‘Metamorphosis’ Aims to Fuse Art, Craft

The muse of Los Angeles art has been a creature determined to harmonize contradiction. She’s struggled to find ways to do everything from joining advanced thinking to traditional form to fusing aesthetic purity with social utility. A small exhibition at the California African-American Museum finds L.A. artist Michele Houston in pursuit of these elusive goals.

Titled “Metamorphosis,” the show marks Houston’s gallery debut and the results of her participation in the museum’s six-month residency program, “Perspectives in African-American Art.” The program acts to encourage emerging talent.

Houston didn’t start life as an artist. She earned a degree in business and had a career in banking. Shifting to public school teaching, she drifted relentlessly toward the arts, returning to school at 39 and earning a degree at Otis College of Art and Design last year.

She styles herself a mixed-media artist. It may be a little more accurate to see her as one who practices in various artistic categories. The exhibition includes her illustrations for a traditional Jewish fairy tale, “The Wonderful Healing Leaves,” and a copper sculpture, “Evolution,” that resembles an unfolding tube. A graphic collage called “Juxtaposition” depicts a homeless man huddled under the show window of a fancy couturier boutique. “Study for an Exhibit” is a somewhat puzzling exercise in which the Park Plaza Hotel is equated with the floor plan of a Romanesque church.

Taken together, all this demonstrates a fecund range of potential expressive avenues but is otherwise inconclusive. By contrast, it’s clear that most of Houston’s effort has gone into six fully realized pieces of furniture, hand-carved and beautifully finished.

The artist says her work is internally inspired by the female archetypes, earth, moon and ocean. Externally she is attracted to such varied sources as Japanese craft, Shaker furniture and African drum-makers, which feed her work not only formally but philosophically.

Asian influence is clear in the low-profile curved legs and softened edges of her cherrywood “Shinto Table” as well as in her fiber board “Terra.” It’s a small storage box with hinged panels and myriad little compartments and drawers.

Two chairs do theme-and-variation on the classic Shaker ladder-back. Houston’s white oak “Butterfly Chair” curves the Shaker’s horizontal members so they create wing-like shapes. They’re upholstered in soft green Ultrasuede, as is the seat. “Chrysalis Chair” refines the idea further in Honduras mahogany and a seat of nylon chord.

The single piece suggesting an African source is “Alchemy.” A small two-tiered side table with a top drawer, it’s armored with tesserae of nailed brass.

So much said, it’s important to note than none of the work feels particularly derivative. The ensemble is subsumed in a postmodern sleekness modified by the softening aura of loving attention to finish and detail.

The work is bound to waft anybody interested in larger reverberations back a century to the heyday of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Pasadena. Houston’s Asian influence makes a direct link to the Craftsman tradition without emulating its look. Conceptually, however, her model has the same elements--a desire to metamorphose craft into art and connect it to a set of ideals.

* California African-American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park; through Jan. 11, closed Mondays, (213) 744-7432.