Recycled Imagery

“Assembled Allegories,” the three-woman show at the Platt Gallery, is a good primer on how art based on found objects can be done subtly without sentiment or cheap tricks.

Each artist brings her own materials and agenda to the practice of ushering concrete objects into artistic concepts. A nicely varied impression of the medium emerges from the twisted nostalgia and dark echoes in Annemarie Rawlinson’s work, Eva Kolosvary-Stupler’s carefully reordered chaos and the deceptive polish of Joan Vaupen’s art, which is literally contained under glass houses.

Rawlinson, who grew up under stressed conditions in Austria during World War II, shows pieces that reek of compromised innocence. The theme is emphasized in the recurring motif of dolls in strained, unnatural settings.

In “Transformation,” a doll is tied to a rusty metal framework while doll heads share cages with scraps of integrated circuit boards in “Isolation.”

Vintage family photos appear as happy standards against which life’s tragedies and disappointments are weighed. “After the Wedding” combines a photo and a black dress draped over a chair, and “My Heritage” blends a photo with trinkets, sewing paraphernalia and German text. The Holocaust, though never directly referred to, seems around the corner in these memory-based images.

Kolosvary-Stupler has more interpretation in her work, avoiding explicit references but creating powerfully evocative pieces from trash. Dolls, those lifeless yet emotion-packed objects, also figure organically in her art. “Self” finds a doll with a chest of drawers--a repository of memories and meaning--in her midsection and worm-like yellow strands for hair.

She likes funky materials but imposes disarming organization on them, from the careful symmetry of “Twins” to the balanced pile of elements on an old wooden tripod in “Victor.” “Muse” is a doll, cute yet creepy, with a violin body and fuzzy mop of hair.

Vaupen’s neatnik art initially looks to be the tidiest of the lot, but her messages are the most stringent, sometimes to a fault.

She thinks small, arranging imagery and objects such as stacked cigarettes into small arched glass houses perched on pedestals. The “Little Houses” series appears delicate and cute but takes on big issues.

“Smoke House, Hollywood Men/Women” targets the noxious glamour of smoking movie stars, and “Ice House-DeBeers” combines the opulence associated with the diamond trade with minute images of indigenous diamond-mine workers slaving under shabby work conditions.

Visual elegance implodes on itself in “House Afire (L.A. Insurrections/Riots)” and “PowerHouse America,” which deals with the toll exacted by atomic testing and the dark aspects of nuclear power.

Vaupen seems to understand instinctively that her pointed messages are invested with greater power because of their fragile scale, which forces us into close-up scrutiny.

But there also is a direct, physical link to the real-world ills they indict.

BE THERE

“Assembled Allegories,” through Feb. 11 at the Platt Gallery, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. Hours: Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. (310) 476-9777, Ext. 203.