GLASS MAPS AN ARTIST’S DEPTH TRIP

You don’t ordinarily see a church or a subway in a shopping mall.

But next to Basket World and just above Susie’s Casuals, the Santa Monica Place has both--if you take a leap of faith on the F train.

“The Underground Cathedral,” at the USC Atelier in the mall through Sunday), is artist Frederick Abrams’ stained-glass “environment of sound, light and ideas,” which may make you feel as if you’ve entered either a sacred place of worship or a dank subterranean subway stop.

Coming down--or up--to earth, the exhibit actually consists of 11 two-dimensional leaded glass works, two of which look like large, see-through subway maps, and a sound track comprising sounds Abrams recorded while riding on a New York subway, embellished with organ-like electric guitar and synthesizer music.

The show, with works made over the last 12 years, reveals one of the multimedia artist’s prime preoccupations: He’s fond of coupling dissimilar ideas or like ones, such as the underground (represented by a subway) and a cathedral.

“I related the underground to a cathedral,” explained Abrams at the Atelier, “in that a cathedral is like a very large sound environment with an echo-like feel similar to the underground.”

And for what he calls his most ambitious work, Abrams, 36, linked natural and man-made systems--specifically, biological brain diagrams and a Paris Metro subway map--to create “Les Routes de la Grande Odalisque (The Large Brain).” Colored veins of intersecting subway routes crisscross the 10-by-11-foot glass sheet, representing the “nervous system of a culture.”

“I came up with the idea for the work while I was riding the Metro in Paris (in 1979),” Abrams said. “It’s also based on an (ongoing) glass series I began in 1974 derived from zoological diagrams, though the perfect, rigid lines of the Metro map reflect more of a man-made system. So with this work, the biological has moved into the technological.”

The piece represents the underground of a city, its people and history. Made-up scientific-sounding phrases, personalized license plate slogans and more recognizable words written on it “deal with issues of natural and man-made disasters, the issues of time and space, economics and politics,” Abrams said. The elaborate terminology also represents another game of association he plays.

“The work became like a game board and what I’m doing is making interdisciplinary connections by juxtaposing words that sound like things other than what they may truly represent.” For instance, he said, pointing to the glass map, the phrase “Convertible Debentures,” an economic term, is next to the race horse’s name “Tijuana Cadillac,” and the phrase “Vane Operation,” a water pump, is beside the license plate logo “FACELFT.”

Abrams has coupled this project with a glass map of Los Angeles for a contrast of two cities. His Parisian chart, with its “organized, centralized” rail system, is a cultural and technological opposite to the “spread out and amorphous” Los Angeles freeway and boulevard system laid out in “The Routes of the Grand Illusion (Shooting Star Triptik).”

This work, covered with laminated acetate maps of subway systems from 23 countries, is also “a contrast of the mass transportation systems that exist in the world,” Abrams said, and the many cultural influences that made up the melting pot of his homeland.

“I always played with trains as a kid, and my mom thought I’d be a freeway planner,” he offered. It was slot cars next but, after studying sociology at UC Berkeley, Abrams was irrevocably attracted to glass after a stained-glass class he took in 1971. His ensuing art education, “a patchwork of night courses and independent reading,” preceded jobs as editor of three glass art magazines from 1976 to 1978.

Abrams, who left Berkeley before graduating because of political differences over ways to teach art, makes wry social commentary with all his works. Coupling another pair of ideas--this time science and spirituality--”The Underground Cathedral” makes such a statement, he said, that faith in the church isn’t unlike faith in technology and the Establishment.

“We tend to believe technology is safe if the authorities say it’s so,” Abrams said. “Then there’s a grand human disaster. Just now we’re seeing rockets blowing up in front of us, a meltdown of a nuclear reactor and a fire in one of the most important cultural centers in the city.”