WILSHIRE CENTER

The paintings/assemblages of Lee Jaffe have been labeled neo-primitivist, but despite their strong totemic, fetishistic quality, they are really about the hypocrisies of power and the transformation of objects into economic currency. Working on a large scale in a wide variety of materials and genres, Jaffe exploits the metaphor of the ghost image (in painting as well as video) to explore the debasement of the weak by the self-aggrandizing forces of the Establishment.

In “What Becomes a Legend Most,” for example, he arranges three mink stoles across a surface of gold leaf that’s been punctured by hundreds of menacing nail files. Not only have living organisms been turned into gratuitous luxury goods, but in turn re-appropriated to create a dangerous emblem of aesthetic extravagance, defined more by the value of its materials than by intrinsic artistic merit. Although one might argue that by critiquing decadence with overwrought works that are themselves excessive and outrageously baroque (shades of Julian Schnabel), Jaffe falls into the very traps he attacks, the work is actually far more subtle and self-reflexive than it appears on the surface.

Through flattened spatial parameters and montage-like arrangements of information, Jaffe lets his signs and documentation speak for themselves, much like a cause-and-effect historical blueprint. Thus, in “The Ghost of Sally Hemmings,” he depicts Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress as mere phantoms, metaphors for the impossibility of Hemmings’ social acceptance as a white man’s wife and for the necessity of her role as a possession to validate her position in Jefferson’s household.

Hemmings’ portrait is framed by an actual gilt mirror with distorted glass and a sentimentalized, racist candelabrum. Jefferson himself is represented by floating $2 bills, signifying both white economic hegemony and practical irrelevance. This rich interplay of image and surface, literalness and metaphor, thus becomes a mapping out of historical deceits, ultimately connected to both the current art market and Jaffe’s own creative complicity. (Burnett Miller, 964 N. La Brea Ave., to May 17.)