Wilshire Center

New Yorker Nancy Spero has built an international career with hard driving political works that always share strong ideology and the conceptualist posture that puts the presentation of an idea well before paint ‘n’ brush pyrotechnics. Works are made from torn, fragmented descriptions of the torture, imprisonment and murder of political prisoners compiled from Amnesty International reports or taken from newsprint.

Spero has transferred the text to large, typed words whose spacing she manipulates, creating a jagged meter that only adds to the horror of the content. Mounted on browned paper, the atrocities--mostly perpetrated against women--are mixed in with quickly painted pictographs of the female form, coiled like a fetus, falling like match stick hunters from the neolithic caves at Lascaux. Such figures accent the large words from an ancient Babylonian myth that describes (and tacitly legitimizes, says Spero) with gory poetics the gross physical brutality which the god Marduk rains on his female counterpart.

In the back gallery, looking hermetically pointless after Spero’s intense work, conceptual artist Charles Ray shows a bathtub perversely mounted into the perpendicular gallery wall with water draining into it and kept from pouring out by a plexiglass barrier. (Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., to July 2.)