The Spirit Shop: In a small, dark...

The Spirit Shop: In a small, dark room with walls painted pumpkin and chartreuse, Anna Homler has set up shop, a pseudo-apothecary that caters to the spirit more than the body. The L.A.-based performance and visual artist launched her “Pharmacia Poetica” project 10 years ago in the form of a radio play and storefront exhibition. It has since traveled widely, evolving, expanding and contracting according to the circumstances of each venue.

In its current incarnation in Dirt’s cozy exhibition space (a second room contains additional pieces, but is not continuous with the installation), Homler has pared down to the essentials--shelves of uniform bottles containing objects in colored solutions, glowing by the light of small, flickering candles. In the jars there are feathers, locks of hair, fragments of aquatic plants, roots and tubers, as well as a nest of magnetic recording tape, stalactites made of colored pegs, a collection of tiny wooden spools, a cluster of blank price tags on string.

A kitschy plug-in log fire flickers and whirs in one corner, a touch of postmodern irony casting shadows over the curandera’s den. “Pharmacia Poetica” works on the assumption--rather safe, but often overlooked--that the world as it stands could use some healing.

Homler applies a democratic hand to the process, proffering the organic and the manufactured, the primal with the artificial, injecting reason with a large dose of emotion. However modest her setup, Homler’s space feels charged with grand philosophical purpose.

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* Dirt, 7906 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 822-9359, through Dec. 6.