Santa Monica

Buzz Spector spent most of his childhood holed up in libraries and developed an intense love affair with books. He loves their feel, their smell and the great flood of ideas they contain. Not surprisingly his highly intelligent art pivots on this devotion. This exhibit takes his usual operation of ripping, stacking and altering books one step further to delve more deeply into the mental and physical enchantment of his medium. One of the show’s most poignant images is the encaustic-covered, blank-page grid “Mensem” with its single splash of red paint down the center that makes the white pages reel with the feminine principle of life.

But Spector has stepped out of his bookish metaphors for two of the strongest pieces in the show. Although the reference is still to bound volumes and the power of written ideas the materials are pure symbol. “Butter-Rose” is a long grocery freezer stocked with a bed of long-stemmed roses that have been dotted with great scoops of butter. Like any book, the cryonic coffin tries to preserve beauty, delicate flavors and aromas that become frozen, abstracted principles in the process. “Hospitality” is a strange wall piece made of 11 white enamel bread pans that have been used to bake loaves of bulbous bread. Disturbingly, the swollen bread resembles aborted fetuses, making an analogy between waste and life. In the context of this show this raises associations between human life and vital ideas that are trashed before they have the opportunity to provide nourishment. Tough and uncompromising as these messages are, Spector can still seem non-threatening, thanks to the visual poetry of his materials and metaphors. (Roy Boyd, 1547 10th St., to June 1).