Peter Shelton is funny. He's funny like the Goodyear blimp stuffed into the Watts Towers. He's funny like an eccentric English inventor describing an odd dream over tea while masking an anxiety his bladder won't hold to the end of the story. Or that he might possibly murder his hostess.

Shelton, 43, is an L.A. artist of considerable accomplishment showing some 40 works made since 1986 at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Organized by associate curator Carol S. Eliel, the show will be a revelation to most of his audience since this is the artist's first major museum solo, complete with catalogue. Its title gives a clue to the slightly antic nature of the event: "bottlesbonesandthingsgetwet" is not a typographical error. It's supposed to be like that. All lower-case letters run together in the fashion of poet e.e. cummings.

Shelton was born in Troy, Ohio, moved to Tempe, Ariz., and then here, where he attended Pomona College, majored in premed, sociology, anthropology and theater before settling into art that, not surprisingly, reflects his other interests. He got a bachelor's degree in 1973 and returned to Troy, where he earned a certificate in welding from the Hobart Brothers School of Welding Technology. The fact he valued learning a trade over taking a graduate degree speaks well of him.

At this point in his development any artist with a proper sense of career moves to New York. The rest settle in Los Angeles. Shelton thought he'd be more in his element in the geography that spawned great assemblage artists from Ed Kienholz to Michael McMillen, not to mention those indefinable bricoleurs of style like Bruce Nauman. He was right and he's a prime example of L.A. artists' genius for creating originality through synthesis.

The first section of the exhibition is simply titled "thingsgetwet," reflecting Shelton's knack for making art that at first seems complex, then simplifies itself only to grow complicated again.

"churchsnakebedbone" consists of a bed suspended from the ceiling. On it rests a coiled snake; beneath it hangs an upside-down scale model of Chartres Cathedral. A human thigh bone is wired to one leg of the bed. The whole is interlaced with narrow copper piping that pours delicate streams of water on significant points, all of which eventually dribbles down to buckets resting on the floor.