These Trippy Sculptures Explore the Low-Tech Possibilities

At Louis Stern Fine Arts, Pol Bury’s free-standing fountains and kinetic wall sculptures convey a sense of futuristic optimism that is often associated with the clean-living 1950s and free-loving 1960s. At once corny and slick, sincere and trippy, the 77-year-old sculptor’s pieces look right at home in 1999, where they could be the long-lost ancestors of many works by younger artists also interested in stimulating the senses while inspiring the mind.

To see a picture of Bury’s fountains is nothing like seeing the real thing. In a photograph, “Seven Spheres in a Semi-sphere” resembles a high-tech component of a stainless-steel spacecraft or the heavy-duty egg of some intergalactic creature.

In person, though, the sculpture’s seven basketball-size pods move slowly, gradually filling with water and then awkwardly tipping forward to spill their contents into a pool. You can’t help but think of those spindly mechanical birds that sit atop desks and tip back and forth, apparently sipping water and leaning back to swallow it.

The sounds made by the simple motors enclosed in Bury’s shiny sculpture add to the impression that he is less interested in the possibilities offered by the latest technological developments than in the sputtering, clunky motions that often accompany the work of backyard tinkerers.

A low-tech, hand-crafted ethos likewise animates his wood reliefs, across whose polished surfaces spin marble-size orbs. Some of these spheres rotate steadily, moving at about the speed of a clock’s second hand. Others stop and start fitfully, as if their tiny motors didn’t have the power to maintain steady motion.

Still others move so slowly that you can’t be sure they’re not standing still. Even Bury’s static sculptures and works on paper evoke motion.

Two series of collages depict a painting by Mondrian and the Brooklyn Bridge as if each were reflected in the fountain’s orbs. Three other series, in paper, copper and steel, look like 3-D stop-action images of decks of cards being shuffled through space.

The pop cultural equivalent of Bury’s playful art might be a Slinky. In both, Space Age utopianism comes down to Earth, where it’s preserved as modest delight experienced before moving objects.

* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-0147, through Sept. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Lines of Communication: With great economy of means, Georgia Metz’s pair of 11-foot-long drawings fills Deep River Gallery with a sense of loss that swings, like a tragicomedy, between banality and poignancy. Depending upon your receptiveness, the young artist’s empty expanses of paper punctuated by four or five carefully rendered telephone poles give bold form to the annoyance of missed messages and unreturned calls, as well as to the more lasting sadness that results when more important communications break down.

Although no wires connect any of the telephone poles in Metz’s images, your mind’s eye immediately links them. Further scrutiny reveals that the poles don’t even occupy the same space. Not even the illusionistic magic of one-point perspective is able to bring all of them into one picture.

The longer you look, the more they begin to resemble calligraphic gestures. Floating in space, the disconnected poles invite viewers to fill in their own stories. Harking back to a time before cell phones, they recall long drives on country roads, where phone poles stood like silent sentinels.

They also stand as allegories of the exchanges that take place between viewers and works of art. Memorializing an era when phone calls were special occasions and a series of unanswered rings meant that no one was home and you’d just have to try again, Metz’s art quietly demonstrates that although drawing is even more old-fashioned than early telephone networks, it is still an effective mode of communication.

* Deep River, 712 Traction Ave., (213) 625-2958, through Sept. 12. Open Saturdays and Sundays.

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Statuesque: Not all that long ago, sculptors regularly insulted one another’s works by calling them statues. Ever since Jeff Koons, however, it has been all but impossible to pinpoint just what distinguishes a sculpture from a statue.

At China Art Objects Galleries, Ruby Neri’s life-size rendition of a female lion takes this tradition one step further. To call the young, L.A.-based artist’s painted sculpture a statue is to compliment its realism. With sources in picture books, cable TV’s the Nature Channel and Hollywood animatronics, Neri’s lioness refers to several worlds simultaneously.

Her seemingly simple piece thus suggests that contemporary Realism serves many masters at once. To make the solitary work in her L.A. solo debut, Neri first sculpted its form in clay, modeling it on photographs, anatomical drawings and her imagination. She then made a plaster cast, which she used as a mold for its final fiberglass version.

Painted in the manner of a black, white and gray paint-by-number kit, the lioness reclines on a two-part slab of plaster that has been painted lime green. True to its multiple sources, Neri’s sculpture looks as good in a gallery as it would on the lawn of a Beverly Hills mansion or in an image transmitted by computer.

* China Art Objects Galleries, 933 Chung King Road, (213) 613-0384, through Sept. 4. Closed Sunday, Mondays and Tuesdays.