Santa Monica

Local artist Dustin Shuler makes art of disassembled cars and displays them like trophies, either on decorative wood mounts, like those holding deer heads, or as animal pelts splayed out flat on the gallery floor or hanging on the wall.

How do you get a flat car? The wall-mounted piece, “Porsche Pelt,” is illustrative. Shuler takes the “skin” of the car, its bright red shell of hood, fenders, doors, roof, windows and cuts these into manageable squares that don’t completely lose their volume but are small enough to be affixed to one another by wire like a metal patchwork quilt. The same fate meets “Tiger Pelt,” a nearly complete LAPD car pieced on the gallery floor like a prize rug. In another work, two long 1959 Cadillac fins mounted totemically mimic a fisherman’s record catch.

A smashed motorcycle and a wigged female head on a unicycle are pointless, but in general these hearty social commentaries are made more interesting because Shuler doesn’t clearly state his own position vis a vis all this kitsch. Are these emblems of power or objects for our cynicism? “Aphrodite” (a nude Barbie doll sprawled on a tacky couch with a gallery of mounted toy heads from Ken dolls gawking down at her) and “Skinned Telephone” (a puzzle piece antique phone) hit on the pathetic ridiculousness of the contraptions that come to define us. (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., to April 6.)