Review: For artist Laure Prouvost’s first solo L.A. show, a look at our plastic-wrapped lives

French-born Laure Prouvost, winner of the 2013 Turner Prize and widely exhibited throughout Europe, has her first solo L.A. show at Fahrenheit, where she spent part of last spring in residency. “A Way to Leak, Lick, Leek” is much like its title -- at once evocative, clumsy and obscure.

Prouvost works in multiple media, and often, as here, she screens a video within an environmental installation. Her eight-minute piece tracks young adults in playful, wistful conversation in and around their car. They speak their fantasies of comfort and connection (to feel the heartbeat of the earth, to sleep between a cow and a calf) and invoke other dreamlike scenarios (one involves killing fish that eat raspberries), some of which are quick-cut visualized.

One of the women refers, in passing, to “the plastic that’s slowly covering us,” and Prouvost makes that sensation palpable with every step on the gallery floor. She laid down vinyl tiles and a scattering of electronic debris -- iPads, iPhones, computer keyboards and more -- then encased it all in a pour of slick resin.

However stagy, the swamp of high-tech fossils resonates well with themes that thread through the video: despair at how packaged our experience has become, yearning to feel something more raw and immediate.

If the video installation meditates, with some lingering effect, on what we take in, a small, lesser group of work in a separate gallery focuses all too literally on what we put out. Weakest of all are Prouvost’s drawings of men and women with exhaust pipes puffing smoke out of their mouths. Pure puerility.

Fahrenheit, 2245 E. Washington Blvd., through April 9. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.fahrenheit.flaxfoundation.org