Assembling Meaning in Platt Gallery Show

No loose object is safe whenever sculptor Sylvia Raz walks into a room. Interesting doorknobs, chair legs, anything with a fetching shape or texture can end up in her assemblage sculptures of painted wood.

Since she was a child, Raz could see sometimes frightening figures in the curve of a wall or the most abstract pictures. “What I do now is find discarded items with completely other meanings and give them new life,” Raz says.

Her wood sculptures, painted either all white or in vivid primary colors, are huge--the largest is eight feet tall. They will be on display beginning Sunday at the University of Judaism’s Platt Gallery. These works, often described as whimsical, are the most recent phase in Raz’s work as a sculptor. For many years she worked only in stone.

“Those were pieces that expressed a lot of pain--they were sad,” she says of the stone carvings she did for 10 years. “I overcame that period, though, and went into being more myself; I can let out more humor now.”

Raz, who grew up in Uruguay, immigrated to Israel in 1963, where she lived for 11 years with her husband and four children before coming to Los Angeles. Until moving here, Raz was a psychiatric nurse. But she was desperately in need of an outlet to vent her feelings about the political struggles that she’d lived through in Israel and her homeland. “I decided to go back to my childhood love, which was art.”

“I deal with myself, women, war, poverty--issues that touch my soul,” she says. One wood sculpture, called Venus of Cancer, is Raz’s comment on breast cancer, using the famous Venus de Milo statue as inspiration. “My children told me, ‘Mom, you’re showing things people don’t want to see.’ But I don’t care, and a lot of my work does make people smile. It’s attractive, not ugly--I don’t like ugly work.”

Also in the exhibit are paintings by Brian May, based on the cities of refuge described in the Old Testament book of Joshua, and works by Laurel Paley, who uses broad, calligraphic strokes--a tiny scrawl and layers of colors in abstract drawings.

“The Recent Works of Brian May, Laurel Paley and Sylvia Raz” opens with a reception from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday at the Platt Gallery of the University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Bel-Air. The exhibit runs through March 20. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays. There is no charge. Call (213) 476-9777.