Judith G. Levy adds to La Esquina’s Disturbances

Judith G. Levy has for a while now centered her art on uproarious fictions, rendered in believably deadpan ways. But for her new “Family Memoir” series — part of La Esquina’s latest group exhibition, Disturbances in the Field — she has hewed closer to reality. A reality still bent by the habits of storytelling, particularly the intimate storytelling native to families.

Stories passed down by relatives — or evolved from generations of guesswork based on vaguely captioned family albums — can be touchingly mundane. Your grandparents’ first new car was an non-air-conditioned Chevy. But family trees also cast long shadows, obscuring in shame, say, the cousin who died young for reasons that go untalked about. In “Family Memoir,” Levy presents a range of such tales, fragments from a reconstructed past (her own family’s, she says) that spans approximately the very late 1800s to the early 1970s. The series of 36 small black-and-white posters, using reproductions of snapshots, dominates the gallery’s front wall.

Levy’s work is the first thing visible at this show, guiding you into the space with hand-lettered punch lines. The words are amusingly, sometimes poignantly reductive conclusions or descriptions of various relatives, first on photo-free yard signs staked around the parking lot of the gallery, then on the posters inside. The phrases outside include “Failed in Hollywood,” “Enjoyed Family Life,” “Wasn’t Jewish” and “Became a Magician.” They could as easily be epitaphs on headstones, reminding how someone’s whole lifetime is often reduced in a family’s collective memory to a single episode or trait. The sum of such recollections is how you learn your family history, piecemeal and with oddly accented, sometimes very flawed emphasis.

Straightforward but not linear, just like real family memories, Levy’s grid of scrapbook photos, and their “one thing” about the people in them, lets your glance jump around and draw connections between times and themes. It is akin to our own experience of family and memory, and therefore vivid, giving us plenty to think about when it comes to identity and acceptance.

Other works in this show summon a similar power to disturb, in a wide variety of ways: Scott Dickson’s inlaid photographic prints have an immediate impact, whereas the highly conceptual “Your Lupines or Your Life,” by Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed, require that you read the provided materials. Sarah Lewison’s “Arctic Glitch” can be appreciated even if you don’t absorb the contextual writing. And Leo Esquivel’s two gouache drawings — depicting antique furniture sprouting plant life — are peacefully whimsical, a fairytalelike “disturbance in the field.”

Curator Lacey Wozny has also given us an opportunity to see another of Levy’s works, the latest in her panoramic postcard series. Another take on the idea of constructed history, the wittily rendered, pseudo-vintage scene this time takes place at fictional Sappho Beach, in equally apocryphal Glory, Kansas. Surely such a feminist enclave would disturb Gov. Sam Brownback — and anyone else who lacks a sense of humor.