La Cienega Area

What are we to make of an “American Baroque Hiboy Refrigerator”? Well, it hums like a fridge and it has cans of cold Coke inside. But it sits on curving metal legs and supports an elaborate metal scrollwork balancing a trio of American Indian pots. And the door is colored leaded glass, with velvet wound around the handle.

The piece is one of Joel Otterson’s ingenious portmanteau creations--a little of this and a little of that, pieced together to reflect what he calls the “hybrid” character of contemporary life. What makes this refrigerator “American” anyway--the Coke inside or the artifacts of Indian culture? The refrigerator surely has become as central a piece of furniture in the middle-class home as the highboy--a tall chest of drawers mounted on legs--once was. (Otterson’s spelling gives it the flip, vernacular sound of mass marketing.)

In “Single Cell on Wheels/Hindeloopen Piece,” Otterson paints a colony of plump, curving PVC sewer pipes punctured by constellations of tiny holes and painted with small floral designs similar to Pennsylvania Dutch patterns. The pipes rest on an old-fashioned I-shaped steel pipe delicately balanced on small piano wheels.

The piece seems to be partly about our surprisingly flexible notions of what can be decorative, and about the way vastly disparate objects can be read as organic forms of a greater or lesser order. Puns on the various definitions of “cell” are also at work here.

And there’s more. While he wryly observes consumer culture dancing a jig with art forms past and present, Otterson--a young Los Angeles artist who lives in New York--is also creating works that stand on their own as delights for the eye. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to Nov. 11.)