LA CIENEGA AREA

Mineko Grimmer may not be a visual artist in the strictest sense of the term but the distinction is academic. She’s been bemusing us for several years in group exhibitions, including her sound works and now takes up half of a tandem commercial show. Typically the two working pieces are poetic booby traps designed to catch the troubled Occidental soul and soothe it with Oriental sound. Each consists of a blond lumber frame containing a pool of water. Above hangs a cluster of pebbles frozen into a down-pointing triangle of ice. As it melts, pebbles drop, hitting metal strings in one piece and a kind of bamboo xylophone in the other. The effect is extraordinarily calming. One is suddenly in a Japanese garden on a mild day perfectly content to sit forever, letting resonant thrums and sharp thocks tell one that time is a fiction and chance a friend.

One snaps out of this reverie to look at paintings by John Wehrle and wishes one hadn’t. Ten or so large canvases depict such whimsical anecdotes as Pegasus showing up at a race track, a man with a ram’s head riding a deserted subway and an angel in sunglasses watching television. Presumably Wehrle’s pedestrian painting technique is a purposeful attempt to approximate Rene Magritte’s dry visual wit. None of it works. If any thrills remain in mined-out Surrealism, Wehrle has yet to hit the vein. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Feb 1.)