Simmons and Burke’s ‘You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth’ at Kim Light/LightBox

“You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth” -- or so say the titles of Simmons and Burke‘s extravagant sound and image collages at Kim Light/LightBox. But would you want to, if this is what it looked like and sounded like, if this is how it made you feel?

The four huge light-jet prints at the heart of the show are the kind of horrifying, magnificent spectacle on which your eyes cannot help but be hungrily, stubbornly fixed. They aren’t images of car crashes or natural disasters. They are expressions of the digital present, hellish and heavenly, decadent and sophisticated, frightening and wondrous. This is what we wished for.

L.A.-based collaborators Case Simmons and Andrew Burke don’t just surf the Web, they steep in it. All the imagery in their prints and the sounds in their accompanying audio tracks derive from Internet sources. This is a 21st century collage, the hyperactive, disembodied progeny of Dadaist experimentation with scissors and glue. The art of Hannah Höch and others, irreverent as it was roughly a century ago, now seems quaint compared with this luridly beautiful bombast.

Each print is a richly endowed landfill of imagery, obsessively cut and pasted, Photoshop style, and arranged with just enough structure so the entire heap doesn’t come toppling down. It stays suspended in a baroque quasi-landscape pumped with Vegas-caliber artifice and energy: Tiepolo meets Trump.

Bozo the Clown neighbors Madame Blavatsky. A koala clings to the whiplash curve of a roller coaster. Crows swarm and bats flutter in plague-like numbers. Appearing in a roll call of media notables are Andy Warhol, Condoleezza Rice, Justin Timberlake, Ronald Reagan, the pope, Laura Bush, Tony Blair, Mister Rogers and Miss Piggy.

Homemade porn shares the stage with Hollywood polish. Overcrowded and overwhelming, the images are also impeccably precise. Each component is chromatically vivid and legible to an unnatural degree. Pulsing through the obscene excess are the forces of sex, violence, temptation, danger and material indulgence.

A headset at the base of each print allows viewers to hear an ever-shifting audio montage made especially for it. Comparable in their confetti-precious aesthetic, the tracks play a stream of overlapping passages of music; snippets from films and TV news and game shows; and the sounds of galloping horses and rushing water.

Simmons, a recent graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, and Burke, who earned a graduate degree from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, also present a 25-minute independent sound piece, “Bodies of Water.” It’s a three-movement, oddly compelling tapestry of speech, popular and classical music, gunshots, bagpipes and screams.

Rounding out the show are a few smaller prints and a wallpaper installation, all of them digital collages of photographed cloud formations. In the same spirit of excess as the “You Can Live Forever” prints, these bulge and bloom, packed with puffs and bursts and clots. They turn up both the volume and speed on traditional treatments of clouds but skimp on emotional resonance.

Simmons and Burke have ravaged their (online) art history texts, peppering their prints with excerpts from ancient Greek and Egyptian art, Chardin, Basquiat, Fuseli, Leonardo, Smithson and more. They point to the surreal collages of Max Ernst and the brilliant, politically incisive photomontages of John Heartfield as inspirations.

Bosch is an equally likely antecedent, since Simmons and Burke’s visual work, especially, has the quality of moral parable. Freakish in its detail and complexity, and fantastically exaggerated, it mirrors the ambivalence of our present condition: Everything is within reach and nothing is special; we are ever connected but rarely touched; blessed with possibility, we flounder from lack of intention. Is it paradise on Earth we’ve made or merely an exhilarating distraction from it?

Kim Light/LightBox, 2656 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-1111, through Nov. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kimlightgallery.com

His paintings capture change

Christopher Murphy‘s terrific new paintings at Lora Schlesinger are documents, love letters, bittersweet chronicles of change. Murphy paints Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood in transition, as gentrification raises the heights (and values) of apartment buildings and as weathered, soulful textures give way to crisp and clean generic smoothness.

Murphy paints street-level views of single buildings and specific intersections, along with tremendously detailed elevated views of broad swaths of the city. The show also includes tight yet tender drawings of numerous neighborhood characters, young and old. Murphy captures the singularity of both faces and facades with respect for the idiosyncratic and the fleeting. He balances scrutiny and restraint, leaving ample white space in his drawings and infusing the paintings with a heartfelt but unfussy sense of touch.

Murphy credits as influential Charles Marville’s photographic documentation of Paris during the 1860s, when urban renewal dramatically changed that city’s public face. Murphy’s work also brings to mind Walker Evans and his broad legacy of love for the vernacular, including signage of all sorts. The graffiti on buildings reads like the tattoos on Murphy’s portrait subjects, an expression of the human impulse to adorn, express and claim.

Stenciled onto a warehouse door in one of the paintings is the warning “Don’t Fall in Love With Buildings/They Only Break Your Heart.” Thankfully, it’s too late for Murphy. He’s already smitten, and his acute, sensitively rendered observations bring us willingly along.

Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Oct. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.loraschlesinger.com

Ghosh brings Zen touch to video

The circle was one of the favorite subjects of Japanese Zen brush painters. In the canny wisdom of Zen tradition, the circle could stand for everything, a totality, or nothing, a void.

That practice of framing blankness comes to mind in a new, mildly provocative video installation by Ghosh (who goes by the single name) at Steve Turner Contemporary.

The artist projects an image of the sea against the back wall of a modest-size, darkened gallery, but the view is visible only as a thin strip along the wall’s perimeter. The vast rectangular center of the wall remains dark and blank. Wave motion animates the bottom U of the projection, and bright white sky defines the upper half. An accompanying audio track plays corresponding beach sounds -- lapping waves, sea gulls crying, wings flapping, the distant roar of an airplane.

Like the Zen painters, Ghosh, a recent MFA graduate of UCLA, gives us something to meditate on.

He sets up a contrast between the gestural motion of the projected outline and the utter stillness of the center. He imposes a frame that we must fill -- or, more Zen-like still, relish for its plentiful offering of absence. Naming the piece “Ordinary Paradise” suggests that Ghosh is most interested in sharpening our perception of the miraculous everyday. His piece is too slight to have a profound effect in that regard, but it’s a gentle nudge in the right direction.

Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-3721, through Oct. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.steveturnercontemporary.com An inauspicious first solo show

Nancy Reddin Kienholz collaborated for decades with her late husband, Ed, the great and gritty assemblage artist. She created work independently as well, but it was always shown in the context of their partnership. L.A. Louver is now presenting Kienholz’s first solo show.

It’s dismayingly thin. The works are all lenticular -- images seen through a lens that causes two or more views to alternate or blend as the viewer shifts position. The format is an old one, used in displays and advertising, a gimmick that lends itself to humor or to bold contrast. Kienholz mostly makes benign use of it.

In one large grouping of 18-inch-square pieces, she hand-writes word pairs: “hate/love,” “true/false,” “hope/despair,” “rich/poor” and so on. These opposites are conditions whose distinctions do sometimes blur, but that’s a small point to make in 27 plain and predictable works. In another series, she engages in simple wordplay, twinning “rhythm” with “blues,” “hip” with “hop,” “rock” with “roll.”

The stronger work makes use of photographs, but it too feels one-dimensional in spite of its illusionistic depth. The name Jim appears, rebus style, with/against a tightly cropped image of a crow; likewise Bill with a buffalo.

When Kienholz ventures into the thorny terrain of religion, she does so with more of the same obviousness, combining images of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha, for instance, or a blue star of David, a gold cross and a red crescent. There is graphic punch to some of the results, the most enduring being an indictment of the business of war that shows a path paved in gold bars (literally, a yellow brick road) morphing into a bony tangle of guns.

L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Oct. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com