Artistry in the Round : Renee Petropoulos explores the forms, functions of wreaths in her current exhibition. : The artist is in the midst of public projects including a work at El Segundo’s Green Line station.

‘I ‘m a total hybrid formed by many different influences, so I’m in tough territory,” says artist Renee Petropou los, laughing. “I don’t make work to illustrate a theory, yet my approach to art-making is essentially that of a Conceptualist. At the same time, I’m a painter who appreciates the visceral experience of painting--I sort of fall between the cracks of various disciplines.”

Petropoulos’ current body of work is certainly hard to categorize. Her exhibition of paintings “Show Us Their Faces, Tell Us What They Said” opened Saturday at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. The show, comprising 14 brightly colored canvases, most of them shaped, centers on the form of the wreath.

“When I see a form that recurs in different ways, it becomes interesting to me,” she explains. “In the U.S., wreaths are mostly associated with funerary things, but in Turkey, where I visited in 1989, they use wreaths for every kind of celebration, from weddings to the opening of a bank. I photographed the ones I saw there, and as time passed I became increasingly interested in wreaths because it’s a form with dual functions.

“It’s a decorative object, but it’s also a round form that leads you to a center that’s absent, and that raises intriguing questions. What does a center mean? How does it structure a work? What things in nature start from a center?

“The way I’m using wreaths is becoming more emblematic. Some of these wreaths have monograms of members of my family at the center, which I’ve obliterated, so in a sense they’re about a subject that’s absent.

“I think I’m reaching the end of my involvement with wreaths,” she adds, “because the work is becoming increasingly literal. I’m now making little wreaths that are collars you could almost wear--it’s like a collar without a head, so the subject is literally not there.”

Also included in the exhibition are four paintings from a series on hats, which she says “come from the same place as the wreaths in that they explore peripheral ways of asserting identity. The hats have no heads, so the subject is ostensibly missing, yet hats convey all kinds of meaning. Wealth, power, rank, occupation--all of this can be embodied in this ridiculous item that sits on top of your head. That seems amazing to me!”

Petropoulos, a cheerful, unpretentious woman who favors eccentric dress, lives with her companion of six years, architect Roger White, in a jerry-built structure in Venice that’s a cross between an artist’s studio, a campsite and a cozy little nest. It almost looks like she built it herself. It’s a colorful place jammed with souvenirs from her travels, folk and outsider art and work by her friends in the art community--Jeffrey Vallance, Lari Pittman, Tom Wudl, Emerson Woelffer.

Scattered here and there are plans for three major public projects.

Slated to open this fall in downtown Philadelphia on the plaza of the Municipal Services Building is a collaboration Petropoulos is completing with Roger White and Daniel J. Martinez. She describes it as “50 sculptural forms modeled after game-board pieces from checkers, bingo, dominoes and Monopoly that are strewn about as if some giant came along and tossed them down.”

On the local front, she has a public work scheduled for unveiling in late May at the intersection of Washington and Culver boulevards in Culver City. The project, budgeted at $55,000 and two years in the works, is a series of 10 sculptures made from various materials and based on movie props; among them is a caldron, a fireplace, a punching bag and a candelabrum.

Petropoulos’ most ambitious public project, however, won’t be seen until this summer. Given a budget of $150,000 to create a permanent public artwork at the Metro Green Line’s Douglas Station in El Segundo, Petropoulos has created a subtly magical work that combines vividly colorful steel sculpture, stairways engraved with text, marble chip designs laid into the flooring, images silk-screened onto glass elevators and exotic steel railings.

“My work is becoming more three-dimensional, and I think living with an architect has played a role in that,” the 40-year-old artist says. “Roger’s helped me a lot--not by making anything but by helping me understand how ideas can be translated into physical form.”

P etropoulos has been making art since she was a child, but it has taken her a long time to realize she knew what she was doing.

The artist, born in Los Angeles in 1954 to immigrant parents from Greece and Germany, recalls: “My parents divorced when I was 3 and I didn’t see my father from the age of 11 until I was 19, so I was mostly shaped by my mother’s family. My mother and I lived in Van Nuys with my grandparents, and there were always uncles and aunts around. We were a very tightly knit European family, and growing up I always felt like an outsider because my family ate weird food and spoke another language.

“Both my parents were artistic, and from an early age I was encouraged to take an interest in art. I made all this stuff, but I didn’t know you could be an artist--I thought only people in books were artists, and that’s probably why I enrolled at UCLA as an art history major. The big turning point for me was in 1977, when I started meeting contemporary living artists. I met people like Alexis Smith, Laddie Dill and Bill Brice and thought, ‘Wait a minute, they’re regular people.’ ”

Petropoulos began to feel more confident about developing her own work at that point, but it took several years and many false starts before she found the appropriate vehicle for her creative concerns.

“When I was in my early 20s, I was taking a lot of photographs, and from 1973 to ’75 I worked in the photo archives at the Getty,” she says. “I did some research for the curator of painting, but mostly I was developing their negatives and making prints from glass negatives of photographs of furniture from the 1920s.

“I found photography oddly unsatisfying, though, so in my first year of grad school I got into video,” she continues. “Prior to getting into graduate school, however, I took a lot of film classes and got hooked on film. I was politically active as a Marxist in the ‘70s, and my closest friends were Marxist filmmakers who made films about the class struggle.

“My involvement with them led to my getting a job in 1975 working as a production assistant on Jonathan Demme’s film ‘Fighting Mad.’ It shot in Arkansas for two months, so I took a leave of absence from school and went. It was a great experience, but it made me realize that while I loved movies, I didn’t love the hierarchy of people involved in making them or the nomadic existence movie-making demands.

“While I was in Arkansas, I began a series of photographs that focused on the marginal things around the edges of what might be considered a central action or image. I wound up dismissing those photographs as a failed project, but the idea of focusing on the edges stayed with me, and you can see it in the paintings I’m making now.”

R eturning to Los Angeles in 1976, Petropoulos worked at the then-new L.A. Louver Gallery, and the following year she began graduate school at UCLA, where she studied with Wudl and Robert Fichter.

“I really admired the work of Vito Acconci and Joan Jonas then and was mostly making videos, and while I was in school I started exhibiting,” Petropoulos says. “I showed at LACMA’s rental gallery, was in several group shows and also showed videotapes at Otis that explored the idea of contradiction. I was in the tapes, which used ideas from the section on contradiction from Mao Tse-tung’s ‘Four Essays on Philosophy,’ but I stopped making videos shortly after that because I hated struggling with the equipment. It was then that I returned to painting.”

After graduating from UCLA with a master of fine arts degree in 1979, Petropoulos taught at Cal State Northridge in 1980 and exhibited what she considers to be her first mature body of work in a solo show two years later at the old Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.

“I showed constructed wall pieces that were a weird combination of landscape and odd architectural forms,” she says. “They were inspired by some buildings I’d seen when I was traveling--shacks, sheds and patched-together shanty dwellings,” she recalls.

“I’m in the lineage of Duchamp, but travel has played an important role in my life and I’ve been heavily influenced by the street art of various cultures around the world,” says Petropoulos, whose bachelor of arts is in Islamic art. “I love Mexican wall painting, hieroglyphics and the odd juxtapositions that comprise the vernacular of the street, and I’m fascinated by advertising and by how ideas are communicated pictorially.

“The way L.A. comes together demographically--the ethnic mix and the fact that cultures live on top of one another here--makes for something very rich visually, and I think it’s spawned a kind of painting that’s specific to this city,” says the artist, who began exhibiting with Rosamund Felsen in 1985. “Driving to work on a given day, I might see checkers next to a flat blue next to a painted object.”

Notions of geography are also central to another of Petropoulos’ continuing series, which is an exploration of maps.

“I was shocked when I realized that maps aren’t finite things, that they’re fluid, living organisms that continually change,” she says. “The map pieces deal with a time span that encompasses the present back to my grandmother’s earliest memory--I won’t go back further than the memory of someone I can speak to, so I’m essentially dealing with the 20th Century.

“My work is becoming more personal, and that scares me. But, then, it’s always scared me to put work out there and make myself visible in that way,” she confesses in parting. “I’ve taken great pains to make work that doesn’t reveal me, but ultimately every artist reveals himself in his work, because art is as unique to the person who made it as his thumbprint.”*

* Renee Petropoulos, “Show Us Their Faces, Tell Us What They Said,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Through May 27. (310) 828-8488.