La Cienega Area

Larry Johnson’s Ektacolor photographs are of texts laid out in Letraset-like typefaces and exuding a heavy irony. “Untitled (The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss)” is meant to resemble the back of a record jacket, with mishmashes of type in cheery colors and lyrics conveying a snarly idiocy. (Sample: “that’s all you get to taste/poverty & spit,/ poverty and spit.”)

Other photographs isolate voices whose rhetoric echoes B-movie dialogue (the final conversation of pilots who realize their plane is doomed, a son telling his mother he can’t live up to her goals) or simply the spew of daily conversation (a complaint to a third party about a friend with uncivilized eating habits).

The big-scale glossiness of the photos, the colors and the arrangements of type co-opt a Madison Avenue slickness, presumably to underline the mannered structure of modern-day communication. But, as in so many hotshot first novels these days, there is little indication that the “author” has any frame of reference beyond the comfortable limits of pop culture. (Kuhlenschmidt-Simon Gallery, 9000 Melrose Ave., to Dec. 5.)