SANTA MONICA

Like David Bowie, New York artist Cindy Sherman is a master of disguise. Shooting large, cibachrome photographs of herself impersonating dozens of different characters--most of them distillations of mass media archetypes--Sherman has built a career around the simple notion of transformation.

Though Sherman continues to explore the “let’s pretend” premise that has thus far served her so well (her work sells as fast as she can make it), some distinct shifts can be seen in her new work. While her pictures used to be marked by a rather wistful romanticism--Sherman dressed up as a screen sirens, Sherman as a country-sweet ingenue and so forth--this new stuff is so tough, it borders on the grotesque.

Her work has always taken its central cue from the fictional reality of movies, and the films said to have shaped this series are “Blue Velvet” and “River’s Edge”; obviously we’ll be traveling through some dark waters here. A second significant change is evident in that for the first time the work features models other than the artist herself. One final twist: While the human form all but devoured the picture plane in previous work, the figure is frequently upstaged by the props in these pictures.

The contrived flourishes of glamour that once sparked Sherman’s work are altogether absent from these dark fairy tales which she populates with bestial creatures, most of whom wallow in colorful filth.

A derriere aflame with boils engorged with pus moons at the camera in one picture. We see a crouching figure in a dog mask gnawing a bloody, severed limb; a grotto filled with pink water littered with trash, dead fish and human body parts; a gray-haired old man--either dead or unconscious--stretched out beside a pool gurgling with pink lava. Exploding with lurid color, the pictures are cluttered with cryptic objects--soiled underwear, pine cones, broken cocktail glasses.

A handful of relatively simple, straightforward portraits have the fiendish quality of a Bruegel painting of an idiot peasant drooling over a greasy leg of venison. All told, it’s an alarmingly fleshy show.

This time out Sherman concocts a nightmare rather than a dream, but she hasn’t really changed in that she continues to play things close to the vest. The editorial content of her work has always been ambiguous and it’s impossible to say whether she intends that her work be read as any kind of political metaphor or comment on the times. In the great tradition of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, Sherman seems content to spin a flashy yarn; the viewer, meanwhile, seems content to marvel at her sleight-of-hand. (HoffmanBorman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., to July 25.)