Santa Monica

A sweet-faced mannequin in an ornate cloak hunches in a carriage. It is drawn by a horse draped in a gold-fringed blanket decorated with a prominent star of David. The carriage is filled with thorny branches and shards of glass, and garnished with a carving of a winged skull. Near the seat, a candle burns in a lantern. Called “The Dream of Poland,” this is one of a group of problematic recent works by Petaluma artist David Best.

Despite its detailed, seemingly historical trappings, this room-sized piece seems unequal to the historical burden of expressing the tragedy of Eastern European Jewish life in the 20th Century. The mannequin in the carriage looks too blandly contemporary to be convincing in her weighty symbolic role--in fact, the whole thing, complete with a scattering of dirt on the gallery floor, looks unhappily like a clever form of window dressing. Perhaps that is the point here--that any would-be pious re-creation of the past is necessarily a lie, that the truth cannot be recaptured.

In “The Price of Faith,” Best rigs a Trip Tik of virtually blank “paintings” with a derelict sign reading Faith , and a draped, blue-and-gold-enameled cloth that partially obscures the carved image of a swastika in a sunburst design. The piece seems confused and overblown, seemingly mimicking the bombast of official monuments without yielding discernable meaning.

Most of Best’s other works involve images of repenting Magdalens, welcoming potentates, a woman with far-away eyes (identified as the artist’s mother) and other figures from old paintings and prints and photographs--attacked with paint, sealed under glass, and surrounded by frames carved with all manner of writhing vegetation. So history, biblical legend and Best’s family history become part of one big historical stew, offered up in various configurations that retain the same level of generalized nostalgia and rank implausibility. If there are hidden depths here, they remain impenetrable. (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, to May 8.)