Art Review

Big Messages: Alison Saar’s new sculptural figures, on view at Jan Baum Gallery, have tremendous physical presence. Carved of wood and painted or sheathed in small patches of hammered, patinated copper, they are easy to relate to, body to body, yet impossible to access, eye to eye. By leaving their eyes unarticulated under shadowing brows, Saar endows the figures with an interiority, a sense of self-possession that resonates well with the larger themes of spirituality, race, power and culture that she has engaged over the years in a stunning, continually evolving body of work.

Where Saar previously has suggested an interior life through an actual window or door set into a figure’s chest, the bodies here are intact, solid. The assemblagist’s tendency toward accretion is now restrained, but no less potent.

One figure, about half life-size and suspended from the ceiling, stands upright, sturdy and muscular, hands in fists at her sides, as dignified as an ancient Egyptian statue. Her chiseled skin is painted white, but her twin/mirror image/shadow, who is joined to her upside-down, sole to sole, is black. Together they hang like still and solemn acrobats, at once co-conspirators, co-dependents and polar opposites, flip sides of a single coin.

Hair assumes a special significance in this recent work--hair as a source of beauty, seduction, spiritual power or the bane of a woman’s day. In “Delta Doo,” twigs capped in “spirit bottles” sprout from a figure’s smooth skull. In “Chaos in the Kitchen,” Saar buries keys, bones, scissors, toy figures, a horseshoe and a cross in the stiff, wiry coils of a woman’s hair. In the breathtaking “Delta Blues,” a portrait of poignant self-absorption, a copper-clad woman kneels, her head cocked to one shoulder, while her hair streams from her head in a single thick, heavy rope and wraps itself around her with all the grace of absent love.

*

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through June 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.