LA CIENAGA AREA

Marilyn Lysohir doesn’t see communists under the bed; she spots battleships in her bathroom. Guns ready and its hulk gaily glazed in a camouflage pattern, a great big ceramic ship sits in the bottom of an old-fashioned white bathtub as a life-size ceramic woman approaches it.

Smaller war craft turn up on shelves of a ceramic medicine cabinet, hung above a ceramic sink in the same room. This vision looms gigantic in the next gallery where a 24-foot-long, glazed clay and painted wood ship is accompanied by rows of battleship-gray folding chairs that invite people to sit and listen to recorded war stories told by veterans. And in a group of paintings and color-pencil drawings, images of ships glide through leafless trees or perch on the inside edges of frames.

Collectively this composes an anti-war exhibition called “The Dark Side of Dazzle.” It’s the Los Angeles debut of a young artist from Pullman, Wash. The sheer scale of the effort makes the show impressive and immediately wins her a place among figurative ceramic sculptors (such as Viola Frey and Elaine Carhartt), but her work has strange vectors. Despite Lysohir’s clear position on the infiltration of military aggression she walks a precarious line between decoration and politics.

In a short printed statement, Lysohir says the work is, in part, about “the seduction of war” and “guilt and the silence of the narrative.” The seduction works through the art’s toylike quality and fine craftsmanship. Silence arrives in the figure’s classical repose, the paintings’ chalky tints and the cool pastels and neutral grays that permeate the exhibition. So far, so good, yet there’s a cute edge to this work and a stiffness that makes it seem self-conscious and curiously dispassionate. Lysohir has re-created the attitude she criticizes, and that probably wasn’t her intention. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to Aug. 30.)--S.M.