Find the Line: Richard Hawkins’ large inkjet...

Find the Line: Richard Hawkins’ large inkjet prints of disembodied heads dripping blood and gore are either facile gestures presented with indulgent self-importance or smart, canny comments on the commercialization of sex and death. There’s a fine, sometimes indiscernible line between critiquing a particular cultural practice and exploiting it, in much of the media-derived, theory-infused art that is currently hot. Hawkins, too, treads that tenuous line, juggling sensationalism and irony, pretension and authenticity.

Hawkins’ oozing heads float against hazy pink, yellow and green backgrounds, the Holofernes myth updated and digitized, run through the style mill of the B-grade horror flick. In the end, the images are both amusing and disturbing, but in neither way convincing.

More overtly tongue-in-cheek is a sequence of fashion ads that Hawkins has clipped from an Italian magazine and scribbled with run-on captions, such as “a LEGION of PITILESS ALCOHOLICS and LOVELESS NARCISSISTS advance toward the RAMPART of TENUOUS HOPEFULNESS.” Those, at least, evoke an unqualified smile.

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* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through Dec. 20.