Carlos Garaicoa’s exhibit at the Pacific Design Center is like wandering through a … OK, imagine that a erudite, Asian-inspired friend of yours threw a party in the Hollywood Hills. It’s now 3 a.m. and everyone but you has gone home or is passed out somewhere in the bushes. Alone, in that self-pondering mental state you sometimes enter post-party, the kind of depression that listening to club music alone on a Saturday night inspires, you wander through the still-flickering rice lamps and wonder if you’re the only one that feels this way après-parties.

This is the work of Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa: Rice paper, steel, electric wires and bulbs that, somehow, effectively evoke "an unsentimental understanding of Cuba’s post-1960s politics and ideologies and the role that modernist architecture played in that pursuit." The lighting is soft – the kind you remember lit your baby sister’s room as you peeked in on that first night she was brought home as your mom rocked her to sleep. Garaicoa’s rice paper cities, like these memories, are intensely fragile and you’re afraid to touch them lest they disappear completely. I’m not quite certain how this exemplifies or acts as a metaphor for post-1960s Cuba, but it seems to capture pre-2006 Los Angeles exceedingly well.

MOCA Pacific Design Center is located at 8687 Melrose Ave., in West Hollywood, (310) 657-0800. Museum hours: Closed Mon., Tues. and Wed. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Fri. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat. and Sun. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. For more information, visit www.moca.org or www.pacificdesigncenter.com. Price: Admission is free.