LA CIENEGA AREA

New York-based Joel Otterson makes sculpture from ordinary plumbing pipe in plastic and copper. That would appear to limit his aesthetic to rhapsodic utility, but in fact he gets a lot of mileage from it. “Emotional Slaughter” evokes a kind of mordant Chinese science fiction, “Antique Furniture” uses sewer pipe to call up primitive art and “Atomic Fact” distills the scary complexity of the nuclear reactor.

Anybody who can conjure up Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” with baseballs, bats and a tree limb obviously has a sense of humor, but Otterson’s skill and wit do not mask the fact that he’s a young debut artist entertaining us by funning at the past while he figures out what he has to say to the future.

Sara Charlesworth is an experienced performer but also little known hereabouts. She shows large Cibachrome prints that come across as simple mind-game collages. She puts a picture of a Poiret gown in one half of a diptych and an African laborer in the other and we get thoughts about civilization. She makes a snake charmer into a woman and we get thoughts about sexuality and the feminine mystique. She is extremely deft at triggering complex associations with spare means, as in “Natural History,” where a bench in ancient Roman style is surrounded by roiling lava. Alas, an exceptional intelligence comes across looking thin because of the scrapbook quality of her material. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to May 23.)