Santa Monica

For New Yorker Gretchen Bender, the media is a two-headed Hydra. TV, video and print offer us beautifully choreographed realities and access to visual information that expands consciousness; think of computer programs that generate 3-D video maps of objects or those amazing photos beamed back from outer space. But the looming monster “media” also accelerates that tricky, scary process by which the most assaultive of information quickly becomes humdrum and every day; consider the slow visual (and psychological) accommodation that’s turned a psychopathic killer like “Freddy” into a cinematic caricature that our children can laugh at.

In an excellent coda to her work in MOCA’s “Forest of Signs,” Bender experiments with the way that information either takes on or is drained of meaning. She shows an enlarged, fuzzy black-and-white photo of two bound, battered women hung dead over a ledge with their backs to us. Anonymous and strangely neutral, the bodies could be a scene from South East Asia, El Salvador or a still from the next war flick. Bender says she was drawn to the image’s brutality then amazed at how quickly it no longer moved her. Playing artist, advertiser and political provocateur, she reinvests the photo with meaning by joining it to an enlarged, saturated color photo of a terribly mutilated finger. As she investigates her own responses to the piece (and controls ours), Bender raises hefty questions about the political and ideological power of what we habitually see.

In an excellent floor installation Bender enlarges photographs taken from video screens, TV, etc., dry mounts these onto some plastic material that can be crumpled like rubbish and then heat hardened. Spearing these crinkled, barely discernable bundles of information onto upright metal lances that project out of the gallery floor, she orchestrates the perfect sense of horror and adventure, caution and fascination we all feel toward the images that barrage us. A wall-hung geometric puzzle painted metallic gray spouts a tendril of discarded film strips and a painting of an American flag that decomposes in special effect, 3-D fashion, fill out a handsome, compelling show by a major young talent. (Meyers/Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, to May 27).