Figurative Females

Art tends to come in odd shapes and scales and with unusual attitudes in the Brand Library’s spacious Skylight Gallery.

While a recent exhibition of Connie Mississippi’s various wooden creations was arranged in the form of an artful, surreal garden with allusions to art history and the processes of nature, the individual works making up Terry Lenihan’s current show are far more homogenous in design and execution.

Welcome to the peculiar parade that is Lenihan’s subtle yet audacious installation, “Forty Ladies.”

The ladies in question are extra-tall sculptural figures made of dress patterns, held firm by metal wire frames and grounded in concrete blocks.

For comic effect, the tips of dress shoes protrude from the blocks.

They fill the gallery in a sight at once ominous and goofy, something out of a fashion designer’s fever dream.

Placed in the gallery with an eye for arrhythmic choreography, they affect the visitor’s relationship with the gallery’s space, depending on vantage point.

There’s also the question of the figures’ function: Are they dancing or milling about like socialite zombies or marching through space like a ghost brigade of transitory figures that never quite made it to the final fashion manifestation as garments?

The imagination reels, and that’s part of the point in a conceptual artwork blessed with pleasant shock value and ambiguous intentions.

On view in the Brand’s Atrium Gallery are pieces in Barbara Kolo’s “Black and White Series” of “portraits” of hibiscus flowers, their erratic, crinkly folds suggesting sexuality and aging.

In Kolo’s artistic world, a blossom is not just a blossom.

BE THERE

Brand Library Skylight Gallery, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale, presents Terry Lenihan’s “Forty Ladies” and Barbara Kolo’s “Black and White Series” through April 17. Open Tuesday and Thursday 1-9 p.m., Wednesday 1-6 p.m., Friday and Saturday 1-5 p.m. Call (818) 548-2051.