Visions of Heaven and Earth From the Rev. Ethan Acres

The Rev. Ethan Acres doesn’t care if it rains or freezes, as long he’s got a plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of his car. Or, in the case of his provocative new exhibition of sculpture at Patricia Faure Gallery, a silver-painted fiberglass Jesus, who sports a flaming red Sacred Heart and rides the green hood of a Cadillac like a surfboard out on the gallery’s patio. (Don’t miss the evangelical fish decals attached to each side of the hood.) “Sweet Chariot,” as the outdoor work is titled, swings low.

In “Virgin of the Hood,” a baby blue Virgin of Guadalupe is affixed to a wall-mounted, flame-licked baby blue Cadillac hood. “RapTure” sends a winged and gilded gerbil heavenward from its earthly cage, where its going-nowhere exercise wheel stands notably idle. “Donny & Marie” blends the pop duo into a single two-headed ice skater--shades of Salt Lake City--made from crocheted yarn; he-she executes a figure-eight, symbol of eternal life, and invokes an apocryphal text about how the union of male and female will open the door to the kingdom of heaven.

Acres is a practicing minister, as well as an artist. The musical allusions in his new work--country music, Virgin Records, urban rap, pre-teen pop--link an aural form of celebration, familiar to Protestant liturgy, with visual art, which is mostly alien to that tradition. The unexpected union is what gives Acres’ work its punch. It crystallizes in a startling, four-part, hand-crocheted wall piece in which Peter Criss, Gene Simmons and the other members of the heavy-metal band KISS undergo suitably satanic transformations. Simmons’ body, for example, morphs into an apple-wielding serpent, which seems appropriate for a fellow with such a notorious flicking tongue.

The multi-genre musical ensemble ignites a “Dancing Jesus” and “Dancing Satan” at opposite ends of the main gallery. These two monumental figures, each 11 feet tall, are made from the cylindrical advertising balloons attached to motorized blower-fans that you might find gesticulating wildly at a used-car lot. (Satan gets down in a funkier mode than the relatively wooden carpenter does.) Acres’ estimable work is selling joyfulness and exultation amid our veil of tears, and established pop practice offers a proven method.

Commercial culture and religion usually do not fare too well in today’s art world. More common are repulsive projects like “The Holy Artwork,” on view in Manhattan’s current Whitney Biennial, in which Berlin artist Christian Jankowski videotaped a spontaneous sermon by a San Antonio televangelist on the biblical meaning of creativity. Sophisticated audiences at the Upper Eastside art museum get to snicker at the rubes.

Acres’ art is certainly funny, but it’s also without irony. The result makes its generous invocation of faith both radical and, to some, downright incomprehensible.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 449-1479, through May 11. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Animated Sculpture Has the Last Laugh

As self-portraits go, a new animated sculpture by Daniel J. Martinez is altogether unique. Savvy in its take on a dilemma of art today, shameless in its self-indulgent posing and careful in its theatrical craftsmanship, the sculpture, titled “happiness is over-rated”, is not easily forgotten.

At the Project, Martinez has built a pure white room that functions as an integral element of the figurative sculpture contained within. The figure, dressed in blue workman’s clothes, kneels in a corner with its back to the entrance. Made from silicon over fiberglass it’s stunningly lifelike, in the manner of trompe l’oeil sculptures by Duane Hansen or John D’Andrea, right down to the blue veins glimpsed beneath translucent skin and the two-day stubble on the chin. Unlike theirs, though, this animated sculpture invokes the entertaining “audio-animatrons” at Disneyland.

With the hiss of pneumatically driven air, the kneeling worker raises first one hand, then the other, bringing each in turn down across the opposite wrist. Razorblades are clutched in each hand, in a ritual act of mock-suicide. The head tilts back, the mouth falls open and Grand Guignol laughter echoes through the white-cube chamber. It’s over in less than a minute--then starts again.

The artist as a worker who ritualistically drains his lifeblood for the amusement of the gallery audience is a staple of Modern art. (Think of Antonin Artaud or the peintres maudits--cursed artists--like Amedeo Modigliani.) Here, the visual kick comes from the sharp disjunction between the incredible simulation of the figure and its herky-jerky mechanism, which makes fun of special effects. There’s a bracingly manic, obsessive quality to this otherwise earnest sculpture, which is pointedly adrift in its idealized white space.

The Project, 962 E. 4th St., (213) 620-0692, through May 18. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Sillman Celebrates Struggle and Wonder

Amy Sillman draws with paint, often on rough pastel fields of color laid on the canvas (or sometimes board) in coarse, thinly painted but heavily worked layers. The figurative drawings are shaggy and can be difficult to read.

Are those tall, skinny red lines a pair of legs rising into a cloud, like a kid’s-eye view of an adult? Is that a thought balloon emerging from the profile of a woman? What are those odd creatures amid the people lined up in a queue? Sillman’s images aren’t declarative; instead they have the chewed-over look of ruminations.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the Brooklyn artist’s first area solo exhibition brings together 10 paintings notable for their dreamy insouciance. Blots of smeared color assert themselves as equal in stature and significance to recognizable objects. Episodes of violence look cartoonish--intense, impermanent and unreal. The occasional animal--a bright-eyed fox, a bemused bird--adds the quality of a fable. Sillman’s tableaux seem ripe with narrative possibilities as yet unspoken.

Some of the most charming paintings are also the smallest--unframed canvases barely a foot on a side. A curled-up creature floats in a pea-green sea beneath a blue sailboat; a reclining boy appears to be held down by the weight of a giant head; a figure lies crumpled in a heap, as if the air had been let out of his body. Struggle and wonder go together in these works, in both the imagery and the way the paintings are made. It makes for a potent combination.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-2117, through April 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Theatrical Views of George Mallory

With just the sparest of sculptural materials, Carmine Iannaccone manages to evoke a sense of emptiness, precarious instability and dead weight in his small solo exhibition at Post. Inspired by photographs of the frozen body of mountain climber George Mallory, who famously perished during an attempt to conquer Mt. Everest 78 years ago, Iannaccone’s three sculptures are theatrical abstractions. They lodge themselves between ethereal remoteness and insistent physical presence.

The most convincing is “Mallory’s Shoulder,” a tall white wall with a notch cut from the top left corner. Set a foot or so in front of the white gallery wall, like a stage set, this second wall supports a chunky block of rough-hewn, partially painted Douglas fir. The shape of the carved block, which is balanced in the notch, evokes a mountain range. It’s both far away and tangible, simultaneously an image and an object. This odd duality extends as well to the stage-set wall.

Iannaccone does less well with a heavily framed drawing in magenta acrylic and black ink, which describes a celestial phenomenon (like an aurora borealis) above a striated sea. By contrast, the sculptures take advantage of a physical inertia that gives their subtle pictorial allusions a commanding heft.

Post, 1904 E. 7th Place, downtown L.A., (213) 622-8580, through May 13. Closed Sunday through Wednesday.