ART REVIEW : Chris Finley Demystifies a High-Tech World

Exploring formal properties of sculptural space is a pretty traditional artistic issue. In an engaging show at Food House, the young artist Chris Finley has found a way to send that tradition spinning.

Finley makes quirky, smallish assemblages from assorted plastic containers: bowls, milk crates, laundry baskets, Tupperware, salt and pepper shakers, the tops of aerosol cans, serving trays and more. These are stacked and nested into sometimes precarious structures, without binding adhesives.

Visitors are invited to take the assemblages apart--to deconstruct (you should pardon the expression) what Finley has laboriously constructed. Like a puzzle-in-reverse, the sculptures’ compartments come apart in surprising ways.

Take “Grand Slam.” Its finial is a screw cap filled with whittled bits of pencils. The finial rests on the cap of a saltshaker, hiding an unidentifiable little object inside.

The saltshaker cap stands atop a flowered coaster, which holds a stack of five circular photographs--a thumb, an astronaut, the logo of Boise Cascade, a mousetrap--all clipped from magazines. Another stack of pictures is beneath the coaster, which stands atop a baby-blue plastic tray.

The plastic tray rests on another coaster, itself atop a white cap from a spray can. Stuffed inside the cap is a blue, silk flower, beneath which nestles another little tower of caps. The bigger cap sits on a fuschia-colored, compartmentalized dinner plate, filled with more gnawed pencils and little plastic dinosaurs.

And so on and so on, down through another dozen layers.

Little bits of sculptural information are secreted inside other, completely unrelated bits of sculptural information, like a “windows” program on a computer that’s been made physically three-dimensional. Think of Finley’s orchestration of cheesy, mundane materials as a whimsical riff on the electronic maze called cybernetic space.

Suddenly, the sculptures’ melodramatic titles, such as “Grand Slam” and “Car Crash,” make sense. They’re like the hyped-up names for video games requiring precise hand-eye skill.

The forbidding mysteries of high technology have been wittily transformed into low-tech assemblages of plastic pots and pans. A high-tech world gets playfully demystified, while the sculptures’ toylike simplicity also implies that today’s daunting cybernetic revolution is still infantile.

Finley’s work progressively peels back layers of discovery. Importantly, however, when you get to the end of the journey no revelatory, inner core has been hidden inside. His sculpture has no essential center, no “Eureka!”

Instead, you’re left with the ordinary layers of stuff spread out before you, and with the imaginative, unexpected relationships among them encountered on the journey. Finley emphasizes process, picking up a thread of Postminimal sculpture of the early 1970s. His anti-essentialist strategy smartly cautions against anthropomorphizing technology.

Playful or not, there is a modestly nerve-racking quality to Finley’s art. Its casual demand that a viewer become a participant violates the do-not-touch commandment for traditional art. Handling sculpture is a breach of convention, but it turns out to be a necessary violation that opens the door on a different world.

Finley graduated last year from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design and is just beginning to show his work. This is his second outing at Food House; he was in a group show that just closed at Kim Light Gallery and is in another that just opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Together, his homemade “cybersculptures” add up to an impressively idiosyncratic debut.

* Food House, 2220 Colorado, Bldg. 4, Room 402, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1030, through Jan. 29. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.