Reality and irony collide

In 1982, Vija Celmins put the finishing touches on a 22-part sculpture she had been working on for five years. “To Fix the Image in Memory” (1977-82) consists of 11 small stones she collected in northern New Mexico and then meticulously duplicated, by first casting each one in bronze and then painting it to resemble the original. Arranged in pairs in a spacious vitrine, Celmins’ rocks and their copies raised fascinating questions about reality and fakery and art’s place in the mix.

A 15-artist exhibition revisits these issues and puts a Hollywood spin on them at USC’s Fisher Gallery. Organized by guest curator Mary-Kay Lombino and sponsored by Independent Curators International, “UnNaturally” begins with the idea that it’s getting harder to tell what’s real and what’s artificial. The show, which closed for the holidays, reopens Tuesday and continues through Jan. 17.

Right inside the front door stands a tall vitrine in which rests a stainless-steel tray filled with what appears to be potting soil and dozens of plump mushrooms growing healthily. A closer look reveals that Roxy Paine’s “Psilocybe Cubensis Tray” (1997) is not a science experiment or gardening project but a handsomely crafted sculpture.

Fabricated from polymer, lacquer and oil paint -- among other petroleum byproducts -- the New York artist’s chemically engineered mushrooms make fun of art museums by playfully suggesting that they are musty spaces where time stands still and fungi sprout freely. Across the gallery, Paine has hung a large white panel as if it were a monochrome painting; two thick mounds of mold appear to be growing on it. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see that the preposterous visions in his works bear a family resemblance those triggered by the ingestion of real hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Such Hollywood-style special effects play out in nearly all of the works exhibited. Made of beeswax, papier-mache and acrylic paint, Michelle Segre’s 4-foot-tall mushroom rests upside-down on the floor. It looks as if it’s been tossed aside by some Brobdingnagian connoisseur. And Segre’s 5-foot-tall prickly pear cactus would be right at home on a movie set, where everything is bigger and better than usual, until you look closely.

The same goes for Keith Edmier’s cut flowers made of polymer and dental acrylic, Jason Middlebrook’s clusters of silk plants growing from the seats of four park benches, and Clara Williams’ painted Styrofoam rock sprinkled with faux snow and her plaster tree branch, on which stands a weasel that’s been to the taxidermist.

Alyson Shotz’s 9-foot-tall plants made of Q-tips and rubber resemble genetically mutated lily pads and beanstalks. Connected to one another with intravenous tubing and rolling on casters across mirrors laid on the floor, the artist’s imaginary flora could be props for a Tim Burton fantasy movie.

Frances Whitehead provides the show’s sci-fi component. Using computers and stereo- lithography software, she makes diagrams and models of the poppies growing in her backyard garden. Whitehead’s two- and three-dimensional works are as high-tech as any prototype for NASA.

Flowers are also featured in Marc Quinn’s sumptuous photographs of exotic blossoms submerged in aquariums full of silicone, Nicoletta Munroe’s fuzzy images of cherry trees on actual movie sets, and Gregory Crewdson’s slick digital prints of elaborately staged scenes. Crewdson’s trio of 4-by-5-foot photographs looks like stills from three movies made by a director whose budget is not nearly as limited as his imagination.

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle provides the show’s soundtrack. Soothing sounds such as running water and blowing wind emanate from two small speakers in the corner. If you read the catalog, however, you learn that the artist has engineered his easy-listening disk, “Sonanbula” (1998), by digitally manipulating a recording of a real gunshot.

This piece screams what most of the other works in “UnNaturally” only whisper: Art deceives; like all forms of artifice, it tricks gullible viewers into believing a sugar-coated illusion when the truth is uglier and more dangerous.

In contrast, C-prints by Chris Astley and Allan deSouza do not condescend to viewers with such blunt, know-it-all messages. Their works are more engaging -- and more effective -- because they’re more confusing.

Both artists build homemade dioramas that they light dramatically and then photograph. Astley uses twigs, dry ice and various murky liquids to make eerie landscapes of indeterminate scale. It’s impossible to know whether you’re looking into a freezer packed with chunks of Camembert or squinting into the blinding haze of an Arctic afternoon.

Similarly, DeSouza’s three new images ricochet between the macroscopic and the microscopic. They seem, simultaneously, to faithfully represent bone-dry deserts and little patches of flaky skin.

Mysterious to the core, both artists’ photographs compel viewers to look at them a lot longer than most of the works on display. In a sense, Astley’s and DeSouza’s ambiguous pictures operate in the same way that Celmins’ found and fabricated rocks do: by heightening your attention to details so that you might learn the truth.

Most of the show’s other works merely go through the motions of making up a world that rivals the real one. There’s a deep cynicism about art’s capacity to measure up to reality built into most of the works. The illusions they deliver are meant to be seen through to let you in on the joke.

Jacci Den Hartog and Michael Pierzynski go the furthest to draw viewers into the whimsical worlds they fabricate. They also do the most with the least. Their homemade landscape sculptures have less in common with Hollywood effects than kitchen-table crafts.

Inspired by Chinese landscape paintings, Den Hartog carves and casts plaster and polyurethane to make miniature mountainsides. In two wall-mounted works, gentle streams meander around bulbous boulders. In a free-standing piece, torrential rivers cascade violently, splashing wildly and engulfing cliffs in frothy swirls that resemble puffy clouds.

Pierzynski begins with the ordinary ashtrays, pitchers, serving dishes and aquarium decorations he finds in thrift stores. He re-creates them in porcelain, applies luminous glazes and sometimes air-brushes on highlights. Simple things rarely look so wondrous.

Both sculptors stand out from the crowd because they eschew the seriousness of realism for the silliness of cartoons. Unlike the bulk of the works in “UnNaturally,” their spunky pieces are not driven by the desire to disentangle reality from artifice. Instead, they embrace fakery all the better to get your imagination going.

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‘UnNaturally’

Where: Fisher Gallery, USC, 823 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Reopens Tuesday. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m.

Ends: Jan. 17

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 740-4561