Review: Nicolas Shake works on display Western Project

In the desert, Nicolas Shake piles up old tires, dried palm fronds, mounds of dirt, wooden pallets, old car parts and other stuff scavenged from remote roadsides then decorates them with colored lights. As night falls the makeshift, temporary sculptures are photographed, the resulting prints becoming permanent records of an ephemeral art.

In Shake’s five photographs at Western Project, the slow slide between daylight and darkness underscores the transitory nature of the subject, which is an art conceived as something with a fragile life span rather than being timeless or eternal.

Three cast-plastic sculptures -- an overturned shopping cart, a knotted palm frond and a disk composed of tire tracks in sand -- continue the evanescent theme.

Shake is also able to transfer this motif to large abstract paintings.

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Western Project, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through June 8. www.western-project.com