ART REVIEWS : The Strange House That Pae White Built

The puzzling installations by Pae White at Shoshana Wayne Gallery warps the space your body occupies. Her odd objects also force your mind to stretch if you want to make sense of the uncanny perversity that animates her work.

White’s smart arrangement of lamps, color charts and architectural models creates the immediate impression that she, a recent graduate of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, intends to straightforwardly explore the nuances of interior design and domestic decoration.

The rubber-coated sunflowers, gingerbread houses and minimalistic sculptures that are haphazardly scattered around the gallery prevent this impression from taking hold. They alert you to the fact that White is really interested in cultivating moments when one’s ordinary surroundings take on a hallucinatory quality, freely shifting between being creepy, silly and mesmerizing.

Dizzying shifts in scale begin her articulation of the multilayered nature of reality. In the long, narrow, front gallery, which White has left empty except for some strange objects that lurk in its corners, two small models of houses sit on the floor. In contrast to their homemade appearance and toylike vulnerability, your body feels awkwardly oversized, blown up to proportions radically out of whack with its fragile surroundings.

In the small, cubical back gallery, White reverses this sensation. Two tough, seductive plexiglass sculptures lie flat on the floor, charging the claustrophobic space with an undercurrent of menace. Their shiny surfaces appear to be frozen liquids. They simultaneously function like mirrors and create the illusion that they open onto underground galaxies of pure, saturated color. The larger one seems to suck the air out of the room, and threatens to take your body with it.

White’s witty, sensuous installation demonstrates that it is impossible to separate perceptions from interpretations, and to segregate facts from fantasies. Her art gives compelling physical form to a sophisticated revision of Surrealism.

In place of the sexual fixation and unconscious dread that obsessed the men of Surrealism, White’s work defines a more open, fluid and quasi-feminine exploration of abstract possibilities and unexpected, formal transformations. The sense that anything might transpire in the present gives her installation its diffuse yet undeniable power.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 Fifth St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Beyond Anger and Rage: “No Justice, No Peace? Resolutions . . .” takes its title from a popular phrase that arose from the initially peaceful protests to the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney G. King beating case. Curated by Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins for the California Afro-American Museum, this wide-ranging show of mixed-media works by 19 artists does not focus exclusively on the violence that followed.

To its credit, the exhibition uses the riots that began on April 29, 1992, as part of a general backdrop against which most of its artists make their socially oriented work. For the most part, “No Justice, No Peace? . . .” carefully avoids the problem of forcing art to be a symbolic, emotional Band-Aid, a last-ditch effort that is resorted to only when other, more practical--and effective--means fail.

The strongest works in the exhibition move beyond immediate anger and justifiable rage to locate the riots in a broader social context, as part of a prevalent pattern of racist behavior. Charles Gaines, Carrie Mae Weems and Robert Colescott, for example, effectively use abstraction, irony and humor to invite from their viewers responses more complicated than knee-jerk confirmations of their own prejudices.

Gaines’ wall of numbers interspersed with words and phrases such as love , teaches , principles and values and an inner voice draws parallels between the way former police chief Daryl Gates describes himself in his book and the language the Bible uses to describe the persecution of Christ. This work is compelling because of the time it takes for the message to unfold in your mind, and because of Gaines’ insistence that the “facts” he presents are not the last word, but can be rearranged to support many other interpretations.

Weems’ commemorative plates give voice to famous and faceless African-Americans in terms usually reserved for presidents and royal couples. Both funny and deadly serious, Colescott’s bold figurative paintings also sketch the common desires diverse social groups share. By emphasizing the individuality of its artists, “No Justice, No Peace? . . .” insists that the riots were not caused by a single event, but resulted from relations deeply woven into all aspects of the social fabric.

* California Afro-American Museum, Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, (213) 744-7432, through July 5. Closed Mondays.

Urban Sprawl: “L.A. Stories” is a sprawling group exhibition with a snappy title, some excellent art, but little real reason for existing. Although the city of Los Angeles is the supposed subject of the paintings, drawings and prints by the 40 artists presented at Jack Rutberg Gallery, the grounds for their inclusion are so loosely defined that almost any artist who ever visited the city, dealt with popular culture, or saw a Hollywood movie could be included.

Likewise, the claims the show makes for Los Angeles are so vague that “L.A. Stories” does not serve as an insightful inquiry into the nature of our culture. It functions, instead, as a self-congratulatory advertisement for, or shameless promotion of, an amorphous “Southern Californian” lifestyle. The show is one of the most egregiously short-sighted examples of local boosterism to appear this season.

Rather than acknowledging the fact that art in Los Angeles is part of an international system, “L.A. Stories” would segregate it, shelter it from world-class standards, and celebrate its supposedly homey flavor. Despite the exhibition’s good intentions--to focus attention on art made here--this approach amounts to a sort of artistic protectionism. It betrays either a deeply cynical lack of confidence in artists who happen to work here, or a fundamental misunderstanding of how art functions in the contemporary world.

* Jack Rutberg Gallery, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-5222, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.