Pondick’s ‘Dirthead’ Powerfully Depicts Grisly Effects of Mankind’s Evil History

The pluralism of the current art scene is not just a matter of coexisting diverse styles but also one of a vast range in scope. Nothing is too mundane for an artist’s consideration these days, and nothing’s too heady. One might trace stains on a sidewalk, another might reflect on the human condition. With traditional hierarchies of content looser than ever, each has an equal shot at the badge of credibility.

Rona Pondick’s two powerful installations at Patricia Faure Gallery fall near the big-picture extreme on the spectrum of possible concerns. They let loose an avalanche of thoughts about creation, purpose, destruction, nature, evil and history. Though they don’t refer to specific incidents, their intensely palpable presence grounds them in physical reality, and all too many actual episodes in history come to mind, especially with the installation Pondick calls “Dirthead.”

On a wedge of dry dirt that rises to about 4 feet, where it meets the far corner of the gallery, the New York-based artist has scattered several hundred small, dark, knobby objects that read instantaneously as both animal excrement and desiccated skulls. Each is roughly the size of a fist, lumpy and crudely formed, with cracked, dirt-encrusted surfaces.

What charges these odd deposits with unsettling power is the set of teeth each bares, sculpted of the same brown earth-wax-plastic blend as the rest of the form. The clenched jaws are the defining features of the tiny faceless heads, causing them to seem tortured, tense, pained. They read as the residue of disaster-massacre, famine or drought, and the abbreviated plain stands as a mass open grave.

It’s a desperate scene, bereft of life. Life here has turned to waste. The walls of skulls at the genocide museum in Tuol Sleng, Cambodia, come to mind, as do Holocaust photographs of heaps of emaciated bodies killed in concentration camps or mass executions. The lives represented by the skulls in Pondick’s work appear to have ended in unnatural ways, and yet genocide and starvation have recurred with such frequency in the last century that perhaps we should classify such deaths as natural after all.

This is the first U.S. showing of “Dirthead,” which was commissioned for the Johannesburg Biennial in 1997 and has been exhibited since in several other countries, eliciting strong response and varied interpretations in each context. Pondick has been mining the potency of that particular bulbous, toothed form in her sculptural work for more than a decade. Mildly grotesque from the start, its visceral charge lessens or intensifies depending on Pondick’s choice of materials, the setting she stages and the number of such objects she assembles.

In her other installation here, “Apple Tree” (2001), 40 of the head-like forms cast in stainless steel rest on a patch of living turf, as if just fallen from a leafless stainless steel tree. Now they are fruit--smoother, fuller, more seductive than the shapes in “Dirthead”--but the clenched jaws remain.

Are these poisoned apples, forbidden fruit or the sorry condition of civilization as a result of eating from that tree? The tree itself appears too pure and elegant to bear the blame. The burden rests, perhaps, more with the culture we choose than with nature, which births us, and here we are again, prompted by Pondick’s densely symbolic work, to ponder just where to draw the line between nature and culture, the pure and the polluted.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through May 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Deceptions of the Skin: The title of Larissa Wilson’s show at Newspace, “inside on the surface,” has all the compactness and internal contradiction that Wilson aspires to in her work but only rarely achieves. When she does, the effects are mildly tantalizing, teasing plays on the deceptions of the skin.

“Psychic Coelum,” for instance, presents as a benign, oddly glamorous shape, a bulging tube with a skin of shimmering, radiant light film that shifts from orange to fuchsia as you move around it. Lensed openings at either end allow views to see the inside of this organic cavity, which is lined with pale feathers and spiked with nails, their sharp ends pointing inward.

Clear plastic tubes (like fine cilia) meander through the inviting, threatening passage. Because the work’s bodily references lean toward the sexual, the act of peering within feels voyeuristic, even if driven by a vaguely scientific spirit of inquiry.

Unfortunately, an entirely different, far less provocative series of work makes up the bulk of Wilson’s show. The inside/outside dichotomy is certainly suggested in these life-size human figures, made of transparent packing tape--but only blandly. The figures, male and female, assume various unremarkable postures and are amended by other material--one is wrapped in vein-like red wire, another studded with blow-up valves like an inflatable toy--but their dominant trait is their hollowness, both literally and figuratively. They are clear shells that Wilson has endowed with neither captivating skins nor interesting contents.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 469-9353, through June 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Sensual and Spiritual Feast: The exhibition, “Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution,” currently at the L.A. County Museum of Art, includes five provocative photographs by Marta Maria Perez Bravo, all from the middle to late 1980s. At the Iturralde Gallery, two dozen more photographs by Perez Bravo bring us up to the present, complementing the LACMA appetizer with a full sensual and spiritual feast.

Her work is devotional at heart, each image a carefully constructed offering. The ultimate offering is the self. Perez Bravo’s own body factors into every staged vignette, as worshiper enacting a ritual, as site for worship or, seen in fragments, as symbolic object of worship itself.

In “Tres exvotos” of 1995, for instance, the artist’s arm, leg and knee float independently against the white space, fleshed-out versions of the tiny metal milagros commonly used in prayer in Latin America. In the recent series, “Los Componentes,” her arm reaches in from above to deposit a single bell, a cross or a tiny white church into a black, three-legged pot used in the syncretic Afro-Cuban religions of Santeria and Palo Monte.

Painting on her skin, caking it with something resembling mud and then incising lines into it or studding it with nails like a Kongo power figure, Perez Bravo forges a continuity between body and ritual object and, by extension, between ritual practice and everyday life. The tremendous power of that merging gives her images their physical and spiritual resonance, although the spirits she honors are unfamiliar. The work is lucid and intimate, even as it addresses the elusive and universal.

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* Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through May 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.