A similar state of continuous, low-level convulsion moves the narrative of Tamara Sussman’s “Tremble Series,” 2007–2009, in which photographs of landscapes are annotated with translucent lines of text. “The earthquake started so modestly only the geologists noticed,” reads the first of these, Geraniums, in almost-invisible vinyl letters positioned on the Plexiglas along the bottom edge of an otherwise innocuous image of geraniums in a thicket of weeds. The story evolves over the course of eighteen individual works as a disaster in slow motion: The quake remains relatively small (“It hasn’t exceeded a 3.2 on the Richter scale”) but never ends. Over the weeks and months, the ceaseless vibrations alarm dogs throughout Los Angeles, the city begins to incrementally fold over onto itself, a neighbor’s house collapses amid a chorus of other structural failures, and so on.

All of the photographs are taken at night, with most framing brambles of undergrowth and overgrowth, or the untended collision of nature and culture (crumbling concrete steps, caution tape, construction debris); horizon lines are notably avoided in favor of claustrophobic views. Nothing is staged for the camera: These are essentially documentary images transformed into fiction with the addition of text. Sussman employs language to destabilize her images in order to manifest the ongoing—and, yes, destabilizing—vibration of the tale.

While absent from these images, the human body is conjured by the first-person narrative, and the artist’s interest in bodily sensation is more explicitly addressed in two other works in the exhibition: Tremble and Little Aches (both 2009). The component letters of each work’s title are formed by collages of interconnected human body parts—arms and hands, mostly, punctuated with an intermittent leg or mouth—mounted atop individually framed sheets of paper bearing letterpress-printed text. (These pieces are taken from the series “A Palpable Alphabet,” 2008–2009.) The letter L, for example, is titled L for a List of Things I Would Do with My Body If There Were No Permanent Consequences and enumerates, “In no particular order: / Cut myself open and explore my organs. / Hold my intestines, smell my lungs, / Try to recognize myself in my kidneys. / Attach my left arm to my lower back, like a tail. / Hand-glide from the Chrysler Building to the Empire State Building. / Get blown up.” Littered with absurd humor and abject pathos, and vaguely recalling the typographic experiments of Guillaume Apollinarie’s Calligrammes or Alexei Kruchenykh’s zaum poems, Sussman’s texts reflect a fragmented subjectivity—linguistic corollaries of the severed body parts in their vicinity—and the tenuous connection between people and things. The sublime, geologically scaled version of entropic dread summoned by the “Tremble Series” is here fully eroticized and made intimate. In her solo debut, Sussman thankfully eschews the convenience of spectacle in favor of a more delicate display of quivering sensation.

It is vaguely emblematic that the only male artist included here exhibits photographs of empty stages. Kevin McCarty's subtly evocative works feature the well-worn and gritty stages of Los Angeles nightclubs that are, by turns, gay or punk. That this is of critical importance– or social significance given the shifting sands of Los Angeles culture– is debatable, but the idea has clearly served as emotional fodder for the artist to wreak a mixture of lonely expectations and exuberant release from the shadows of these spaces. The inclusion of McCarty's work, supported by Tamara Sussman's ingenious installation, makes the broad claim that any examination of identity falls under the purview of feminism.

Sussman's site-specific installation includes purple, red and glittery sliver vinyl text flowing across the walls and floor to tell of a fictional liaison between rap stars Eminem and R. Kelly. Based on the phenomenon of slash fiction, in which female fans eroticize the objects of their attention through writing, the concept flips traditional roles by objectifying hyper-masculine stars in a homosexual scenario from the perspective of a female fan. Sussman's installation is carefully designed and, like McCarty's photographs, manages to integrate its conceptual underpinnings while engaging viewers emotionally. That the sexually explicit finale begins on the glass door of Felsen's office and climaxes on the concrete floor is both funny and gutsy, surreptitiously reining viewers into a scene that conflates fame, repression and voyeurism.

Corrina Peipon also takes a fictional character as her subject, though hers is amorphous and focuses on the thoughts and emotions of an anonymous woman. The artist's creation of such a nuanced portrait with minimal materials (the work consists of either Letraset or photocopy text on copy paper) reveals the sharp focus of her attention. In a combination of found and artist-authored text, Peipon posits the weight of experience against the ephemera of objecthood with striking accuracy. A group of nine square pages typed in courier font and pinned to the wall includes phrases like "things I have that are not mine" and "letters sent by friends from long ago" and carries the vibration of those things without the material substance.

The twelve photographs in Haruko Tanaks's series Fit in Room Piece complement Peipon's text. The artist gazes into the camera in a refreshingly vulnerable and honest enactment of self-portraiture. Having entered the dressing rooms of various department stores with clothing in her size, Tanaka tries it on and photographs herself in a pose gleaned from fashion magazines. Camera at her hip, she commands an exceptional performance as woman/fit-model/artist looking variously bored, haughty, lonely and sensual. Tanaka's work embodies a layered examination of identity– not as object, but as experience.

This association with fashion and role-playing take a more obvious turn in Julie Orser's video Occurrence at Lookout Rock. While beautiful to look at, the work does little to delve beneath the surface of films that Orser mines for visual and theoretical reference, in this case, Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. She replaces the characters with female archetypes representing the demure, the sultry, the cocky, and the adventurous in clothing that evokes fashion pages as much as movies. If the attention is to address the viability and persistence of stereotypes, the period costumes and vacant expressions subtract from this effort. The lush cinematic display is playful, but curiously devoid of action– either narrative or conceptual, a looping reminder of the playful glance the exhibition as a whole casts on feminism.