Santa Monica

Conceptual artist Rod Baer is so up front about what it’s like to be an artist you laugh even when you want to wince. Most telling is a pillow, stuffed with rejection notices, grant applications, sketches and reviews, that sits beneath a framed and typeset narrative in “I Dreamed.” In the dream, a row of naked artists walk casually before a uninterested review panel that evaluates and rates them. It’s hard to know if the humiliation lies more in the artist’s nakedness or the critic’s indifference.

Each work is a small installation and uses a somewhat literal visual vocabulary. Yet meaning is ambiguous. What’s the exact interpretation of the steel wall pried open by a gold-leaf picture frame in “My Master’s Lock”? The frame is weighted down by rusty iron books attached to it by a chain and padlock. If the books are unattached, detaching knowledge, will the opening slam shut? Is it a trap or a parable?

Baer is unabashed about telling how tough it is to be an artist and his vignettes are delightfully playful even if they are serious. “Critical Distance” lines up symbolic critical tools like calipers, money, magnifying glasses and useless steel paint brushes along one wall and dismisses them soundly with one phrase. It reads: My art’s real it’s your world that’s abstract.” (Meyers/Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, to Jan. 6.)