WILSHIRE CENTER

Alison Saar’s latest life-size figures and fresco portraits are a logical extension of 1985’s “Shamen, Saints and Sinners” series. Both employ discarded human detritus (old tin, scrap wood, linoleum, rubber) to create roughly hewn icons and fetishes that mine and explore Saar’s African heritage.

The new work is riddled with allusions to magic, voodoo, black cult heroes and figures from the Harlem underworld, as if one of Ishmael Reed’s funky, street-wise novels had been illustrated through the stylistics of folk art. Thus a work like “Dig,” with its archeological connotations of literally stripping bare the heart of a black woman to discover the collective unconscious within, closely parallels the spiritual and mystical function of tribal box fetishes found in primitive African societies.

Unlike Reed, however, whose Post-Modernist, fractured analysis of his roots allows him to open up the subject of blackness and inject his own instincts into the narrative, Saar seems to be timidly skirting the issue. By appropriating the outward trappings of indigenous social and religious rites in tandem with the materials of throwaway culture, she creates a quotational “collage” of the black experience rather than art that transcends as well as acknowledges race. Saar clearly understands black history and myth; what she needs now is the personal experience and willful ego to transform it into an original aesthetic. (Jan Baum, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 28.)