ART REVIEWS : Perna Builds Miniature, Playful World of Imagination

Without exception, kids love Luciano Perna’s exhibition at Bennett Roberts Fine Art. Most adults are also enthralled by its centerpiece, a sprawling, multileveled, toy-train layout set up on seven interconnected platforms, including a Ping-Pong table, a Knoll dining room set, a sewing machine stand, a dollhouse, a coffee table from the 1950s and a vintage National Basketball Assn. backboard made of glass and tipped on its back.

The best part of Perna’s jerry-built structure is that it plays host to the works of nearly 70 artists, whose small-scale pieces form an idiosyncratic city complete with art museums, parks, a gas station, underground parking structure, shantytown, water towers, billboards, bridges and bar. It’s a potluck play land with something for everyone and a lot more left over.

The next best feature of Perna’s miniature city is that almost none of its components are immediately recognizable as souvenir versions of each artist’s style. This encourages viewers to respond to the objects before trying to figure out who made them. Perna prefers you to have a more or less direct response to what’s visible, rather than to let an artist’s reputation determine your reaction.

This democratic impulse goes hand-in-hand with Perna’s willingness to allow his solo show to become a group exhibition. More important, it echoes his capacity to create marvelous works out of ordinary things.

In the past, Perna fabricated abstract paintings from spaghetti, wine, grass stains, garbage bags and fishing sinkers. He made a racing car from Weber grills, garbage cans and a mailbox; a giant spider from crutches, a toilet seat, plungers and rearview mirrors; and a foaming fountain from pots, pans and laundry detergent.

His new exhibition includes geometric abstractions stitched together from old clothing, a charming self-portrait as a model train, and several enchanting coffee-stain collages depicting elaborate maps of imaginary lands. These beautifully detailed pictures are the two-dimensional equivalents of the homemade train set. Both offer images of reality, filtered through the artist’s imagination.

The layout’s two museums provide a quick sketch of the complex world in which Perna lives. One presents an exhibition organized by artist David Muller, who runs a similar, life-size venue in downtown Los Angeles. For his show-within-a-show, Muller has invited artists to make little paintings, sculptures and drawings, doing just what Perna has done, but on an almost microscopic scale.

The other museum, whose three stepped levels are formed by an open fishing-tackle box, houses an exhibition titled “Reading the Railroad.” It includes tiny color photocopies of paintings of trains by 30 artists, including DiChirico, Malevich, Leger and Manet, as well as Kiefer, Koons, Sherman, Burden and Khedoori. Baldessari is represented by a copy inside the museum and an original piece outside its walls. In Perna’s playful world, boundaries between art and life cannot be drawn.

A single train-car encapsulates the spirit that animates his art. On the sides of a clear section of plexiglass in the shape of a boxcar, Michael Gonzalez has glued the word Wonder . Cut from a Wonder bread wrapper, it aptly describes how these artists seem to magically extract something wondrous from mundane materials and prepackaged commodities.

You can read the red letters as a noun or a verb. Either way, it fits into Perna’s generous vision, in which there’s always room for one more participant--namely you, the viewer, whose imagination this art will bend over backward to play with.

* Bennett Roberts Fine Art, 1718 S. Carmelina Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 207-5544, through July 29. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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High-End Addiction: In 1969, when New York-based painter Marilyn Minter was still in art school, she took some pictures of her mother, an agoraphobic drug addict who lived alone in a Miami apartment complex called Coral Ridge Towers. Getting no support for these photographs, except from her teacher Diane Arbus (who promptly returned to New York, where she committed suicide), Minter put the negatives in storage and went on with her career.

If you know her recent “Food Porn” paintings, those early black-and-white photographs, now at TRI Gallery, may provide some poignant insights into the splashy, mechanical style she’s been identified with. In these paintings, Minter wrenches violent, sometimes sexual energy out of simple daily activities, turning the preparation and consumption of food into cool close-ups in which detachment and distance--never intimacy or vulnerability--predominate.

Even if you’ve never seen her brash paintings, Minter’s 25-year-old photographs stand on their own as powerful works of art. It’s as if the young art student was an invisible visitor to her mother’s daily ritual of waking up, lighting a cigarette, reading the paper, putting on her makeup, then spending the day checking and perfecting her appearance in the many ostentatiously framed mirrors of her tidy, upper-middle-class apartment.

One photo, titled “Mom Smoking an Extra Long,” shows Minter’s mother lounging regally on a sofa in her bathrobe, too dignified or self-absorbed to finish getting dressed. The most chillingly claustrophobic shot portrays her in bed, peering into a hand mirror, surrounded by dozens of lotions, creams and emollients, yet uninterested in getting up.

Minter’s mother never appears to be down-and-out, pathetic or even unhappy. Unlike Larry Clark’s gripping pictures of young hustlers and junkies, or Nan Goldin’s moving, ongoing photo-essay about members of society’s underside, Minter depicts the high-end of addiction, a group whose problems are rarely scrutinized because they can afford to buy privacy. These pictures are an unsettling testament to the complexity of one woman’s inner life, suggesting that self-sufficiency is at once more horrifying and ordinary than it’s normally made out to be.

* TRI Gallery, 6365 Yucca St., Hollywood, (213) 469-6686, through July 22. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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At Sense’s Border: At Kohn Turner Gallery, Bruce Conner’s mesmerizing exhibition titled “15 Beautiful Mysteries” looks like a group show of 15 artists who make drawings, collages, photograms, etchings, lithographs, assemblages and photographs. Spanning the last 35 years, it shows the Bay Area recluse to be one of the most richly inventive and important artists to emerge since World War II.

From the punk fury of a photocopied collage called “Ill,” to the deep serenity of “Becalmed,” a collage made of antique engravings, Conner’s art doesn’t hold back as it runs the emotional gamut. In his passionate, complex world, there’s room for the barbed humor of “Applause,” a sign-like lithograph commanding your approval, and the gentle amiability of “Bowing to Half Dome,” a rare study of soft colors and delicate textures that includes an image of the famous mountain and a pair of lips that blow you a kiss when you bend down to see the picture.

Paranoia plays an essential role in Conner’s work, coming to the fore in a series of black-and-white snapshots of a giant, disembodied eyeball that appeared on a TV in the artist’s hotel room late one night, as if it were watching his every move. On a more mundane but no less ominous level, a series of prints in a steel lockbox document Conner’s battle with the State of California over possession of his own fingerprints.

Hallucinatory beauty, painstaking repetition and mind-blowing devotion infuse the best pieces with a sharp edge of darkness. A grid of 494 tiny inkblots that resemble miniature Rorschach tests reads like an impossibly complicated acrostic: As your eye jumps from one lacy blot of ink to the next, your mind tries to register the minuscule differences and family resemblances among the myriad symbols.

Looking at these drawings is like trying to memorize the differences between snowflakes or fingerprints, a maddeningly Sisyphean task that causes something like a short-circuit in your brain. This is where Conner’s art is most compelling. Taking shape at perception’s farthest reaches, it plays--sometimes gracefully, sometimes menacingly--with the border where sense and nonsense bump into each other.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through July 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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N.Y. Collecting: As installed at the Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery, “Selections From the Robert A. Rowan Trust Collection” tells a pretty grim tale about collecting contemporary art in Southern California.

The largest part of the central gallery is given over to a particular strand of formalist abstraction made in New York in the 1960s. Huge canvases by Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis and Frank Stella are almost charming for their vacuous beauty. Since these guys worked in seemingly endless series, very similar examples of their acrylics on canvas can be seen in almost every major museum in the country.

Smaller, more recent works by Californians (including only two women) and a pair of Europeans are consigned to three narrow hallways and the space behind a free-standing wall in the main gallery. A third of these pieces are watercolors, drawings, etchings and other works on paper--media that rank far beneath paintings-on-canvas in the traditional hierarchy.

If this exhibition is representative of Rowan’s larger collection, it exemplifies a problem common to California collectors: Too often, they look to New York for prestige and validation, slighting what’s in their own back yard.

* Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (818) 396-2244, through July 9. Closed Mondays.