LA CIENEGA AREA

Robert Stackhouse’s environmental wooden sculptures are invitations to dream. Their basic ship-shapes, whether in the form of flattened hulls or snaking corridors, represent metaphors of escape, of psychic passage from tangible reality to an archaic collective unconscious. The artist thus acts as a sort of shaman, creating ritual fetishes that trigger a transcendence from ego to a more fundamental, hidden self.

Stackhouse’s latest installation, “Likely and Unlikely Prospects in L.A.,” is dominated by a huge, flattened “ship,” suspended from the ceiling and bathed in ethereal blue-green light. The work’s intricate network of slats casts shadows across the floor and walls, so that the viewer becomes enveloped by the object, an active participant in the symbolic process. Although Stackhouse draws upon Nordic myths as well as Celtic and Indian rituals--potentially obscure and trivializing sources--his works are rooted in the tenets of a rigorous Minimalism that exploits skeletal and serial structures to undercut the literacy of his metaphors. This injects the work with a timeless, primeval quality that plays upon ideas of linguistic recurrence and deja vu.

The ship also exudes a strong archeological presence, a mythic aura that simultaneously is grandiose and sad, as if an historical relic had been restored and trussed up like a dinosaur in a museum. Stackhouse prevents such ideas from becoming maudlin by infusing his structures with offbeat humor, particularly in his drawings. Ship-shapes crop up suspended on stilts beside local art museums, Union Station or the La Brea Tar Pits. They resemble insect-like “presences” that dislocate the literal permanence of landscape, benign psychic intrusions in an otherwise objective environment. Thus in Stackhouse’s hands, modern urban signification becomes just one more metaphor in an ongoing evolution of collective archetypes, resonant symbols of mankind’s obsessive search for meaning. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to March 8.)