Wilshire Center

Pieces of unstretched, silver-coated primed canvas ripped into rectangles form the ground for John McCormick’s tantalizing fragments of written narrative. His stark paintings usually consist of a single rough black sketch related literally to the lines of script. Often the words are obscured by the image as they verbally weep thoughts of death or frustrated dreams. The power of McCormick’s images lies in their poignance. Phrases are intriguing. They make up in poetry what the drawings lack in invention, capturing something of the soul-bruising pain of an encounter with conscience.

Next to McCormick’s paintings, Steve Tannen’s precise irregular wood panels are cut and dried. Each painting is a abstracted Puritan work ethic parable touting steadfast effort in the pursuit of noble ideals. If the geometric symbolism seems simplistic, the work is alluring nonetheless for its glowing color and the sheer excellence of its craft and painting.

In the front entry of the gallery is a fragmented, colorless and cynical installation by Steve Heino entitled “Naval Science.” Suggesting instruments used in navigation and a ghostly hull floating in thin air, the works create a haunting but frustrating walk though a unmarked navy museum for the terminally lost. More a collection of unrelated individual items than a single installation, these beacons and buoys refuse to interrelate so that every line of sight leads determinedly to a blank wall. Stoic isolation and a series of dead ends makes each piece an island of purposeless existence. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to July 8.)