LA CIENEGA AREA

Lynda Benglis, a regular artistic visitor to these shores, is back with a batch of sculpture in cast glass. The artist is based in New York but has a longstanding romance with places like the Great Barrier Reef. She is inclined to produce art that suggests the more exotic and primal products of nature, especially deep-sea life such as coral and jellyfish.

The present group of 16 objects was made by pouring molten glass in an S-curve mold and knotting it while still malleable. The resulting forms, embedded with copper, dripped or dusted with pigment and sandblasted, suggest the desert as well as the sea. They coil up like snakes and hint at curios resulting from accidental forces.

“Well, it was the dangedest thing. It got so blazing hot, the glass insulators just melted right off the power lines. They got all tangled up with the wires and then oozed on down to the ground and sopped up colored sand and a coupla Coke-bottle caps. Weird, you know, but kinda purty.”

Benglis seems to be satisfied to produce a group of works that are so unaccented as to appear almost anonymous. About the only way you can tell that anybody actually made these things is through negatives. They ought to be lapidary kitsch, and they aren’t. They are as lovely as perfume and quietly tough. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to March 23.)