Elad Lassry’s hometown exhibition on Smiley Drive, at David Kordansky’s warehouse gallery in Culver City, presents a spectrum of the artist’s rapidly diversifying practice. Most every component—from photos, to drawings, to sculptures, to architectural interventions—remains both cleverly engaged while also unreachably disjointed from each other. The overall effect is that of a nebulous exercise in plumbing the depths of the subjective acts of perception, to put it in a heady way; or rather, an exercise in looking and seeing, or indeed, the whole range of operations connecting the eye and mind that differ only by subtle, ontological measures: how a viewer places their own intents, focus, presence, while cognition takes place. In the main gallery, there are two architectural interventions that stand out: a freestanding wall, with wave-like scallops alternating in blue and peach blocks of painted wood at chest-height. This wall runs parallel to a long rectangular aperture punched out at the same height in the wall across the room. These are the two most striking features in the show, and yet it’s unclear whether they surpass their function as framing devices, or if they should be considered artworks in their own right. This taps into a timeless philosophical debate, …

Matthew Brannon’s letterpress works felt delightfully and deceptively anachronistic in the early decade, resurrecting motifs of mid-century American advertising with pithy captions on the cosmopolitan set. Forged in the margins of ad copy and commodities, the artist’s alter egos appeared forever prey to the doubts, inadequacies, and frustrations that even a glitzy, gin-soaked veneer can barely disguise. Little stretching was needed to see the resemblance these fast-lane phantasms bore to the confidence men of our own last, great bull market. Over the five years since the artist’s first solo show at David Kordansky, in Los Angeles, as the economy collapsed and Man Men renewed a decorative interest in Brannon’s 1960s New York, I wondered how his artwork had registered the shocks, and if his Joneses were continuing to consume the new and the chic at a breakneck pace. His latest show, “Wit’s End,” provides a sober response. Visitors are corralled at the gallery entrance by Tour Guide (all works 2010), a teal railing fencing in a letterpress print of a champagne glass on a tipped over iPod that comes as an elegy for the fizzier days and a portent for those to come: “You should know this before you go in,” …