IT'S HARD TO ESCAPE the tone of apocalyptic doom that inflects contemporary discourse in the political, economic and environmental spheres. Kirk Pedersen's group show, "Prelude to An Apocalypse," pushes away the doom and gloom rhetoric for a look at the way artists register and address very real environmental changes through their work - specifically in landscape - though that generic term is merely a reference point for a much broader range of concerns, ideas and expressions.

In An Altar for your life, for your death (2008), Amir Fallah presents an apparatus rising in short perpendicular thrusts against a blue sky descending into inferno - a phantasmagoric tree house or habitat; each shelf or coffer crowded with domestic/fantastic detail - otherworldly flora and fauna, urns, vessels, masks, artifacts - interspersed with collaged photo representations of historical personalities both ancient and contemporary, the whole framed by an element - branch, pipe or duct - connecting with the foreground structure. Fallah here commingles a number of contradictory ideas, strategies and sensibilities: Altar functions as both image for contemplation and a pastiche of such an image; an ecological metaphor and an archaeological send-up.

Contradiction and complication are at the heart of Lisa Adams' work. The paralleled tensions between the natural and built environments, the representational and the conceptual or abstract are explicit in Ineluctable. Here landscape registers as entirely abstract in horizontal, explicitly "denatured" zones of gray-blue (sea), green (land) and pale acid-yellow/green (sky). On the right side of the canvas, a brown stalk rises through the "zones" to a pale yellow-white cloud or blossom. To the left, what might be glass blocks in pale ice-blue and verdigris step up to a chartreuse planter holding succulents, stepping down to a still icier planter trailing off filigree vines (an Adams signature), which end in fuschia-colored "fruit," with a cluster of cherry-tomato roundels bleeding into the deep green foreground.

Greg Rose has a tangentially related approach to the symbolical power of abstract shape and mass that fuses irony with dazzle, gloom with exuberance. For all I know Arcadia (Arboretum) (2006) might be modeled directly on the Los Angeles Arboretum, but here smog-dusted San Gabriel skies have given way to a hallucinogenic otherworldly atmosphere in pale modulated amethyst, mauve, turquoise and sea-green washes. Against this backdrop, shrubs, flowers and other plants are laid out with deliberate paint-by-numbers stiff articulation in neon-vivid, saturated colors - blood-reds, carnation pinks, blue, purple and grass, emerald and forest greens. At the center, rising amid the cresting red and green foliage at a hillock's edge, a purple tree, entirely bare of foliage - as if severely pruned or simply dead - is pitched forward in an almost muscular arabesque, both exuding and exemplifying an irrepressible vitality that charges the entire painting.

Wendell Gladstone's 2008 canvas, Sanguine seems most tenuously related to Pedersen's theme. The land, sea and sky here seem to be referenced as elements of a dreamscape - an inebriated one, albeit mediated by symbols. A vivid pointillistically-rendered figure floats in the foreground, borne aloft by a collaged crew of ghostly Russian sailors and the demonic mask of his dream. Perhaps this is a fitting pendant to the troubled yet still magical "landscape" presented by the show as a whole. But these dreams - or their implications - will not easily be slept through, much less slept off.

- Ezrha Jean Black