Getting at Secrets Under Our Skin

Sarah Perry and Peter Zokosky are Los Angeles artists whose sculptures and paintings take viewers beneath the surfaces of things. At Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery, a pair of solo exhibitions juxtaposes Perry’s assemblages with Zokosky’s oils on canvas and panel, revealing similarities that are more than skin deep and differences that are even more profound.

Perry scours the desert for her materials, gathering the sun-bleached bones of birds, reptiles and mammals along with the rusty remnants of boom-and-bust ghost towns. She finds many of her best materials in “cough balls,” small clumps of fur and bones regurgitated by predatory owls.

With the patience of a field biologist, she collects the delicate skeletal remains of hundreds of rodents, amphibians and lizards. With the fastidiousness of a dentist, she cleans their ivory surfaces until they appear to be illuminated from within. And with the orderliness of an accountant, she sorts them according to shape, size and condition.

Then things get interesting. Inspired by Surrealism, which insists that reality consists of many layers (both visible and invisible), Perry glues and bolts together the bones, often combining them with other organic substances and man-made objects to make sculptures that seem to have originated in a world where dreams and nightmares overlap.

Titled “The Pull of the Moon,” her show features 16 works that range from the miniature to the monumental. The biggest, a 9-foot-tall sculpture shaped like a 1950s toy rocket ship, is not the best.

Made entirely of leg bones and jawbones of horses and cattle, “Beast of Burden” looks better in reproduction than it does in the flesh. Although Perry has composed these distinctive parts of the animals’ skeletons in a dynamic pattern, the nuts and bolts that protrude from each component diminish the overall effect. Up close, the lacy gracefulness of the spaceship’s streamlined silhouette gives way to jerry-built, earthbound clunkiness.

The strongest works are the smallest, which are also the most fragile. All are made of bones so tiny they make toothpicks look like hefty chunks of lumber. Think of Perry as a misfit hobbyist who has taken her obsession to the next level, and you’ll have an idea of the patient labor her art embraces.

The piece from which the show takes its title is a spiral staircase that wraps around a webbed column as it rises out of a pile of extremely fine bones. In other tabletop and wall-mounted works, Perry fashions a swirling funnel cloud, a beehive-shaped shelter and a circular configuration so wispy it has the presence of a spider web. Devotion to detail and painstaking dedication are also embodied by Zokosky’s 15 paintings and two bronze sculptures, which transform the rear gallery into something that resembles the odd offspring of a natural history museum and an old-fashioned portrait hall.

The centerpiece, “Three Graces,” depicts a nude young woman with her left arm thrown over the shoulder of a skeleton and her right arm wrapped around the waist of a skinless figure whose underlying musculature is fully exposed. All three stand in a sun-dappled meadow, their relaxed postures and contented expressions suggesting that nothing is out of the ordinary. In Zokosky’s talented hands, an emblem of idealized beauty from the classical era merges with a sobering memento mori from the Renaissance to become a modern meditation on our place in the ongoing cycle of life and death.

Titled “The Nature of Being,” his exhibition includes two tabletop bronzes, “Flayed Figure I” and “Flayed Figure II.” At once dignified and comical, these men, like all of Zokosky’s figures, insist that humor is both an essential part of humanity and a useful tool for coming to grips with our mortality.

A less engaging series shows the skeletons of monkeys climbing trees and the skeleton of a camel standing before the great pyramids. Although clever, the ideas these images illustrate are more interesting than the works themselves.

In contrast, Zokosky’s picture of a sheep walking on its hind legs is so silly and endearing you have to be pretty hard-hearted not to be touched by its pathos. His portraits of monkeys, chimpanzees and hominids build on this sentiment. In three-quarter profile and set against dark backgrounds, “Bonobo,” “Amanda,” “Jeffery” and “Habilis” wear expressions so sensitive and complex it’s hard not to regard them as human. Embodying trust, sweetness, self-conscious awkwardness and wise resignation, they steal the show.

Zokosky’s paintings of potatoes that resemble human faces and his image of a root shaped like a headless person invite viewers to extend their sympathies beyond the animal kingdom and into the vegetal realm. Although it’s easy to understand the sentiments that motivate these works, they are too goofy to take too seriously. But you still can’t dismiss them.

As a pair, Perry and Zokosky’s exhibitions play off of one another nicely. Where the first turns inward to a world of disembodied dreams, the latter leads us out of our bodies, into a world filled with just as much wonder and a little more absurdity. *

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“THE PULL OF THE MOON” and “THE NATURE OF BEING,” Laband Art Gallery, 1 Loyola Marymount University Drive, Los Angeles. Dates: Wednesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturdays, noon-4 p.m. Through Nov. 17. Phone: (310) 338-2880.