Everything’s Coming Up Roses for Ott

The encaustic rose paintings of Sabina Ott exude a heavy, melancholic air. Their thick, waxy surfaces equate easily to time and seem to embalm each painting in dark musings about presence, absence or life and death. Ott’s roses are the stuff of memories and old Victorian cards, swollen and fully open. One rose is much like another, a fact Ott uses masterfully in “Disappearance and Return No. 19,” where she weaves a claustrophobic white web of pattern across the huge painting’s surface. Part bridal gown, part flocked wall paper, the massed roses vie for breathing room seeming to drown and surface repeatedly amid milky flotsam. In other paintings the flower’s obliteration is more heavy-handed as the artist washes over portions of imagery with runny veils of colored encaustic. In a corner of a four-panel painting a single small red rose evokes a vivid sense of violence. The impact is chilling.

Creighton Michael’s driftwood wall sculptures read like Modernist tribal art. The elegance of his simplified forms recall Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures of the late ‘40s but Michael’s abstraction is more animalistic than figurative. Pieces suggest fetishistic shields, or abstract animal totems which are delightfully spry yet surprisingly earnest in their dignity. Perhaps it is the cocky spontaneity of sanded limbs covered with penciled lines gesturing broadly in refined courtship rituals that lifts this art out of the reverential doldrums that affects most fetishistic work. The nobility is there but thankfully it’s got a sense of humor.

Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Nov. 24.

Perfectly Crafted Plywood: Erik Levine’s three huge plywood forms are tidy pieces of self-containment. They look exactly like what they are, pieces of raw plywood perfectly crafted into rounded, vaguely mechanical forms of precise geometry and resolute functionlessness. Just looking at the unfinished surface dotted with staples, divided by pencil lines and liberally dusted with finely sanded wood putty, we know they have everything to do with construction. They bring out the craftsman in all of us. You want to run your hands over the surface because that’s how you will really know the perfection of the shape and its fine smoothness.

If this is Minimalism’s “what you see is all you get” basics, then Levine’s sculptures have found a constructivist trap door to allow for allusions to machines and containers of empty space. These Gargantuan models for orange squeezers, tops or drain plugs reek of industrial ramifications but refuse to get specific. Instead they bring up formal considerations about sculptural weight, interior vs. exterior volumes and implied movement retained by static form. Isn’t it fun when something that looks that good before it gets “finished” can still carry on an intelligent conversation?

Meyers/Bloom, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Nov. 27 .

Occidental Exhibits: Of the four exhibitions going on simultaneously around the Occidental College campus, the most noteworthy is Michael McMillen’s installation “Atlas Worked.” Not as much a full-scale environment as earlier pieces such as his “The Pavilion of Rain,” “Atlas” has more in common with the running musings of “Train of Thought” seen earlier this year.

United simply by the question “What Shaped Burbank?,” the small gallery space is broken up by three sculptural “points” and a single painting. Most intriguing is a rusted, padlocked locker which has a bubbling fountain flowing loudly inside. The sound of liquid splashes coming from the sealed locker animate and inform the rest of the room with a hidden presence of life. This is in sharp contrast to the entropy projected by the rest of the works: a slowly rusting conical mountain of steel junk and a dirt-encrusted old drill press (the Atlas trade name of the title). On the wall is a painting titled “A Home in America” that focuses on a junk-laden backyard which backs up to a construction site where huge grubs are busy moving earth.

Though it’s quite spare, there is much to be said for the intelligence of this piece and the way McMillen allows the viewer to come to interpretations based on changing physical interaction with the sculpture. It’s an experiential premise that’s at the heart of some of the most interesting installation work being done today by artists like Ann Hamilton and Connie Zehr. In a sense, the art really only finds meaning through the observer. It’s an interesting way for an object maker like McMillen to get the audience involved in the process of making the art.

In the next gallery, two painters take off on their own ideas of water in “Waterfall as Image.” For such a hackneyed subject, both artists offer some nicely arresting abstract landscapes bordering on the figurative. Jean Towgood’s writhing, Expressionist “Fire Falls” are the raw force of nature with an apocalyptic edge. Her energetic mark on naked canvas and inflamed color are the exact opposite of Gillian Theobald’s icy cold rivers of self-illuminating swiftness which flow in bleached white blues against solid black rocks. The polarities form a refreshing juxtaposition.

Painter Jesus Perez makes points with his great sense of humor about death and pollution in “Dead Issues.” Any artist who admits doing research for a Day of the Dead show by investigating folk tradition and then going to the butcher shop is in touch with an appealing sense of the absurd. While his paintings try too hard to be symbolic high art, the drawings are wonderfully inventive and playful. They are firmly entrenched in the Mexican idea that death and life have everything in common and are a delightful celebration of that unity. This is not gallows humor but something more lively.

On view in a different building are the somber, shifting-space interiors of painter Linda Kallan and the oddly diminutive sculptures of Pamela Burgess. The space is problematic for the work of both artists but Burgess suffers most with stone and metal pieces that have great difficulty with their scale.

Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, to Nov. 29.

Shegelman’s Transformation: Russian painter Simon Shegelman’s images have undergone a startling transformation since he left the Soviet Union in 1975. The linocut and silk-screen prints he made in Latvia, before his immigration to France and America, were dark, powerfully claustrophobic figurative works dealing with the emotional pain of regimented oppression. Little wonder that officials would close the exhibit for “political and ideological reasons.”

Since Shegelman immigrated, his work has exploded in a maelstrom of brightly fashionable colors. He is attracted to the flash and dazzle of the nightclubs and glittery trappings of “the good life.” His paintings are a strange combination of Chagall and kitschy Leroy Nieman illustration montage. It’s distressing to think that Shegelman could sound the depths of one political reality so clearly in his early silk-screens yet be so completely bedazzled by the materialism of another. But perhaps both systems are extremes and that’s the simplification the artist is communicating.

Sherberg Gallery, 665 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Nov. 15.