‘Clip Ons’ Collection Attaches Itself to Wonders of Nature

These days it’s an uncommon pleasure to encounter art like that in Otis Gallery’s “Nancy Evans: Clip Ons.” Some dozen paintings and tabletop sculptures on view at the school’s still-new Westchester campus reveal the L.A. artist in possession of unusual poetic resonance refreshingly unburdened by any politically correct agenda.

Most of the dozen works were made since 1995, with a few slightly older pieces to provide context. The exhibition, organized by Otis gallery director Ann Ayres, at first strikes one as a piquant combination of the minimal and the exotic couched in the language of the everyday. The backgrounds of Evans’ works, for instance, read partly as informal hard-edge abstractions, but they’re more convincingly seen as enlarged sections of kitchen tablecloth.

The homey suggestion is reinforced by the “clip-ons” of the title. These are cut-out shapes of familiar things, like flowers and fruit, made of colored, heat-shaped Plexiglas. They’re often greatly enlarged over normal size and simplified like cartoons or punk-style plastic junk jewelry.

A work like “Still Life” immediately broadcasts an aura of cheeky Carmen Miranda camp that one might expect to find attached to a bright young adolescent girl with a funky sense of style. The amusing implications of all that almost immediately fuse with something a little wistful, disappointed and even sinister. The double reading comes in part from Evans’ extremely sophisticated use of subdued color. She manages combinations as unexpected as a jazz musician playing an oboe. The work is nothing if not layered.

“Still Life” depicts a stylized bunch of grapes, a sprig of cherries, a pear and a banana. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to recognize the latter pair as symbolizing female and male principles. But what Evans manages to do with her simple means is quite extraordinary. Between the stand-ins for boy and girl she interposes the sprig of cherries. They carry their usual implication of virginity, but they are also arranged to suggest the pendulum of a ticking clock. The evocation of time gels the work into a rumination on loss of innocence and a sense of dallying too long at the fair. I found myself unexpectedly reminded of both Joan Didion and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

More youthful romantic lyricism appears in works like “Promise.” Achieving this much with means that amount to a kind of visual haiku would be enough to ask of any artist. But Evans’ understanding clearly runs deeper and broader than the shallows of engaging narcissism.

She engages all of nature with an intuitive sweep that takes in the origins of the planet and the life it sustains. An earlier work called “Vera Cruz” is a pure abstraction of tropical turquoise and fuchsia marked by a proliferation of oozing, gelatinous shapes. The more recent “Petal Table” is a field of fallen blossoms that somehow also suggests a mass of moths smashed against a windshield. Both works address the random, tireless, ruthlessness of nature’s experimentation. “Lattice” makes an optical illusion suggesting the artist is hip to new views of nature expressed in theories of fractal geometry and plate tectonics.

In “Strawberry,” Evans juxtaposes the sleek, seductive outer skin of the fruit with its visceral interior. It’s an unmistakable contemplation of humankind’s self-congratulatory self-image set in comparison with the bags of guts we really are.

As with any authentic poet, there’s no trace of a notion that Evans has any ax to grind about the fact that we are fragile creatures bobbing around in the cosmic soup. She recognizes it, eloquently reminds us of our estate, forgives our foolishness and stands--as we all should--in a state of wonder.

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Otis Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 9046 Lincoln Blvd., Westchester, through May 3, closed Saturday and Sunday, (310) 655-6905.