WILSHIRE CENTER

Michael Davis’ mixed-media sculptures used to be noted for their ambiguous political and sociological overtones, exploiting industrial materials such as wood, steel, glass and cement to create totemic commentaries on urban and global madness. Unfortunately, this multi-layered approach, with its oblique metaphors and sense of self-reflexive irony, has now given way to simplistic political satire. Davis prefers to score easy ideological points against nuclear proliferation and super power collusion rather than dig beneath the surface of medium or subject.

This is particularly disappointing as Davis draws upon some interesting aesthetic sources. His pedestal-like edifices owe much to the Constructivist tenets of Vladimir Tatlin, in particular the famed “Monument to the Third International,” as well as William Wiley’s “junk funk” aesthetic and the assemblage tradition of H.C. Westermann. What might have been an interesting dialectic between strict formalism and fluid improvisation has instead become predictable and banal. By reducing political complexities to the rigid objective metaphors of “Chernobyl,” “Bikini” and “Summit,” Davis is guilty of the very same smugness and closure which he so deplores in the Machiavellian world of his targets. (Roy Boyd, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 1.)