Domestic Horrors Poignantly Told

Susan Hornbeak-Ortiz’s new sculptures inhabit touchy terrain, a charged emotional ground embracing both beauty and danger, seduction and repulsion, comfort and fear. A few of the works, now at Sherry Frumkin Gallery, feel overwrought; but more often than not, Hornbeak-Ortiz packages the horrors of domesticity in clever, poetic and poignant ways.

An old gramophone horn mounted on the wall like a huge mechanical blossom emits a faint sound requiring close contact to identify. It turns out to be the persistent, buzzing whine of a bee.

Nearby looms a 10-foot stack of crude wooden drawers, their surfaces marred with staples, numerical markings, aging varnish, nicks and scrapes. A sweet music box melody tinkles from inside, a trace of innocence and nostalgia securely trapped in a functional body geared to accumulate data, experiences and possessions as it steadily erodes.

A sense of repression builds in these works to a level of toxicity that makes the heart pound with both vulnerability and sympathy. In “Resentment Builds,” Hornbeak-Ortiz finally snaps, letting loose a curt “shut up” from a dresser neatly packed with folded linens and a loudly ticking clock.

Tony Oursler’s tone of confrontational theater comes to mind here and in several other works, where such icons of domestic order as keys, a high chair and a mirror become aggressive tools of entrapment.

The view may be bleak, but it’s true to experience, particularly that of a working woman and mother, like Hornbeak-Ortiz and many female artists, wrenched by the dueling expectations of both domestic and professional realms. Life devours, rage builds, beauty persists. A large, wall-mounted cabinet structure housing a tiny tornado on continuous film loop is read as an apt and chilling metaphor for the day-to-day.

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* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 453-1850, through Nov. 15.