Sculptors’ Works in Metal and Wood Shun Medium’s Norms

The three sculptors who share the spotlight in “Sculptural Rhythms,” at the Platt Gallery, all embrace their mediums while pushing away from sculptural norms. They don’t take for granted the alternative possibilities of their mediums.

Soonja Oh Kim happily works in an aesthetic that’s between painting and sculpture, two- and three-dimensions, and between geometric rationality and a looser, more intuitive mode of expression. These works hang on the wall like paintings and refer to the color field and minimalist schools of thought borrowed from painting.

With the pieces in this show, her chosen geometric template is the square, writ large and mostly in aluminum. But then, all manner of variations takes place within that setting: She fits squares within squares and contrasts colors and textures to give the works their rhythm and tension.

The cool, weathered look of the metal is offset further by solid-colored bands of black and red acrylic paint. In some pieces, the square is broken up, fragmented in various ways. “In Affection” is half metal, with the other half of the square divided into black and red rectangles. The red section has a wavy, warped surface, as if depicting wave phenomena found in nature.

In “Black With Rectangle,” the metal section leaves a large square hole, into which a smaller black rectangle is snugly fitted. The visual relationship, of one form encasing another, seems to change the role of one component to the other, transforming the outer square into a frame. This work is, on some level, art about art, exploring the ways in which we look at and define art, but managing to avoid being lost in cerebral issues. It also has its own inherent visual allure.

Connie Mississippi’s sculptures are made from wood, but are in varying stages of transformation from their source material. Sometimes the transformative process is the message, as with “Female Torso,” halfway between a figure and a log. Key sections have been refined and finished, suggesting clothing, while other sections still retain their bark.

Bark is also an important element with “Tree Columns,” in which logs have been turned on a lathe, subject to the machinery of civility.

“Emerging” is a pod-like piece of plywood, on the floor, partly darkened by burning--another form of imposed metamorphosis. “Bone in the Road” is a hatbox-shaped piece made of laminated and turned Baltic Pacific plywood, set on its side and hinting that a soft kick would send it rolling.

Mississippi challenges the conventional definition of sculptures as inert, cultural artifacts, forcibly altered by the artist from their material, physical origins. She never forgets whence her art comes, in a tangible sense.

Wood is also the chosen sculptural putty for Pat Warner, also showing here. Raised in rural Pennsylvania, the artist shows work that reveals a close affinity with natural processes. It also celebrates the pliability and innate beauty of her source material.

Unlike Mississippi, though, she makes pieces that are less wood-referential than they are allusive to other life forms. Spindly tendrils of wood are often attached to a host structure, sometimes suggesting bug life--as in “Worm Mound,” “Result (as a Spider),” and the centipede-like “Result (#7).” Elsewhere, the artist fashions wood works that mimic other types of vegetation, as in “Bulb With Sprouts.”

In another corner, we find the invitingly bizarre miniature landscape of “Quartered With Well.” Sharp, twisting sticks of graduating heights are situated in what could be viewed as almost ritualistic rows, radiating out from the central form of a well. Echoes of Stonehenge and other ostensibly supernatural phenomena can be detected, as can the sculptor’s general interest in the referential--and rhythmic--properties of simple, found materials in sculpture.

BE THERE

“Sculptural Rhythms,” through April 26, Platt Gallery, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sunday-Thursday; 10 a.m.-2 p.m., Friday. (310) 476-9777, Ext. 203.