Wilshire Center

There’s no one home inside the twisting overcoats that scud through many of Ed Nunnery’s phantasmagoric paintings. Fires burn, night closes in, ragged buildings loom, empty streets suggest immanent menace and pending catastrophe. Nunnery knits together borrowings from Bosch, film noir, sci-fi thrillers and the zombie aspects of late 20th-Century life. Yet black humor--or even a dash of genuine hope--percolates through the swirling chaos and gloomy surroundings. In “It Could Be Worse,” the passengers on a train all wear gas masks and a broken shark’s head is visible through the windows. But one man reaches out for the hand of a fellow traveler, a sign of fellow-feeling even among the damned.

“The Studio” surveys nocturnal spookiness on a huge, rambling scale. Small irritations inside the studio (a smoking phone, a fallen coffeepot) rise to a crescendo of weirdness in the city outside, with gloved fingers rising from the water, a burning church, a cowering blue ghost, a skeleton on the loose. Even when certain images seem rather cliche, the crazed intensity that animates his dream visions keeps the work vital. But in “Paper Airplane,” he finds a strong, fresh image of civilization in decay: brilliant white paper airplanes landing in the gloom near a barbed wire fence, a hulking tank and a mirage-like Greek temple.

Nunnery, who carves his painting frames into frenetic zig-zags, also makes goofily apocalyptic sculpture. A heraldic black “Bat” carved from cardboard has a vast wingspread, forked tongue and devilish tail. A cardboard “Tank” has the simple lines of a child’s pull toy and the dark, pockmarked bulk of an instrument of doom. (Ovsey Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 3.)--C.C.