Pastor Giddily Embraces the Trashy Vernacular

Jennifer Pastor’s magnificent, eye-popping sculpture of five raucously decorated artificial Christmas trees, all engulfed in a catastrophic deluge of simulated water formed from shimmering sheets of clear plastic, is such a startling and beautiful image that you can hardly bear to take your eyes off it. Instantly, the sculpture sears itself into your memory.

When first shown at Richard Telles Fine Art 18 months ago--the sole object in the artist’s one-person gallery debut--the glittering cluster of surfing Christmas trees became perhaps the most talked-about work of the season. Many artists are interested in the malignant glamour of mass-culture excess, but Pastor pushed it to delirious heights of theatrical va-voom.

Pastor put the art back in artificial. Her show announced the sudden arrival of an exciting new artistic voice that we didn’t know we needed but now can’t imagine living without: a shopping mall Bernini.

Just in time for the holidays, the untitled Christmas tree sculpture is back, having been included in Pastor’s current “Focus” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s as dazzling and resonant as before, causing visions of demented sugarplums to dance in your head.

Yet not all the news is good. The piece has been paired with a newer Pastor sculpture that is something of a letdown. One of its four parts is haunted and mesmerizing, but the other three are disappointingly flat.

“The Four Seasons” is a long-standing subject for Western art, dating at least to the Middle Ages, but Pastor’s new piece is a decidedly contemporary use of the theme. Whatever religious or secular inflection the subject of life’s cyclical passage has had in the past, it is used here for what appear to be more structural reasons.

Like the preordained sequence of letters in the alphabet or the irreducible primaries on a scientific color wheel, the four seasons are not an invention by the artist. They are instead a given, a kind of “found subject” whose embellished articulation becomes the focus of artistic activity.

These “Four Seasons” are monumentalized emblems executed in a Pop manner. Making sculptures about the subject seems, for Pastor, rather like decorating a Christmas tree: representative of a communal ritual but also highly personal and idiosyncratic.

Pastor’s representation of “Spring” is a large, gray, astonishingly crafted moth, covered with thousands of delicate hairs and gently resting on a gallery wall. “Summer” is a group of three oversized seashells--two conchs and a scallop--scattered across the floor.

“Fall” is a tall stand of four stalks of corn--literally as high as an elephant’s eye--its golden ears similarly giganticized (and spooky). “Winter” is a small pair of snowy hillocks jutting out near eye-level from the wall, each dotted with a grove of six snow-covered evergreens.

The sculptures share something with the psychologically destabilizing work of Charles Ray, Pastor’s companion and former teacher. Their precarious shifts in scale--tiny trees, giant corncobs and, excuse me, but is that moth unusually huge or (even scarier thought) normal size?--make you feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland.

Like her holiday disaster sculpture of a Christmas flood, the “Four Seasons” is fabricated in glamorous synthetic materials and colors while drawing on a variety of pop culture conventions. The cheerfully perfect “Winter” hills look borrowed from a Hallmark greeting card, the mutant “Fall” corn seems like something Dorothy’s friend the Scarecrow might have tried to guard on the way to Oz.

In fact, the artifacts of popular culture are not merely sources in Pastor’s art; they’re competition for it. Most of the “Four Seasons” has plainly met its match.

Looking at the show makes you wonder too often why these particular objects are thought to be more compelling than those you encounter in the world every day. The “Summer” shells, all pink and smooth, seem merely mundane, like leftovers from a bathing suit display in a department store window or standard items in the prop-shop of a TV studio.

“Spring” is the one exception, a sculpture wholly different from Pastor’s remarkable Christmas trees in the adjacent gallery but the only one among the “Four Seasons” that even begins to approach it in terms of fascination. The moth is dazzlingly fabricated, and the delicate poise with which it seems to have alighted on the gallery wall makes you feel it might dart off and vanish at any moment.

A poignant, unusually apt fusion of beauty, ominousness and impending loss is powerfully condensed in “Spring.” The remaining seasons are variously inert.

If the MOCA show, which was jointly organized by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, might be said to be an unfortunate example of too much, too soon (Pastor is just 30 and hasn’t yet made much work), it nonetheless contains remarkable evidence of an unusually gifted artist. Pastor’s strength can be found in her sculptures’ giddy embrace of the trashy vernacular of contemporary life. Likewise, though, that vernacular is her art’s biggest threat.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through March 2. Closed Mondays.