles in its base; one incarceration center involves housing “heinous criminals” in a maze-like structure with “offensive beasts.” Despite their punitive uses, these buildings are invariably wrapped in serene, cloud-like white forms — they could be Apple products.

The drawings are indictments of bureaucracy and cruelty, but they are also fanciful imaginings, not unlike the complex maps that children draw of invented worlds. One design — for a tyrant’s safe house — looks suspiciously like an elongated version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. This lair, we learn from the blueprint, is guarded not just by dogs, but by “wolf-dog hybrids,” wolves, and finally, preposterously, by “wolf-men,” each indicated by a different symbol and deployed in a different place.

This fantasy of mastery is simultaneously the purview of the child and the megalomaniac, and the drawings poke fun at the notion of total control even as they gently indulge it. Here, the logic of Kim’s inversions becomes clear: Oppression and imagination are two sides of the same coin. Even as he lays bare the deadening effects of the product-driven society we have envisioned and built for ourselves, Kim reveals how imagination might enable us to see a bit of ourselves in everything, perhaps even in other people.

-- Sharon Mizota

The Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., (213) 237-2800, through June 19. Closed Mondays. www.redcat.org

Photos, from top: Kim Beom, "Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools," 2010, installation view at REDCAT; "Animalia," 2011, installation view. Credit: Scott Groller

In 1930, Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias and his wife, Rose, traveled to the island of Bali in Indonesia and promptly fell in love with what they saw. They stayed nine months, soaking up the natural beauty and distinct culture. Covarrubias later wrote a classic book called “Island of Bali,” which somewhat overshadowed the art he made on the trip. One of those paintings is a stylized map of Bali, showing the diamond-shaped island dominated by smoking volcanoes towering over lush valleys and hillsides terraced into rice fields. Temples dot the terrain and in the ocean dragons and mermaids swim while a cruise ship steams away.

The map — displayed in a show at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum called “Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance” — nicely sums up the seductive allure that has made the island such a byword for exotica. Not to mention a land of contrasts.

Bali is a Hindu enclave in the middle of the most populous Islamic country in the world. The island is verdant yet also densely populated, divided into hill-clinging rice fields that make for beautiful photos but backbreaking labor.

Its people are celebrated for weaving artistic and spiritual practices into daily life, but the island’s history is soaked in blood, from the Dutch conquest in the early 1900s to a dirty war against suspected communists in the 1960s. Only 2,000 square miles in area, Bali boasts tens of thousands of temples. The Balinese language has no word for religion — so saturated is the culture with notions of the divine that none appears necessary.

The show, which runs through Sept. 11, is the first in the U.S. to broadly examine the art and culture of Bali. More than 130 objects — including  sculpture,  musical instruments and textiles — are on display.

For the full Arts & Books article, click here.

--Michael J. Ybarra

Photo: The widow Rangda, wood and pigments. Credit: Asian Art Museum

While interviewing Amy Watson, a principal dancer in the Royal Danish Ballet (which performs next week in Costa Mesa), for a Sunday Arts & Books profile of her boss, Nikolaj Hübbe, artistic director of the company, I told her about watching Hübbe, formerly a beloved dancer in the New York City Ballet, walk through a reception for him at the Guggenheim Museum. It was like watching a prince glide through his adoring minions, I said. "Oh, yeah," she said, laughing.

Watson, born in Oceanside (she was a military kid and lived on Camp Pendleton until she was 10), offered that when she was a teenager at the School of American Ballet in New York, and Hübbe came to teach, "We used to put on special makeup. We used to say, 'Ohmigod, Nikolaj's teaching, we have to wear makeup today and our pretty leotards.' Yeah, he's a magnet. He's a magnet to women and men. He just has this persona around him. When he comes into a room, his persona demands attention."

I asked her if acclaimed dancers always made good teachers. "It definitely does not go hand-in-hand," she said. "I've worked with phenomenal dancers who have had phenomenal careers and it has not been the same when they have made that transition into being a coach or instructor." But Hübbe, Watson said, was the exception: he was a sensational teacher and mentor.

"He is the most passionate person I know when it comes to this art form. He knows everything about it. He knows the history of every ballet, of every ballerina. You can talk to him about every style, every company, this person, that person. He gives all his knowledge." 

His passion, she said, ran both ways. "He can be passionate about something being phenomenal, and he can be passionate about something that he highly disagrees with you on. He likes to argue. So you get a good debate going with him, I'll say that. But he always wants the best for the art form, the best for you."

Advertisers would have us believe that the world is divided between Mac and PC users. But the world of acting is still split along lines that go back half a century to two titans, Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando

British technical polish versus American Method is one way of describing the schism. Cross-pollination in theater, movies and TV would seem to have rendered all this obsolete. But as this year’s competitive Tony race for best lead actor in a play reveals, old traditions die hard.

To read my critic’s notebook on the subject of the U.S.-U.K .acting divide as played out this season on Broadway, click here.

--Charles McNulty

twitter.com\charlesmcnulty

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Photos: Al Pacino in "The Merchant of Venice." Credit: Joan Marcus / The Public Theater

Some artworks fire up in a flash. Others take a bit longer to enter the world. By Peter Wegner’s accounting, the most ambitious of a suite of artworks he just completed for Stanford’s new Graduate School of Business campus was simmering for about two decades.

“Monument to Change as It Changes," shown above, is a large grid of color that, as the title suggests, is perpetually in flux. It is not static for even a second. At one moment, the whole “screen” floods with orange or blue; at another it disintegrates into a field of competing hues. For each small rectangle making up this large grid can change color with a quick flipping motion, the same way letters change on an old-fashioned train station departure and arrival board.

The artist says he first had the idea of using this flip-digit technology in an artwork when he was 25, standing on a train platform in Berlin with his wife. He found himself transfixed by the mechanical motion of the train signage “like any 3-year-old would be.”

He was also fascinated by the appearance of language in flux, as fragments of letters appeared and disappeared. “For me, it felt like meaning or sense was assembling and disassembling itself. Language was prying itself apart and putting itself together while you're standing there.” And then at a certain point, he says, the fragments “will coalesce into something recognizable.

“That really resonated with me. I go through life that way. There are moments where meaning seems really elusive and inscrutable and then momentarily falls into place.”

Click here for the full Arts&Books feature on Wegner's "monuments to the future" at Stanford, with a video interview showing the artworks in action.

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--Jori Finkel

www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

Image: Peter Wegner sits in front of "Monument to Change as It Changes" at the Stanford Graduate School of Business's Knight Management Center. Photo by Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times.

“The Dark Lining” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art represents Marco Brambilla's biggest museum exhibition to date as well as the first public showing of his new 3D video “Evolution.” But it doesn’t include the video he made that got the most small-screen play last year: his music video for Kanye West’s hit “Power" (shown above).

Curator Lisa Melandri says, “I actually never considered [including] it, because I felt it was Marco’s vision in the service of a particular product as opposed to completely an autonomous artwork. You’re given the music and given the personality, Kanye West, and I don’t think of it as the same process.”