Works by Los Angeles photographer Patrick Lakey are also featured at the 5 Traverse Gallery exhibit, including Marx: Reading Room, Great Hall, British Museum, London, II, where Karl Marx began assembling his thoughts for his famous works Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.

Patrick Lakey

Though it’s barely a year old, Providence’s 5 Traverse Gallery has quickly emerged as one of city’s most innovative, if unconventional art spaces. (One of the gallery’s first exhibits, for example, featured a selection of artist-decorated bikes and skateboards. A more recent show highlighted the work of local printmakers, with most of the pieces selling for under $50.)

Now owner Jesse Smith has found a way to perk up what is typically one of the slowest months on the local art calendar. Faced with a gap in his regular summer schedule, Smith invited the owners of The Happy Lion, a like-minded gallery based in Los Angeles’ newly trendy Chinatown neighborhood, to take over his small Fox Point space for the month of August.

The resulting show, “Happy Lions: Patrick Lakey and Brian Wills at 5 Traverse,” features the work of two of Happy Lion’s best-known artists: painter and mixed media artist Brian Wills and photographer Patrick Lakey. It’s also a chance for Rhode Islanders to sample some top-notch West Coast art without having to worry about things like baggage fees and frequent flier miles.

Wills’ work, in particular, gives off a distinctly West Coast vibe.

A piece called Standard Candles, for example, consists of a grid of smaller block-shaped works, each sporting a different stripe pattern. Sometimes the stripes are packed closely together, creating a dense, almost crystalline effect. At other times, the stripes are thinner and fainter — more like the pattern on a faded pin-striped shirt. In both cases, the stripes are rendered in an array of pastel-hued pinks, reds and blues that would not look out of place on a California beach umbrella.

Yet while it’s possible to enjoy Standard Candles on a purely visual level, color isn’t the work’s only virtue. For one thing, those stripe patterns aren’t drawn or painted on; rather, they’re composed of hundreds of strands of rayon thread that Wills has carefully affixed to blocks of painted wood. Seen from the front, the threads look like flat lines; but seen from the side, they provide a subtle, almost subliminal texture. Look long enough and the lines almost seem to vibrate.

The work’s title adds another layer of meaning. In astronomy, the term “standard candles” refers to the process of using light to measure the distance between stars, planets and other heavenly bodies. What’s more, Standard Candles itself belongs to a larger series of works dubbed “String Theory” — a reference both to Wills’ actual use of string and to a controversial scientific theory that suggests the universe is composed entirely of tiny vibrating strings of energy.

Other works employ a similar array of lines, stripes and grid patterns. A pair of untitled pieces near the gallery’s entrance, for example, echo the colors and patterns found in Standard Candles, though on a slightly larger scale. In another untitled work, this one located in a small alcove off the main gallery, a series of brightly colored lines skitter across a piece of varnished wood.

According to a gallery note, the lines, which twist and tilt in many different directions and suggest a kind of Pop Art calligraphy, were made using bits of colored dental floss.

By contrast, it’s hard to discern much of a California connection in Lakey’s “German Photographs” series. Indeed, the series of large-format color photographs focuses entirely on sites associated with prominent German philosophers, among them Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Unfortunately, the results sometimes verge on cliché. One photograph, for example, features a fog-shrouded view of Switzerland’s Lake Silverplana. As it turns out, the lake was a favorite haunt of Nietzsche, whose darkly brilliant musings on the nature of good and evil, the death of religion and the will to power seem reflected in the lake’s brooding gray depths.

On the other hand, there’s a wonderful shot of the main reading room at London’s British Museum. It was here that Marx began jotting down the ideas that would ultimately culminate in books such as Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. Still, it’s a challenge to picture the father of Communism in this posh, grand-looking space — almost like trying to picture Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller trying to organize a Soviet-style workers’ collective.

“Happy Lions: Patrick Lakey and Brian Wills at 5 Traverse” runs through Aug. 25 at the 5 Traverse Gallery, 5 Traverse St., Providence. Hours: Fri-Sun., noon-5. Contact: (401) 278-4968 or www.5traverse.com.

bvansicl@projo.com