ART REVIEWS : Guilt, Innocence Entangle in Pondick’s ‘Heads’

If all the wads of bubble gum you ever had snuck out of your mouth and stuck under tabletops and chair seats were collected in an empty room, the pink blob might look a little bit like Rona Pondick’s sculpture, “Heads.” If you can imagine that each of the chewed-up and spit-out components of this fantasized mess grew nearly to the size of your head and sprouted life-size pink teeth, then you will have a pretty good picture of what’s waiting for you at Asher/Faure Gallery.

From the foyer, your attention is immediately drawn to the doorway of the main exhibition space, from which emanates an electric pink glow. On the thin strip of floor framed by the door lie a dozen or so balls of irregularly shaped stuff. Their lure is irresistible.

They pull you into their orbit and cause you to walk past a tiny child’s chair, barely noticing that it’s wearing shoes and has an extra leg that extends from between a deep crevice in its fleshy, lace-covered cushions. Too curious about the pink orbs in the next room, you treat this psychological time bomb of a settee as just another object in the world--ordinary, boring and perfectly ignorable.

With each step you take toward the main gallery, more gummy blobs become visible until you are suddenly in the presence of a cluster of the little, now menacing things. Their alluring cuteness instantly disappears when you realize that they are uncountable parts of a teeming mass that totally overruns the space and anyone who might venture into it.

Angled around the bend in the L-shaped gallery, almost all of the open-mouthed units face another kiddie chair--this one upended, with its black high heels pointing helplessly, but also somewhat viciously, into the air. This immobilized creature creeps up behind you. Even more so than the one in the foyer, it initially escapes your attention, which is riveted to the massive spill of pink spheres dominating the exhibition.

The chair’s upside-down position creates the impression that the mouthy wads are animate and mischievous, that they have been swarming around the room, tipping over furniture, and perhaps using the defenseless little chair for their own perverse purposes. At present, they seem to be on a demonic search for more trouble to get into, which you, the visitor, just might provide.

You draw the inescapable conclusion that you’re being toyed with by a master of theatrics. Resentment flashes through your mind, only until you realize that the manipulation to which you are being subjected is much less insidious and far more enlightening than that involved in growing up and coming to terms with the pleasures and violence of sexuality and objectivity--issues Pondick’s work provocatively and intelligently raises.

Childhood returns, in her art, as a far from innocent ground over which normal adulthood has layered even weirder expectations and more extreme distortions. Whereas children see the objects that make up the world in terms of an anthropomorphism that is both frightening and exciting, this enlivening vision is “corrected” when we grow up and begin to see things objectively, as dumb arrangements of only so much inanimate material.

Pondick’s objects play havoc with these neat categories. They marry adult knowledge with childhood fantasy in order to explore the strange intersections between guilt and innocence, aggression and affection.

Her collection of heads and pair of kiddie chairs both elicit our sympathy and assault us with obnoxiousness. If her charming little seats and misshapen, gum-like skulls seem sweet and vulnerable--to the point that they are threatened by the scale of the gallery--they also seem nasty and vengeful to the point of being wickedly demented.

Despite the diminutive size of her chairs, something unsavory lurks beneath the surfaces of their supposedly innocent curves and swollen or folded protuberances. Despite the fact that Pondick’s pink heads occupy the same space as pets, too many exist for us to share the affection we hold out for domesticated animals.

Her sculptures remain utterly unlovable. Like human mutants too numerous to be distinguished or disregarded, they embody our fears of failing to get what we want--and worse, of getting exactly what we deserve. Simultaneously engaging and discomforting, alluring and repulsive, her art acts out a psychoanalytic drama of ambivalence, a scene of compulsion in which it is not contradictory for something to be two things at once.

* Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 271-3665, through Dec. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Quirks of Art: Kevin White, in his second solo show at Marc Richards Gallery, casts around for a real world model on which to base his art-making. His odd exhibition of dysfunctional playthings, broken medallions, empty molds and unusable pieces of plumbing superficially suggests the exhaustion--if not the end--of art as a meaningful endeavor.

This glib cynicism, however, merely skims the surfaces of White’s quirky works. At a deeper level, his apparently barren sculptures twist convention by tweaking meaning out of nearly worn-out forms.

By using visual puns deftly and cleverly, White constructs whimsical objects that give way to conceptual conundrums. They reverse expectations and thus paradoxically preserve art’s capacity to renew, surprise and delight.

By tiling the outside, rather than the inside, of a shower stall floor, White turns common experience inside-out. Unlike much contemporary art which employs plumbing as a metaphor for the human digestive tract in order to emphasize the brute physicality of our bodies, his barely present sculpture denies the primacy of corporeality in favor of focusing on the mind’s more supple and subtle movements.

The body, nevertheless, receives its due in his installation. It doesn’t disappear into a nerdy investigation of abstract concepts, but reappears where we least expect it, as sentient flesh transformed by the stimulating rigors of thinking.

Another floor piece consists of a drain’s safety cap that penetrates a cement cast of a hat from which extends two wing-like hands. Shaped like the wings on the head and ankles of the ancient Roman god Mercury, the hands suggest the speed with which the mind works--sometimes flies--without severing its relationship to the flesh. The messenger god’s association with commerce, thievery, eloquence and science gets recast in White’s goofy, cartoonish sculpture as the mind’s capacity to wear several hats, to be everywhere and nowhere at once.

Heads without bodies and headless figures populate the rest of his exhibition. A sequence of portraits of a generic boy--in hard plaster and rubbery silicon, in “positive” casts and their “negative” molds, and in newly made but already broken configurations--neatly summarizes the reversals that energize White’s elastic art.

* Marc Richards Gallery, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-1114, through Nov. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Abstract Simplicity: At first glance, Shirley Pettibone’s paintings match the camera at its own game, faithfully depicting the appearance of detailed reality. A second look--or more sustained scrutiny--overturns this initial impression. Her masterfully crafted canvases and delicately rendered watercolors in this 20-year survey deliver pleasures beyond the scope of photographs.

Up close, they dissolve into pure abstractions. When you examine their surfaces as documents of their construction, nothing is visible except an infinite area of seemingly random markings and irregular configurations based on purely formal arrangements of shape, color, line and edge.

From further away, however, Pettibone’s paintings congeal into beautiful images of surfaces of water. Their depths--both literally and figuratively--may be unseen but are no less present. Each stroke of the brush and every choice of color, hue and intensity becomes part of an extremely disciplined endeavor to create the illusion of sunshine dancing off of the water’s constantly changing surface. By implication, this play of light becomes one of perception. Vision’s clarity segues into the clearness of comprehension, which gives way to that of absolute conviction.

Intangible reflections of light and darkness--almost blinding glares and deep, light-swallowing shadows--make up not only Pettibone’s sensuous and exquisite paintings, but the foundations of belief that establish our fundamental relationships to the world.

* Torture Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8878, through Dec. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Pastiches of Whimsy: Pages of newspapers and segments of stitching, layers of handmade paper and fanciful glyphs come together in Charles Christopher Hill’s unabashedly lyrical paintings. Made up of fragments of usually incompatible elements, his formally refined images at Cirrus Gallery overcome the disruptive associations of their discordant materials to create playful balances that are both nonsensical and elegant.

Whimsical grids organize the pictorial structures of Hill’s watercolors and acrylics. The large canvases often consist of a single black figure that resembles an imaginary calligraphic character or a partial view of a street map that goes nowhere.

The smaller works on built-up layers of translucent paper are funnier and more animated by a relaxed mobility. Their grids look like schematic architectural plans heaving a sigh of relief or the units of Morse Code breaking free of their necessary order to cross paths in a flowing dance.

Hill’s quietly mature paintings find serenity and ease at the very points where rigid orders and restrictive systems begin to break down.

* Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda, (213) 680-3473, through Jan. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.