Driftwood’s a Medium for 2 Different Messages

Driftwood, the “found object” that makes up much of the art currently at the Orlando Gallery, departs from the typical topography of found-art sculpture, the world where old toilets or crumpled Coke cans are viable artistic putty. For one thing, these materials are gathered during walks on the beach instead of urban scavenging hunts.

Pieces of driftwood are nature’s detritus, castoffs whose ultimate beauty and sculptural appeal depends on the ravages of physical abuse. A piece of driftwood is both a concrete, natural object and the product of an ephemeral process. What better testament to the powers of metamorphosis?

That history and symbolic potential is not lost on either Edie Ellis Brown or Lynne Westmore, both of whom, though working in disparate directions in terms of subject and attitude, make key use of driftwood in their work.

Ellis Brown, in her exhibit “Sticks and Clay and Books,” constructs animals and mock-marionette puppets from chunks of driftwood, carefully fitted and assembled in puzzle-like fashion. These hanging sculptures convey a charming naivete but can also come across as a bit spooky--gnarled, disfigured characters hanging by a thread.

Her clay pieces are unpretentious sculptural miniatures on a shelf. Into some she incorporates tiny bits of driftwood. All have a similar, almost childlike innocence. Her books of drawings and paintings, too, are of a piece--simple sketches inspired by models of Native Americana and African art.

Taken as a whole, her show evokes a palpable longing for the direct, intuitive nature of folk art, fashioned from scraps and images from a less culture-cluttered, info-glutted world. In other words, she envies the quality of driftwood.

Westmore’s artistic process is more complex, as is her frame of reference. Her works have an edge of gothic intensity, in which haunted or horrific ceramic faces seem to ooze out of driftwood like apparitions breaking free from one material plane to another.

We get a broader understanding of the artist’s intent from the exhibition title, “Venice, Florence and Other Personal Journeys.” A closer look at these sometimes seemingly ghoulish sculptures reveals the sly machinations of an artist taking an unusual approach to religious art, as handed down from European art history. Westmore brings these familiar religious subjects into a context both contemporary and primitive--an air of ritual hovers in the gallery.

Three altar-like frames of driftwood house Madonnas as grim, hooded figures that look as haunted as they do beatific. Evil is up against good, and demons antagonize angels and mortals--as in “Falling From Grace,” in which Lucifer clings to a tree while a figure plummets into an abyss. In “Judas Hid While the Marys Waited,” the traitor cowers, in the shadow of the Madonna, in triplicate.

Through it all, Westmore’s canny use of driftwood as a foundation for her religious micro-dramas is telling. It is the gnarly stuff of nature in an afterlife.

* Edie Ellis Brown and Lynne Westmore, through March 29 at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks; (818) 789-6012.

Nature Revisited, Part 2: Natalie Sehn’s vivid, mysterious photographs, hanging at the Eclectic Cafe Gallery, take a strange path en route to portraying nature. Using a process of photo manipulation, which results in what she calls “Natagrams,” the artist attempts to get under the skin of vegetable life and foliage, the building blocks of her art.

The influence of surrealist Man Ray’s experimental photographs is apparent in Sehn’s work. But she’s after something wholly different here, with dense, darkly colored scenes, which nicely jostle the viewer’s bearings.

Because of Sehn’s abstract, spatially distorting technique, we’re never quite sure what we’re looking at. Patterns and specific details suggest plants and objects from the real world, but they are transformed into something alien and extra-iridescent, like plants from another planet. Pleasant disorientation is the upshot.

Rex Bullington’s photographs, also at the cafe, are something completely different--gentle-spirited images from travels and everyday observations. He’s coming from the humanistic, Henri Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment” school, but with heart-on-the-sleeve sentimentality.

* Photographs by Natalie Sehn and Rex Bullington, running indefinitely at the Eclectic Cafe Gallery, 5156 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood; (818) 783-6209.