The impression one gets is that a large section of the general population is a lot less uptight than the pious moralists who want to take over the political realm. At the same time, one wonders what pressures of daily life give rise to the impulses behind these jokes and cartoons. Megan Williams offers cartoons in which everything is a blur of juggling that seems to express the speed-up and turnover of contemporary life, while Raymond Pettibone wallpapers one room with obsessive cartoonlike sketches with enigmatic captions that suggest existential angst. On the other hand, Ray's nude Male Mannequin has all of the normal stiff and jointed features, except its realistic replica of male genitalia. It combines male role-induced awkwardness with an image of male vulnerability.
Some work is less psychologically but no less politically charged.
It reads like an oblique commentary on skewed U.S. housing priorities. The youngest artist in the exhibition is Manuel Ocampo, a Filipino who depicts his sense of the horrors of colonialism in a roomful of paintings that incorporate figures of grim reapers on battle fields of skeletons, or the image of an infant with a world globe for a head and a bloody amputated hand. At the center of the room on a pedestal of four painted panels is a hooded and robed figure holding a sword. In other words, in no way does the exhibition represent the full scope of interesting art being done in L.A. at the present moment. Nor does it predict the future.