The Bitter and the Sweet Captured in Artist Poupee Boccaccio’s Repositories of Memories

Literally a holder of relics, a reliquary is also a repository of memories, an object of meditation and worship, a space infused with faith.

In a remarkable show at the David Zapf Gallery (2400 Kettner Blvd., through March 10), artist Poupee Boccaccio introduces the notion that the mind, too, is a reliquary. It stores the remains of our experience as well as a flood of perceptions, hopes, imaginings. It warps our sense of time, splicing together the eternal and the temporal, the fleeting and the fixed.

Though she works primarily in pastel and paint, Boccaccio, a Los Angeles-area artist, proves exceedingly deft here with glass, wood and a variety of found objects. Her sensitivity to the textures and moods of her materials steers her clear of the forced contrivances that often mar such assemblages, rendering them decorative but diffused and vacuous. Boccaccio’s materials work with her, contributing their own dual natures to her professed theme of the duality of life and death, nature’s fragility and power. She encases her “Angel Reliquaries” in a shell of broken glass--hard, smooth, fragmented yet continuous. In her altar-like reliquaries, glass doubles as both wall and window, distancing us from the imagery within but allowing access, too.

Boccaccio calls the angel series an homage to nature, but it could easily be human nature she means, and not just the organic world of flora and fauna. All of the “Angel Reliquaries” have the same basic form, a house-shaped torso with pitched roof, wings on either side, a short, billowing skirt and a rigid pair of legs. Body and home are one and the same here, vital centers, shelters for an inner reality.

In the center of each house/body is a small niche, lined with red paint or shimmering sequins. A heart of broken glass occupies the niche in the “Green Angel Reliquary;” scarabs fill the others. The beetles, highly revered in ancient Egypt, are both hideous and beautiful, their squat bodies sporting a spectacular, iridescent sheen. These static, preserved forms hold the center stable, while the angels’ legs seem to propel the figures upward. Rough icicles of glass drip from their skirts, dangerous but delicate.

Boccaccio’s other reliquaries, in the form of wall-mounted shrines, compress narrative and symbol into dense tableaux. In “Hummingbird Reliquary,” the tiny bird is nestled into a hollow of lace within a red, glass-encrusted heart. Wild flames spew from the top of the heart, and a halo of tinted photographs surround it, each with the same, bittersweet image of a young girl dressed as an angel and posing with a bow and arrow. A row of glittering, coiled serpents sits below, each with a beast’s head and tongue shrieking upward. Each set of images resonates with the one adjacent, creating alternating tides of tension and release.

The photographic image of the little girl recurs in most of the reliquaries, a reference, perhaps, to the artist’s schizophrenic sister, whom Boccaccio mentions in her gallery statement. A poignant symbol of innocence, trapped in a masquerade, she stares out from each image with a sadly resigned expression. Melancholy fills the spaces around her, whether crowded with tiny plastic skulls, little Japanese Noh masks, pins, sequin stars or glass hearts, cracked in two.

Reproductions of old, handwritten Italian letters paper the frames of two reliquaries, adding yet another hint of vanished tenderness to Boccaccio’s bruised visions of the past. She underscores this sense of loss and remoteness by veiling certain images behind a delicate web of nylon, or making them visible only by a mirror’s reflection. Boccaccio’s materials are modest, her means inventive and her message a deeply moving meditation on love, death, tenderness, passion, reverence and the sweet sadness of life.

Poupee Boccaccio will lead an informal discussion of her work at the gallery Saturday at 2 p.m. The public is invited.