At home in two worlds

Every once in a while, art and design intermingle so promiscuously that these ordinarily distinct disciplines become a hotbed of boundary-bending creativity.

It happened during the Russian revolution, when many of the most advanced painters and sculptors designed posters, textiles and stage sets. It happened in Germany in the 1920s, when the Bauhaus’ talented faculty fused form and function in everything from teapots to skyscrapers. And it happened in Denmark in the 1960s, when Verner Panton married Op Art to home decor in vibrantly designed furniture, carpeting and lighting fixtures.

Today, it’s happening in Los Angeles. Artists with one foot in the world of art and the other in that of design are setting the pace. The rest of the country is keeping step as increasingly stylish products fill an expanding range of market niches. (As the U.S. economy shifts from production to service, how something looks is as important as what it does. Quality always counts.)

Roy McMakin is at the forefront of these developments. An artist, furniture designer and self-taught architect, his playfully humorous and impeccably crafted works combine charm and smarts to straddle the boundary between art and design. In West Hollywood, at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Pacific Design Center branch, an impressive inventory of chairs, tables, desks and dressers designed by McMakin, as well as works of art in different media, and drawings and documents of architectural projects, fill the blocky, second-floor gallery to overflowing.

Spilling down the massive concrete staircase into the small entryway and pouring out the front door, McMakin’s two- and three-dimensional works immediately reveal the desire to embrace contradictions. Their simplified shapes echo the back-to-the-basics geometry of Minimalism, but have no truck with that style’s reductive industrialism or stripped-bare austerity.

The show is a cornucopia of visual delights and cerebral satisfactions, all based in the creature comforts. Its title, “Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment,” is an unwieldy mouthful that strives to capture the multipurpose complexity of McMakin’s creations but lacks their eloquence.

Ably organized by assistant curator Michael Darling, the exhibition is installed to emphasize the links that unify McMakin’s work as an artist, designer and architect. Arranged neither chronologically (works date from 1979 to the present) nor by discipline, the installation looks more like a mid-range furniture store -- or such a store’s storeroom -- than a museum.

Huge metal shelves cover one wall and half of another. Unceremoniously lined atop their three tiers are more than 50 pieces of custom-designed furniture, including a two-toned wingback chair that spins on an oversized Lazy Susan; six footstool-sized tables that fit together, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, to form a single, mix-and-match coffee table; and an upholstered ottoman whose top is sloped like the roof a house, which prevents magazines from being stacked atop it but still makes for a comfy footrest.

Hung on the walls on the opposite side of the gallery are two big grids of works on paper. The first are drawings, either studies for specific projects or goofy doodles, some of which give birth to forms McMakin develops and others that just show his hand -- and mind -- wandering freely.

The second group features sketches and photographs of some of the architectural renovations McMakin has completed. These plans and documents give viewers a glimpse of the casual elegance that is the trademark of his refined yet welcoming interiors, nearly all of which are domestic.

Although it’s clear that every detail has been pored over with the attentiveness that rivals that of an obsessive-compulsive, McMakin’s living rooms, pool houses and offices never feel fussy or claustrophobic. With great consistency, their harmonious proportions are interspersed with just the right touch of quirkiness. This infuses them with a physical sense of light-handed animation. Unlike a lot of designer homes, which look better in magazines than they do in person, McMakin’s renovations balance the pleasure of looking at 3-D compositions and living in them.

His installation does something similar. To counteract the brutally inhospitable gallery’s extreme verticality (it’s higher than it is wide or long), McMakin has laid 15 shiny refrigerators on their sides, stacking them like oversize bricks to form a white wall.

On one side stands a long glass table covered with “Alphabet Sketches,” 143 abstract forms cut from wood and painted creamy white. Some resemble dollhouse furniture, miniature versions of what McMakin designs for adults. Others look like streamlined translations of ordinary household items, like framed portraits, books, candles and tissue boxes. Together, they give form to the same scale shifts that animate McMakin’s furniture, evoking childlike wonder before the infinite possibilities of things.

On the other side stands “Lequita Fay Melvin,” a cluster of beds, dressers and lamps all based on McMakin’s memories of his grandmother’s house in Oklahoma. Painted a uniform gray, its pieces look like real furniture but function like art: The lamps are solid wood, the mattresses are missing, and everything is artfully crowded together. This creates the impression that the self-contained installation is a mental picture -- a nostalgic trip down memory lane, and not something to be used.

These two works of art are far more successful than most of McMakin’s sculptures, the majority of which merely illustrate ideas more fully embodied by his furniture or, worse, simply treat art as a useless (or dysfunctional) thing that appeals to the mind at the expense of the body.

For example, “Refrigerator, Table, Shelving Unit” is a free-standing wood sculpture whose appearance changes as you move around it. From the front, it looks like a refrigerator; from the side, a table that’s been tipped on end; from the back, a set of open shelves. (From this angle, four of the “table’s” six “legs” function like extremely long coat hooks or oversize tie racks; the bottom two just get in the way.)

Once you understand McMakin’s points -- that appearances deceive and that use and meaning permeate one another -- the piece is no longer engaging. The same goes for the aptly titled “Two Chests, One With No Knobs, One With Slightly Oversized Drawers.”

This beautifully crafted three-part sculpture would be a perfectly functional pair of dressers if the drawers of one had knobs and those of the other weren’t too big to fit into their slots. These works outline an unambitious and oddly conservative role for art, making it the resting ground for design failures and manufacturing mishaps.

In contrast, his furniture and architectural designs go far beyond such old-fashioned habits and stale cliches, giving viewers a glimpse of a future that not only looks better than the present, but also delights the mind and satisfies the body by bringing us into it.

McMakin is a humanistic hedonist, a pragmatic do-it-yourselfer for whom expertise and perfectionism are the logical consequences of truly loving the materials one works with, not to mention the world built from them. Luxury never looked so sensible.

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‘Roy McMakin: A Door Meant as Adornment’

Where: The Museum of Contemporary Art at the Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood

When: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.

Ends: June 29

Price: $3

Contact: (213) 626-6222