Hollywood

A construction-destruction dialogue fuels Bella Tabak Feldman’s free-standing steel sculptures. It’s not hard to see that she has visited temple ruins in Yucatan. Most of the works are a takeoff on the stalwart stepped pyramid and Feldman gives them a density that exceeds their actual size. She also skews angles, seeks out off-balance volumes and jostles planes to undermine any sense of firm footing. She annexes ancient domed tholos and ziggurat forms and tools little steel sanctuaries with oddly skewed terraces, obscure staired passageways or wavy “flames” fashioned from stiff steel cable. Like the crumbling ruins that inspired them, these compact, shiny structures manage to look like they’re tiering relentlessly skyward while simultaneously decomposing or missing critical parts.

“Afloat” is a steeply inclining single staircase of polished metal. The steps get smaller and smaller for a heightened illusion of ascension, but paradoxically the tower leads nowhere. “Scrap” looks like a spherical Minoan sanctuary sliced into staggered decks, not by design but by some internal eruptive force. On a funnier tangent, “Self Portrait as a Chair” beckons and repels, with a traplike seat and a backrest that sprouts two sharply protruding “breasts.”

For a long while Bay Area artist Judith Foosaner coupled spidery line with well-placed erasures to form light, mobile marks on an uncluttered white field. Our perceptual habits turned the marks into pirouetting dancers, like Rorschach dots. In current works Foosaner’s chalk and graphite marks on paper congeal into one tightly webbed coil a la Pollock. You’ve got to have formal and conceptual clarity to try your hand at action painting without getting egg on your face and Foosaner pulls this off admirably, but the result is not as fresh or personal as her previous gestural work. (Space, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., to April 2.)