Like writing, photography has crystallized into a “legible,” marketable medium through the reduction of production obstacles, barriers to entry; the dominant contemporary style has become available, immediate. That expectation of immediacy trammels the ineffable and formally indefinite. Ambiguity unsettles a standardized system of signs: the readymade input-output relation of the machines of image or of language.

Machines estrange us in the sense that they make it easier to produce and handle things of the material world without care. Input, output: Beep If You Boop.It’s a logical premise in code or nature or game theory: if/then, Newton’s Third Law, you get back what you put in. Megan Plunkett treats her object (a chameleonic Pepsi can shot at three angles, suspended from an invisible wire—a classic Hollywood trick—with its logo suggestively taped over, isolating the subtext CALIFORNIA’S CHOICE) with precise, romantic attention; in photographs that range in texture from hostage-cam surveillance footage to holy glowing beverage commercial to an image (pictured) as luminous and deeply toned as a seventeenth-century oil painting, quality reflects the care she invests.

Plunkett enjoys scrambling signals. Though Ruscha looms large in the show’s loopy title—which floats off a bumper sticker to hover over the erstwhile gallery door in glossy red vinyl like a passing specter (Dracula’s Revenge is a migrating establishment)—and in the blown-up billboard aspect of the works themselves, her forms remain blurred and hallucinatory, subtler than the explicit contours of ad copy.

She understands the strategic language of display across time, the provocation of desire for objects. The object is the subject of a photograph, which becomes a discrete object itself. Details form themselves in relief along narrative outlines, hardening into iconography where the light falls or dropping away into alternating shades of depthless space. The most striking photograph suggests a glistening, high-contrast display still life: a popular reference of late, as the flow of global commerce remains top of mind. Plunkett stages the obscured Pepsi can as both a classically beautiful luxury object and a fungible readymade.

Language itself is a sign—we use the term still life (direct from the Dutch stilleven, which includes manufactured objects: tangible accessories to life) as opposed to a derivative of the French nature morte (dead nature), which implies a focus on the organic. Still, Plunkett’s object is not quite not-alive; jellied in the camera eye, it has a viscous, syrupy quality, a touch of something ripe and lurid or the lick of a flame in the dark. Her work is evasive—it shines in its perpetual slippage, its ability to sublimate and transform—just as you think you’ve pinned it to the wall, there it goes.

The show is also very Southern California gothic. Plunkett, who hails from Pasadena, worked for a private investigator and trained as a forensic photographer; the background hum of film noir colors the city just as it establishes itself here, across registers.

There is, too, an unmissable elegiac materiality: specific reds and cuts of light that could not exist outside the long shadow of David Lynch, who himself slipped away in January as wildfires tore through his beloved Los Angeles. Lynch cared for objects and images alike. He saw that Hollywood is as American as commerce and shiny surfaces—our sleepless, dreaming, accelerationist machine heart; the center of production of our icons, our visual language—it pacifies us, it answers to us, its sins and signs reflect our own. The Hollywood of images will never burn. It may live forever, or as long as we care to picture it.