Fun-House Attitude

“Medium at Large,” the rollicking sculpture exhibition at the Finegood Gallery, is one of those shows that refuses to hang politely on the wall. Nor does it necessarily adhere to schools of curatorial thought where subtlety or cohesion rule. What it does offer is a diverse fun house of ideas, some more thoroughly conceptualized than others.

This is not wallflower art, and we get an early indication of that when we enter the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Center, where a few of Blossom Friel’s slapdash assemblage pieces are visible through the downstairs window.

These funky junk-art sculptures are concocted from wood scraps and can convey roughly figurative ideas, but mostly raw, brawny energy is the upshot.

It’s another aesthetic entirely in the back corner of the gallery, where Karen Frimkiss Wolff’s “Years as a Shadow” hangs from ceiling to floor, its circular bead showers containing echoes of summer-of-love kitsch and ephemeral shadows on the wall.

In Karen Coburn’s small, gangly wood and wax sculptures, figures materialize out of tree branches, metamorphosing from plant to animal life.

One of the most peculiar and impressive pieces in the show is Elaine Sherwood’s “Industrial Evolution,” a wonderfully kooky assemblage with an elephant and a rhino (invoking an old bad joke, what do you get when you mix an elephant and a rhino? Elephino). They gaze, bemusedly, at a rickety, function-challenged “machine,” cobbled from railroad ties and rusty gear, spinning in a gesture of futility, the rotten fruits of industrial know-how.

On more serious turf, religious themes enter into the exhibition. Dahli’s “Armageddon” with mad, thrashing horses in a compressed relief piece, and the 22 separate images in Sandy Bernstein’s colorful and elaborate woodcut “The Tree of Life” draw on comparisons between Tarot cards and the kabbala.

Amid all of the flashier provocations in the show, Robert Bassler’s works are relatively sedate in their seductively clean geometric forms, while also being imposing in scale. Suddenly validating the “Medium at Large” show title in a punning way, Bassler’s three large relief pieces take up one entire wall of the gallery. But they speak low, with their warm materials--wood, Masonite, convex mirrors--and comport themselves with a vaguely mystical persona.

BE THERE

“Medium at Large,” through June 18 at the Finegood Gallery, Bernard Milken Jewish Community Center, 22622 Vanowen St., West Hills. Gallery hours: Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (818) 716-1773.