Rachel Whiteread.

Gagosian Gallery | Beverly Hills, California

In his 1919 essay "The Uncanny," Freud describes that cognitive dissonance triggered in the mind when perceiving apparent instances of the "repetition of the same thing," an upsurge of strangeness rooted in, as the central theme of E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" shows, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes." As happens in another of Freud's examples, repeatedly coming across the number 62--in "addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains"--alerts us to unforeseen undercurrents in everyday existence, evoking anxieties to do with blindness, castration and the death of the father, like so many "disturber[s] of love."

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In Rachel Whiteread's renowned reiterations of interior spaces, viewers endlessly scour these voids for traces of the familiar, from bits of wallpaper to soot stains delineating a former fireplace. Taking up, in another context, Lacan's glittering sardine can, it's not so much that we visualize these impenetrable blocks of plaster through points of marked absence as indeed recognize all presence as inherently lacking, causing a basic asymmetry or tear in the fabric of being. Perception and meaning, too often converged in the idealized phenomenology of experience, then fly apart, cave into pure difference, uprooting the very notion of a single, comprehensive point of view.

Now, for her first L.A. solo exhibition (through December 20, 2008), Whiteread takes a path of least resistance. Working in a much more intimate manner, she casts the insides of small boxes, packaging tubes, and other humdrum objects, arranging them on shelves, tables, or, in one case, a skeletal steel chair. Unlike her usual monumentally cast voids, these demure, pastel-hued plaster shapes and luminous blocks of resin are directly contextualized as sculpture, as in Juggle II (2008), whose cylinders are sandwiched between bronze, bookend-like chunks of polystyrene casing. Even in a work like Fell (2008), a vivid jumble of pick-up sticks and cubes, we find a broken piece of terracotta paver, suggestive of a beginner's drawing class or, apropos de Maupassant's story "L'Horla," the sudden appearance of an unseen presence blocking your mirror reflection, which comes back blank.

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Upstairs at Gagosian are two larger resin casts that glow in natural light. Like a solid hologram or MRI, the honey-hued Untitled (Hive) I (2007-08) provides direct access to a beehive's interior. Positioned at the other side of the room, Ghost Ghost I (2008) gives diamantine form to the interior of a two-story dollhouse. On closer inspection, a shimmering, purplish apparition inside turns out to be a miniature, precisely rendered stairwell. Reading from the back or blank, that which interrupts our mirror images turns inside out as more and more openings for the long distant, the sight unseen, to take a controlling interest in us. This is what Freud meant by "projection."

Offering a more conjugated or assembly view of these negative volumes than her earlier London row houses, Whiteread's new body of work nonetheless seems rather slight for the weighty issues it would contain. Immediately sculptural, even painterly in scope, these muted, often wryly colored formal repetitions don't read particularly well as social commentary, however much they derive from the inner workings of commercial design and packaging, but err more on the side of Giorgio Morandi's minimalist aesthetic. But in the work or world of Whiteread, there's a blank that gets in our face because it can't be filled, fulfilled, or otherwise redeemed.