Review: Paul Pescador’s layered images riff on consumer overload

Filmmaker and performance artist Paul Pescador turns his eye to photography in a playful exhibition at Park View.

Capturing arrangements of found objects with a keen eye for color and composition, Pescador’s photographs evoke high-art conventions with everyday materials. It’s not a new idea, but the L.A. artist approaches it with irreverence and wit.

The most straightforward images are abstractions composed from various found objects. One is filled with lemons whose globular forms are bisected by what looks like a yellow plastic pen. The composition is formally striking at the same time that the pen’s intrusion takes on an impertinent, slightly sexual tone.

In another series, Pescador layers commercial imagery, abstract scribbling and found objects, re-photographing the results to create images that are whimsical, often decorative riffs on our cacophonous consumer landscape.

Full of cookies, stickers, fruit and flowers, the images surf our contemporary image glut with aplomb.

Yet the most compelling works are 45 small “selfies.” Each one is an inventive portrait, in which Pescador’s visage is transformed by masks, plastic bags and pieces of clothing, or has been replaced entirely by a bucket or a melon or a chicken costume.

The works comment on our constant desire to represent ourselves to ourselves, but also propose that these treasured identities might be little more than mash-ups of all the stuff that clutters our lives.

Park View, 836 S. Park View St., Unit 8, (213) 509-3518, through Dec. 21. Closed Monday through Wednesday. www.parkviewparkview.com