‘Profound’ Art Created From Urban Debris

Old shoes. Letters from the 1930s. Newspaper clippings.

These are flotsam and jetsam of our lives, ignored in back-yard sheds and junk piles. Yet such items are infused with personal histories. Perhaps they were once important to someone. Perhaps it is significant that they were thrown out.

Three artists showing at Pierce College’s Art Gallery have filled an exhibit with such urban debris. Like its title, the show “Found/Profound” offers current expression that hopes to be empowered by bits and pieces of anonymous, past lives:

* Betty McDonald builds constructions of scrap wood and wire and, in one instance, shoes--”fascinating trash,” she calls it. The artist claims to be guided by a garbage-can intuition.

“Why I pick up what I do is not known to me,” she says in accompanying text.

From such basic beginnings, McDonald ambitiously attempts to present her opinions regarding “aspects of being a woman” as well as “censorship, flag protection, contemporary icons and our planet in distress.”

One particularly striking piece, called “Exposure,” features an unclothed plastic doll perched on a bed of crushed glass. The doll’s head is bound in pink ribbon and black thread. A row of lights along the top lend this construction a carnival appearance, but block letters warn “DON’T LOOK AT THIS NUDE.” One assumes that the work falls under the “woman/censorship” heading.

* Along a more personal and painful theme, Nancy Halvorsen has produced a series of images and handwritten texts framed by a gooey, tarlike substance bristling with bits of twigs and seashells. These works, in both picture and word, equate the illness of the artist’s mother to the destruction of nature.

“She has cancer, just like the rest of the Earth, the cancer of our greed, of our emptiness and insatiable lust for things for objects to own and devour,” Halvorsen’s text says. “The cancer is devouring my mother, just as the cancer of our human greed is devouring the Earth.”

The centerpiece for Halvorsen’s series is a full-page newspaper ad that Exxon ran shortly after the Valdez oil spill. The company apologizes and insists that it has taken every possible action to clean up the spill.

Images above and below this ad--human figures bent in sorrow or twisted in anger--cast doubt on Exxon’s sincerity.

* Kathi Martin has provided a less assaultive fare. She harks to a less complicated era before people were desensitized by constant stimulation. The wood and glass boxes she calls “Los Angeles” are filled with faded letters and postcards. Tourist pictures show the city as a place of color and beauty. Yet the images can evoke discord.

“We have visited these very spots last week,” Martin writes in the accompanying text. “We couldn’t find a parking place and litter was jammed along the edges of all the tree lawns.”

As Betty McDonald suggests in her text, the most banal items can offer insight to a society that produced and used them up. McDonald, Halvorsen and Martin struggle to illuminate such discarded wisdom.

“Found/Profound” continues through Dec. 6 at the Pierce College Art Gallery, 6201 Winnetka Ave., Woodland Hills. The exhibit is open from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 to 9 p.m. Mondays; 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 to 9 p.m. Tuesdays, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Wednesdays; and 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Thursdays. Information: (818) 719-6498.