Dredging Up a Sense of Adolescent Place

“Lingam and Yoni,” the title given to each of eight new sculptures by Mike Kelley, suggests a grand cosmology. In each, a phallic form grows out of a vulva-shaped bowl, which rests atop a pedestal. They are familiar Hindu symbols for masculine and feminine energy, in which creation and destruction interlock.

But they’re also sculptures by Kelley, a protean artist for whom nothing is ever one-dimensional. The “Lingam and Yoni” sculptures are made from mud dug up from islands in Michigan’s Detroit River, near where the L.A. artist grew up. Creation and destruction merge with personal history.

At the bottom of each bowl, around the base of the nominal phallus, bits of trash are embedded. Sexuality takes on a decidedly earthy, frankly unromantic edge. The child is the hapless father of the man, even as memory of the past remains embedded in the murky ooze.

“Black Out,” Kelley’s show at Patrick Painter Inc., also includes several suites of photographs and, in the gallery’s main room, an extraordinary centerpiece composed from several parts. Monstrous, poignant, funny, hopeful, embarrassing--this is Kelley’s strongest, most compelling exhibition of new work in Los Angeles in several years.

A low, U-shaped ramp is covered with broken crockery salvaged from a Detroit River dumping site. One end features an assembly of rusted nails, table utensils, sparkplugs and other stuff, as well as clots of indecipherable brown gunk. The other is composed of bottles, ashtrays, jugs and other pristine shards of clear glass.

The flotsam in between has been carefully sorted by color--blue plates, green bottles, white dishes, etc.--so that the path follows a kind of “chromatic purification” process. The trash goes from raw and soiled to clean and unsullied.

At the clean end of the path stands a lumpy, larger-than-life statue of astronaut John Glenn, helmet at his side, likewise made from potsherds and other riverbed dregs. Not unlike the lingam and the yoni, where opposing human principles are merged, the effigy of the first American to orbit Earth is composed from the lowliest detritus. Glenn, the namesake of Kelley’s suburban Detroit high school, looks less like a heroic pioneer than Oz’s clinking Tin Man, rising up from the end of a tattered rainbow.

There’s more. A pair of vertical display cabinets flanks Kelley’s powerfully ambiguous monument. Pull-out panels, each 8 feet tall, feature photocopies of clippings culled from a local newspaper’s morgue.

The clippings chronicle cultural happenings in town during the artist’s high school years. Concerts, parades, pageants, holiday events and local celebrities, circa 1968 to 1972, mingle with countercultural episodes, such as drug busts, the opening of the town’s first head shop, the formation by area housewives of a women’s lib group and more. It’s hard to say which is more pungent, heartfelt, absurdly desperate and even weird--the official culture or the rebellious counterculture.

As with much of his most persuasive work, Kelley’s “Black Out” lodges itself in a queasy, uncomfortable place that is typically suppressed--namely, adolescence, the tormented time between the supposed guilelessness of childhood and the sophistication to which adults aspire. Like a blackout between scenes in a play, adolescent life is almost never deeply examined by art. (“Adolescent” is more often hurled as a term of derision.) But Kelley has emerged as our most eloquent poet of the awful stress and strain of that consequential state of being--which is very much a distinctive product of modern American society.

Patrick Painter Inc., Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through May 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Where Imagination

Is the Special Effect

Prepare to be disconcerted at Blum & Poe. An attendant stands at the ready to thread Jennifer Bornstein’s beguiling 16-millimeter film, “Celestial Spectacular,” through the projector and to replay its seven short works as many times as you’d like to see it. (It’s only a few minutes long.) Given the ubiquity of chilly, automated video projection in galleries today, the presence of a whirring film projector and a live projectionist is positively quaint.

It also fits the aesthetic of Bornstein’s short films, which look brand new but pointedly recall the earliest experiments in cinema from a century ago. In “Sunset at the North Pole,” a glowing orb skitters along the cottony white horizon. “The Oldest Star” is a nearly imperceptible flicker of light in the center of a black screen. Three rocky spheres fly into a room through an open window in “Meteor Shower.”

For “Plant Communication,” a Boston fern placed on a kitchen table waves a languid frond at the avocado plant growing on a nearby windowsill. After a moment, the avocado waves back.

The special effects in Bornstein’s films eschew digital wizardry. The North Pole snow actually seems to be made of cotton. The meteors are balls of crumpled aluminum foil, which slide down a visible wire. The display of an astounding “14 Leaf Clover” is surely rigged.

Little or no effort has been made to hide the cinematic trickery, which only adds to the charm and whimsy of the work. For those few episodes that don’t immediately disclose how they were made--like the clover or the faint light twinkling in “The Oldest Star”--you find yourself figuring out a simple way to achieve the effect.

This is the grace note of “Celestial Spectacular.” In a world of preprogrammed technology and remote-control experience, the film insists on the artistic power of imagination, inventiveness and do-it-yourself intimacy. Then it delivers.

Blum & Poe, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Saturday.

Wall Sculptures

Play With Space

The intersection of painting with sculpture fueled much of the most interesting American art made circa 1970. Something of that spirit seems to infect the lively new work of Torbjorn Vejvi, whose second solo show is at Richard Telles Fine Art.

Most of the sculptures are wall-mounted. The one that isn’t, “Watercolor Melon,” is made from heavy sheets of paper cut and slotted to form a standing object. The paper, painted to simulate rind and seeds, merges a hemisphere with a three-dimensional grid. Think of a digital image on a computer screen projected into physical space.

That’s the difference between what Vejvi is up to now and what artists did 30 years ago. Digital space isn’t visible in these works, but you sense it in their ancestry.

“Vertigo” is composed from two planes of wood, standing perpendicular to the wall. They’re pierced in the center by a horizontal tube. Each end of the tube is covered with knit blue fabric, like a turtleneck. Look into the interior and the fabric stretches the length of the tube. Inner space seems to have turned itself inside out.

Bright, flat color adds to the graphic punch of Vejvi’s work, which can be deceptive in its simplicity. Linearity is emphasized by the painted purple wooden frames stacked inside a purple wooden open-frame box in “Shaved.” Visually, though, the not-quite-square box and the tilted frames inside seem somehow animated.

“Billiards at Half-Past Nine” is the most complex work. Six vertical tubes of various lengths, each covered in bright green fabric, are lined up side by side. A white cord is threaded through them, while two white and four red wooden balls are threaded at different places along the cord. Forces of tension, gravity and suspension are subtly set against one another. It’s as if the geometric plotting and random action in a billiards game had been compressed, shaken up and rearranged for your perusal on the wall. The playful effect is uncanny.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through May 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Taking Public Art

in a Zesty Direction

Trompe l’oeil painting has been fooling eyes at least since Zeuxis’ prudently painted grapes convinced some birds in ancient Greece that they’d be delicious to eat. Richard Ankrom has just given the venerable tradition a zesty kick in the pants.

Ankrom painted an exact replica of a portion of a California Department of Transportation sign, then surreptitiously installed it on an actual sign above the northbound Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, near 3rd Street. The real sign didn’t give motorists adequate information. The added replica, in place since August, fixed that problem.

Art for use, rather than art as an end in itself, likewise has a long history. Ankrom’s sign is a distant cousin to a Duchamp ready-made. Yet while there’s pleasure in the artist’s having put one over on the state bureaucracy, which didn’t notice the seamless addition until a story appeared in the press, the work is more meaningful for another indirect but well-placed jab.

It’s safe to say that had Ankrom proposed this refreshing work to a public art agency, it would have had as little chance of happening as if the public-spirited citizen had tried to get Caltrans to improve the freeway sign on his own. (Bureaucracy’s main function--which can be useful--is to say “no.”) Public art is subject to as many numbing bureaucratic restraints as anything in our civic life today, which is one reason so little of it compels admiration. By contrast, Ankrom’s guerrilla public art does.