Greene Naftali Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through Oct. 5
With varying success, this show reflects the current dominance of recycling, collage and assemblage used with both political and decorative intent. The tendency is especially clear, if almost a little obvious, in the work of Kelley Walker, who plants bright little digitally derived shapes across color photographs of train wrecks and other urban catastrophes and a cracked and crumpled car windshield. The result evokes Philip Taaffe but has its own bite, especially when the shapes are piled high on black-and-white photographs of turntables, as if they were some kind of wonderful sound.
Julie Becker's obsession with slightly seedy interiors, intimations of crime and the trappings of power has yielded a beautiful 29-minute video called ''Federal Building (Whole).'' Shot on Super 8, with much rough-edged editing and blurry color and several layers of self-reference, it is shown on a small portable filmstrip screen with a plain wood bench. Its focus is a bank building that is visible from the artist's studio, and a small model of the building that appears to be the object of a bank heist. It juxtaposes the corporate and the personal, the sleek and the tacky, with genuine poignancy, helped along by a soundtrack dominated by a blaring Mariachi band.
The weakest link here is the work of Padraig Timoney, an Irish-born artist living in Liverpool, England, who works in a style overly similar to that of Gabriel Orozco. His presentation here includes a rolled lavender sock identified as a purple rose, a row of broken-off necks of beer bottles on a shelf and a chalk pavement drawing of a classical painting marred by graffiti. It's all fashionably diverse and ephemeral but rather irksomely precious. Still, Mr. Timoney's subtly punning titles (the bottle tops are called ''What's So Special on Saturday Night?'') and his feel for materials, especially in two very different abstract paintings, leave you intrigued.
ROBERTA SMITH