ART REVIEWS : Horrific Archetype Reborn in Body of Work About Babies

Ann Preston has a gruesome imagination. A plump baby fashioned out of ashen concrete is mounted on a steel spike, one thumb in its mouth, its single leg curled like the tail of a fish.

A drawing depicts two babies--Siamese twins?--joined at the head, sucking their curled fingers. Another transforms the babies’ disembodied features--flared noses, staring eyes, pursed lips--into a grid of peculiarly symmetrical, self-generating, biomorphic shapes.

“Twins,” a series of five objects crafted of beeswax and rosin, is Preston’s piece de resistance. Depending on which way you read them, these objects depict the differentiation of a single form into two baby-organisms; or, the collapse of two baby-organisms into a single, smooth mound, with a double-tongued opening waiting not-so-patiently to be filled.

At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, this finely crafted work conjures many things: Victor Estrada’s post-nuclear babies; Bruce Nauman’s waxy, doubled heads; even Mary Shelley’s archetypal monster. Shelley wrote Frankenstein while she was pregnant, and her nightmarish vision of the gestation of monstrosity is germane to Preston’s work.

Indeed, her art offers a vision of the infant as sucking machine, a collection of orifices, a constellation of unfulfillable needs. This horror is usually repressed. Here, it returns with blank-eyed, open-mouthed vengeance.

The babies, baby parts and partial babies are accompanied by “Blanket,” an array of flexible, urethane forms. Alternately, they resemble pacifiers, nipples and the tips of condoms, depending on what kind of blanket provides you with security.

Preston insists that security, like the Freudian fetish, is a defense mechanism. It is impossible to grasp or experience. No object can provide it--least of all an art object.

Her work evokes not just the horror of the child, but the horror the art object holds for the artist who birthed it. Neither a proud possession nor a token of creativity, it is a vacuum that sucks up the body of its maker.

Of course, this is part of its allure. Like children, art promises to liberate us from obsession with our own needs, our own bodies. We usually stop short of examining the cost of this “transcendence.” Preston doesn’t, and her visually seductive work is all the more conceptually dense for it.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 652-9172 , through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Mature Styles: The veterans of “In Context”--Peter Alexander, Fred Eversley, John McCracken, Eric Orr and Helen Pashgian--give the novices recently showcased in the Christopher Grimes Gallery show, “Technocolor” a run for their money.

Here is an explosion of light and color minus the frills, the conceptual fillips and the Postmodern double-entendres. Not that those things are bad. They just aren’t very . . . mature.

It feels funny to use the word mature in relation to artists who have long been labeled “finish fetishists” or “surfboard artists.” Such terms imply adolescence, levity and superficiality--and are terribly short-sighted.

Curated for Boritzer-Gray Gallery by artist Lee Musgrave, this exhibition announces the vindication of a broad sweep of California art of the 1960s and ‘70s. Featuring early examples of the artists’ work, along with more recent endeavors, “In Context” stresses continuity, as well as the emergence of more idiosyncratic, mature styles.

McCracken’s sculpture is remarkably sober, considering the way it recklessly toys with our senses. In “Amara” (1992), the sheen of polyester and fiberglass is as mundane as it is unearthly, as much about the seduction of the commodity as it is the unpredictability of perception. The saturated tones of red and orange suggest depth; the high-gloss finish cautions us to trust only surfaces.

After a period of critical neglect in the 1970s, McCracken was rediscovered in the 1980s. Not so Helen Pashgian, who has long hovered on the margins, despite the virtuosity of her paintings.

Pashgian imagined cyber space before such a thing existed. Her brilliantly colored and strangely denatured forms are trapped behind layers of resin so dense and light-reflective they simulate the glare of a computer screen.

Like all the pieces in this show, these compelling paintings struggle to reconcile technology’s infinite promise with abstraction’s circumscribed history. They aren’t surfing. They’re moving cautiously into the next millennium.

* Boritzer-Gray Gallery, 1001-B Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-6652. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through June 19.

Fragility of Perceptions: Claudia Matzko makes art that hovers on the edge of invisibility, eschewing Minimalism’s bombastic materials while embracing its order.

Matzko is concerned with the fragility of sense perceptions. In the past, the work has been weighed down by an insistent ethereality, a delicacy so programmatic it was heavy-handed. In her new show at Angles Gallery, everything is more artfully balanced: Light is fringed with shadow, vision is tinged with music, form elucidates content.

The centerpiece of the show is “Blind Stories,” a series of texts watermarked onto white paper, which tell of blind people who have begun to regain their sight. This piece is flanked by a huge wall-drawing, which mimics the cryptic notes of a player piano, and by a massive piece of glass hooked up to a transducer, which records the vibrations of the room.

When you pass it, you hear a faint whisper. It can be audacious to whisper. This time, for Matzko, it certainly is.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through June 12.