Wilshire Center

Margaret Honda, a young San Diego artist, is intrigued with “found” structures. Her “Traps” are precisely that: mechanical devices used by fishermen and trappers. These are modest objects made with the honest materials (wood and metal, mostly) and austere, clean-lined silhouettes that get good marks in contemporary art. They are also, of course, instruments of killing. In precise, matter-of-fact descriptions--surely as important as the three-dimensional components--Honda explains how each of the seven pieces achieves its ends.

We’ve been brainwashed with the notion that the utilitarian objects of many cultures also have strikingly “aesthetic” aspects; Honda stands this truism on its head. The traps are attractive tools, admirable for their elegant combination of simple physics and time-tested observation. But they also have a deadly power. The canniest viewer-traps are the trickiest looking pieces, like “Deadfall,” a pair of boards propped at a 45-degree angle with a delicate rigging of bamboo, bait wire and tin tack, or “Box Snare,” in which airy curls of wire prove to be coldly efficient nooses.

The real zinger in this work is its tacit invitation to contemplate the mysterious ways of animal and human psychology--not only those of trapper and beast but also that of the viewer, who is enticed (via alluringly “contemporary” forms) to investigate the relationship between the hunter and his prey. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Jan. 6.)