Hollywood

Anne Marie Karlsen’s ceramic vessels and photo-collage paintings make for a whirling maelstrom of images and rich color tackling the interconnectedness of life. Her ceramic bowls in particular are fascinating objects that seem to have pulled themselves into a spiraling whole from the wet compost of a leaf-strewn gutter or a deep-sea whirlpool. The vessels are most effective when Karlsen lets the limp and glistening forms that swirl around the inside of the bowls remain ambiguous. In that state they are able to suggest pieces of clothing, centipedes, viscera and female genitalia in what amounts to a romantic melding of fragments of fertility.

But Karlsen has a tendency to want to make her meaning inescapable. She pounds on an idea such as the cyclical nature of the spiral until redundancy saps the poetry and turns the work into a didactic illustration. She decorates some bowls with innumerable circular diagrams, or sets planets at the bottom of the spinning vortex in case you missed the association. This heavy handedness is most strongly felt in the painted photo-collage images with their repetitive central heart or womb shape surrounded by fossils that become planets, then become leaping fish and then turn into nuclear missiles launched at sea. Karlsen mixes the magazine imagery with the air-brushed and painterly areas very effectively, but perhaps because such cosmic meaning is expressed in such straightforward terms the montage paintings have the descriptive simplicity of a Sunday school assignment.

Ultimately it is the vessels that make the most eloquent statement. They allow the earthiness of the clay to create a metaphor for the creative primordial ooze by alluding to the visceral connectedness of nature and the human body. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to March 4.)