Art Review : ‘Altars’: Contemplating Religion and Art

Recent years have seen a massive revival of basic religious longings. They probably never really went away. Thoughtful people have long seen modern art as a religious surrogate. That means there is nothing particularly new about the shape and feel of the current exhibition at the Pasadena Armory for the Arts--except its title, “Altars.”

A few years back this show certainly would have borne some more secular designation involving words like Assemblage or Installation. Being frank about the emotional wellspring of such art invites a different and illuminating sort of contemplation. For this we have to be grateful to the exhibition’s co-organizers, Armory director Jay Belloli and artist Stanley C. Wilson. The latter’s work is represented among the eight local artists on view.

The success of both art and religion hinge on belief. For either to work one needs to be convinced that they offer some magical insight into the mystery that is life. Roughly half the offerings here achieve this.

Sarah Perry is represented by half a dozen little wall objects. They might be more properly called reliquaries than altars, but why quibble? Perry works with the remains of small animals. She is at pains to point out in a posted statement that none was killed to be turned into art.

They’re fashioned with an exquisite delicacy and care that is persuasive of Perry’s belief that these are hallowed creatures. “The Sibyl’s Gift” is particularly affecting. In it the tiny snout of a kit fox appears amid a coil of dry cactus. It and most of the other objects hark back to animism, the primitive religious conviction that everything has a soul. In more everyday terms they convey that curious feeling most of us have had in contemplating animals. They seem to know something that would make us humans better if we learned it.

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By contrast, “Incantation” uses a rusted metal container as a kind of temple of evil. Inside hang human skeletons scarcely two inches high. Fashioned of almost microscopically small animal bones, they remind us that we are also animals. Animals, according to Perry, who live in a charnel house.

Poupee Boccaccio also works at miniature scale but to quite different effect. Her boxes evoke Mexican retablos. “Las Culebras Reliquary” includes a repeated motif, a vintage photograph of a kneeling little girl in a cupid costume complete with bow and arrow. The arrow of love takes on a new meaning because the child is surrounded by skeletons and dragons. Here the individual becomes the center of their own beleaguered religion.

Patssi Valdez’s altar is a life-size environment. Titled “Homage to the Feminine Spirit,” it happily fails to be gender-specific. Like a stage set, it centers on a pair of classical columns festooned with cherubs and dried plants. There is an inescapable allusion to the grandeur of the Catholic Baroque. In the center stands a stepped altar decorated with personal memorabilia. Above gurgles a soothing fountain.

Valdez’s colors are autumnal; the possibility of individual alienation in the vastness of life seems resolved. It’s a very mellowed, mature work.

So is Betye Saar’s “Memory of Fire.” It uses a dark service corridor as a ritual approach to another stepped altar. It bears many incantatory objects but all take second place to a “fire” made of flickering orange Christmas tree lights. This, indeed, is fire in memory, not consuming fact. The work is wise and a little wry.

The remaining four seem less devout and more humorous. Mildred Howard’s minimalist installation, “Madame Walker,” appears to be a send-up of women who make a religion out of going to the hairdresser. John Outterbridge’s “Spirit Shadows, Sacred Hymns, Lye Lie Soap, and Super Sweet Melon Slices” finds the whole notion of ritual slightly hilarious.

Kim Abeles has a cheerful time wondering what a dolphin would pack if he ran away from home. Wilson seems to get stuck between social activism and thoughts of a mother who won’t even let her leave home.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena through Sept. 3, closed Monday, Tuesday; (818) 792-5101.