Art Review:

In “Origins + Intersections,” at the Brand Library Art Galleries, four Los Angeles artists present wildly disparate works — diverging in tone, thematic content and medium, but arriving at an intersection of critical and complementary queries.

In sculptural installations like “San Gabriel II,” a panorama of the San Gabriel Mountains composed entirely of scotch tape (on vellum), and “Untitled Landscape,” a stunning 3-D flower bed of slightly lucent, cast-foam toiletry bottles, Joe Davidson plumbs the depths of compulsive repetition to unearth tensions between our emotional lives and the daily, mundane activities in which they’re submerged.

The artist asks what gets lost in the process of his “seemingly meaningless” labor, his obsessive crafting, which he uses to gobble up and re-purpose the waste and paradoxes of urban, consumerist existence in these strangely pleasurable objects.

In Melissa Murrow’s vibrant oil paintings of trailer parks along the California coastline, aerial perspectives, reflected light and broad strokes lend both visual clarity and a freewheeling movement to the compositions.

In her smaller canvases (e.g., “Facades”), reflections of skylines appear inverted in the windows of the box-like homes, which heighten the difference and tension between inside and outside, viewer and inhabitant.

Plainly (if disarmingly) voyeuristic, and intensely atmospheric, Murrow’s (Edward) Hopper-esque scenes don’t romanticize or denigrate her subjects, but disrupt conventional perspectives on the social disparities they implicate. Such differences are collapsed in a furnace of color, sunlight and nostalgia. Meanwhile, photographers Ryan Romero and Katina Desmond push their medium to very different ends.

Printed, packaged and displayed like record albums, Romero’s intimate, inky images (a chandelier, landscape details, sardines) play on the duality of photographs as both metaphors and concrete objects that can be consumed, shared and used as a proxy for the complexities of memory.

Desmond’s black-and-white prints transform details of her “found compositions” (jagged concrete, fractured signage, brambly trees) into intense, abstract landscapes that pulse with reactive energy.