SANTA MONICA

Wade Saunders lived on this coast and made sunny representational paintings before he moved east and began making sculpture that looked like East Indian phallic votives. Currently he shows floor installations strewn with 60 or so hand-sized objects cast in bronze from all manner of vessels, ashtrays and tubing. He gives the works a silver nitrate patina that makes them look like old earthenware or fossilized gourds recently exhumed from a burial site.

One looks like a tiny ladder that’s been arched into a bow form, another like a water trough spiraled into a conical peak; others are bowls, honeycombs and hollowed leaf clusters. The more literal sensuality of his columnar sculpture is translated into a tactile sensuality here. The forms are smoothly arched or gracefully bowed as if holding some secret substance and perfectly balanced around a central fulcrum point so that we want to touch them, to set them rocking with a foot or roll them across the gallery floor like an old toy tire.

Concurrently James Ford takes his fascination with the vessel form to flat, collage-like monotypes that place images of solitary containers on taupe grounds. Two simple bowl shapes float side by side; a richly hued science beaker stands on a neutral field. For a long time, Ford has pursued archetypal containers in stone, paint or print for their symbolic power. Familiarity with this tenacious evolution may get you beyond an initial reaction that these monotypes are safe, slick rehashes of modernism. (Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Blvd., to July 1.)