‘New Works’ Show Reopens the Pasadena Armory

Nine months ago, Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts closed its doors to the public. As the building was being renovated, 11 artists were commissioned to create works for its new-and-improved galleries. Last weekend, the art center reopened with “New Works, New Spaces,” a hodgepodge of sculptural installations highlighting the architectural features of a redesigned interior that integrates classrooms, studios, offices and galleries in a dynamically balanced whole.

The least interesting pieces illustrate the obvious. Atop the two skylights in the curved roof, Jane Mulfinger has laid out two rows of secondhand clothing, one blue, the other red. Although her installation calls attention to the skylights, it prevents them from doing their job: bathing the other works in Southern California sunshine.

Tamara Fites has transformed a narrow back gallery (which was once the National Guard’s ammunition vault) into what appears to be a storage room for the leftovers from numerous yard sales. The tarnished household items that fill Fites’ floor-to-ceiling racks are props from her previous performances that visitors are invited to take with them. Not only is it difficult to imagine anyone wanting any of this musty stuff, it’s simple-minded to think that the most interesting things viewers take away from an exhibition can be carried in their hands.

Rather than messing with the form and function of their surroundings, Lisa Yu’s 23 ceramic vessels and Marsia Alexander-Clarke’s 12-monitor video-installation complement the spaces they were made for. Glazed white, Yu’s 3-foot-tall urns line the walls of a square, ceiling-less gallery. Shrouded in the darkness of a fully enclosed gallery, Alexander-Clarke’s piece blocks out the competition in order to draw you into its repetitious rhythms.

Although both works offer conventional interludes from the chaos of everyday life, they have the presence of classroom demonstrations, directed exercises whose primary purpose is to emphasize the adaptability of the Armory’s new spaces. All but one of the remaining pieces take the form of networks, clusters of interconnected components to which additional elements may be logically and imaginatively added, as time and space allow.

For example, Lynn Aldrich has bundled together hundreds of 6-foot-long garden hoses and PVC pipes, forming what appears to be a single cross-section of an enormous circulatory system. There’s nothing in her work’s form or materials that requires her to stop where she has, in either size or number. Such arbitrariness is dissatisfying.

Similarly, Geoff Allen’s sculptural relief, which sprawls across 20 feet of the wall and towers 12 feet overhead, is made of dozens of lacy, pretzel-shaped spills of high-end plaster mixed with gypsum. Adorned with cartoon eyeballs and the textures of prefabricated parts for dollhouses and model dioramas, each fragile, pastel-tinted cast is a universe unto itself. Big simply because it can be, Allen’s painterly abstraction is unnecessarily repetitive.

Size does not detract from Enrique Martinez Celaya’s sculpture of an enormous elk sitting on its haunches on the gallery floor before a boy who stands with bowed head. Tarred and feathered, the life-size figures are linked by their predicament, which elicits both sympathy and humor. But Celaya spoils the simplicity of his piece by including four huge photographs of the boy and the elk in various settings. Conceptually, this transforms his free-standing sculpture into a bona fide installation. It also supplies souvenirs for collectors without the space or budgets for such large, institution-friendly sculptures.

Where Celaya’s sculpture gets dressed up in artsy packaging, Deborah Aschheim’s 3-D model of the rods, cones and nerves of a human eyeball gets bogged down in realism. The more her 40-foot-long sculptural transformation of a textbook diagram departs from its source, the more it inspires leaps of the imagination. Changing colors faster than a sunset but slower than a flashing neon sign, Aschheim’s homemade electric eye resembles a school of mutant jellyfish swimming amid a cluster of WWII torpedoes, all adrift in a fantastic galaxy.

Michael C. McMillen’s “Motel (Under the World)” is made with children in mind. Set beneath a thick sheet of safety glass in the entryway’s floor, his life-size diorama features a rusty robot drinking motor oil as he watches home movies in a room cluttered with junk. Like a Cold War survivalist holed up in a backyard bunker, McMillen’s mechanical man contrasts dramatically with the other works’ embrace of expandable interactivity.

Steve Roden and Pae White take this attitude into the realm of functional objects. Strung from the branches of two trees outside the building’s front door, Roden’s audio speakers play a chiming melody that blends with the sounds of the street. Just inside the gallery’s entrance, White’s 14 candy-colored seats also verge on disappearing into their surroundings. You could rest on their vinyl-covered cushions and admire their curvaceous forms without knowing an artist made them.

The set includes a 14-sided desk, made of wood and translucent Plexiglas, which also functions as a receptacle for notes visitors might wish to leave behind. No wall-labels instruct you to do so, nor is any hint given of what White will do with the information she gathers. Mystery enters her pragmatic piece obliquely, leaving you free to wonder just where design ends and art begins.

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“New Works, New Spaces,” Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (626) 792-5101, through June 23. Free. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.