THE VALLEY

Vida Hackman has always made good-looking art--meticulously crafted and sensuously drawn. She still does, but recently she has toughened her work with a conceptual line of social criticism. The theme most often pursued in a current show of drawings, sculptures and box-like books is the senseless killing of animals and, by extension, the fragility of wild life.

She’s on the side of the animals, of course, but her stance is so infused with poetry that you think she’s stroking you with a feather instead of preaching a devastating message. She draws with delicate lines, pulls off deft transitions from real to simulated objects and generally constructs her art with a light and knowing touch.

She also engages in word play that suggests double meanings. A hinged book called “Whole Fox/Fox Hole,” for example, contrasts two silhouettes of a tiny beast that seems to have been blown away. “Crow Quilled/ Quilled Crow” is a powerfully spooky sculpture consisting of a black statue half covered with porcupine quills. Seen from one side, the bird has a spiky halo; from the other, it is a surreal apparition. Hackman repeats the same approach in “Lazarus,” a caged bird bristling with matches. This sculpture seems to sum up the mentality at work here; it will be set afire at the end of the show.

Concurrently, Vivian Browne, a professor at Rutgers, shows large oils and acrylic-on-paper paintings. Like much of Hackman’s work, they are built of masses of line, but Browne’s strokes compose multicolored forests, thickets and massive single trees. Also like Hackman, Browne incorporates words in her art, lacing lost-and-found titles or poetic phrases among the branches of trees.

These are skillful if not particularly exciting paintings that have more in common with Abstract Expressionism than with most representational art being touted today. The strongest pieces are images of towering trees that make you feel as though you are looking up at an ancient redwood from the forest floor. They are probably about spiritual enlightenment, but fortunately Browne doesn’t hammer that home. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to Sept. 27.)