Chihuly Continues to Break Glass’ Boundaries

Dale Chihuly breathes life into glass, in more ways than one. Miles away from the rarefied vessels that once typified this medium, his jaw-dropping new installations at L.A. Louver dramatically alter their surrounding environment, taking shape in your imagination as much as they do in the glass-blowing process.

Over the years, Chihuly, who co-founded the internationally renowned Pilchuck Glass School north of Seattle, has pushed glass to ever greater heights, incorporating lavish color, rich art-history allusions, architectural savvy and a sense of playfulness coupled with a “What’ll he think of next?” audacity.

After a 1976 auto injury damaged his depth perception, Chihuly was unable to blow glass himself. At that point, he began assembling large teams of assistants to realize his designs, which grew increasingly ambitious and complex as Chihuly’s interests gravitated toward larger, site-specific projects.

Chihuly’s new works evoke natural life forms. A rounded hallway leading into the main gallery houses the magnificent “Pergola Ceiling Installation,” different versions of which have been previously exhibited elsewhere. In this dazzling environment, hundreds of multicolored vessels rest atop a clear glass ceiling like so many scattered jewels. These sparkling objects refract the sunlight shining from an upper window, splashing dappled pools of colored light onto the floor and the surrounding white walls. The effect is of walking through a life-sized kaleidoscope or a luminous underwater cavern.

The gallery’s beach-side location makes it hard not to think of these unidentified forms as squids, stingrays, octopuses, jellyfish, conchs and other sea creatures. Similarly, the four breathtaking works in the main gallery (a fifth is included in the upper sky-room) seem connected to the sea. Your eye is immediately drawn to a fiery red creature with grasping, Medusa-like tentacles measuring 13 1/2 feet tall by 12 1/2 feet wide. Appearing to pulsate with an inner life, it has a gorgeous, vaguely threatening presence recalling that of a giant squid or a burning sun.

Equally stunning are the blue-hued, curved platters of Chihuly’s “Persian Wall Installation,” whose ridged textures, radiating patterns and gentle curves recall lily pads, sand dollars, blooming flowers or fluttering butterflies clinging to a wall. An adjacent gallery contains four unabashedly sensual, milky-red vessels from Chihuly’s “Red Baskets” series, three of which bear small ovoid bubbles within their womb-like interiors. Deeply mysterious, these fecund works anticipate the germination of still newer forms, which Chihuly will no doubt continue to deliver.

* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Coming Into Being: John Souza’s enigmatic new sculptures at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions are as compelling for what they leave out as for what they convey. Formally, they are precisely balanced; conceptually, they are circuitous. They court the extremes of the imagination, even as they appear to ruthlessly tamp it down.

Invoking architectural spaces both urban and domestic, Souza’s works address the fantasy element in everyday forms. Made from bright green-and-yellow perforated steel bars and the kind of do-it-yourself hardware one is likely to find at Home Depot, some appear to be partially disassembled, others in various stages of becoming, yet none seem unfinished.

Souza’s sculptures take their shape from misfired visual cues, as well as the viewer’s impulse to frame them via recognizable objects. “Remnant Appearance and Flutter” resembles a giant folding table encircled by three tall cactuses. “Flotation Device for a Phantom Limb (For Eduardo and Daniel)” is like a child’s bunk bed--or is it a shelving unit? “A Resting Place” looks very much like a bus stop shelter, and as such appears to provide exactly what its title promises.

These works also hint at the cryptic uncertainty behind an otherwise unblinkingly perceived material reality. Our attempts to account for what look like three-dimensional diagrams take up an enormous amount of hermeneutic energy, and yet the objects remain resolutely irresolvable, always a step beyond the assurances of description.

Souza’s challenging and casually evasive works may initially feel cold and uninviting, but this is simply the mark of an artist who refuses to play to the crowd. By throwing what we see into confusion, Souza’s irresolvable forms frustrate our efforts to fit the outlines of what we perceive into the cultural memory banks of what we think we already know.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777, through Jan. 31. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

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The Mask of Beauty: For her latest solo show at Ace Gallery, L.A.-based artist China Adams secretly entered the 1997-98 Ms. American Woman pageant, engaging in months of pre-pageant preparation designed to craft “a more feminine persona” capable of fooling the judges and her fellow contestants. Adams’ painstaking efforts paid off when she placed fourth runner-up in the pageant, but the uneven art exhibition that results is not quite as successful at meeting its goals.

Part of the problem is that we’re never entirely clear about what Adams’ subterfuge ultimately aims to accomplish. A series of 40-by-60-inch color video stills highlight key moments from the contest, such as Adams parading down the runway or performing a cheerleading rendition of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” Below each photograph are glass vitrines containing Adams’ glittering costumes and gaudy accessories, with notarized certificates of authenticity placed alongside each display.

Adams’ masquerade is clearly indebted to a number of feminist performance artists. Lynn Hershman’s 1973 performances as her alter-ego Roberta Breitmore, and Eleanor Antin’s 1972 “Carving--A Traditional Sculpture,” documenting 36 days of weight loss, readily come to mind.

In light of this rich history, Adams’ contention that the beauty queen’s idealized feminine persona is, in essence, a willfully constructed masquerade doesn’t shed any new light on the subject. What’s more, Adams’ artful attempts to deconstruct beauty-as-commodity lag far behind the seamless make-overs that are regularly staged in the pop-cultural arena, like Courtney Love’s cynical--and tactically brilliant--metamorphosis from pockmarked punk star to A-list fashion goddess.

To her credit, Adams’ extended performance doesn’t come off as a snide put-down of her competitors. Instead, it makes room for the delicious possibility that at least a few of Adams’ fellow beauty queens might have been staging sly, private ruses of their own.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 935-4411, through Jan. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Light Show: Matthew McCaslin’s newest video installations at Shoshana Wayne Gallery simulate the vertiginous experience of wandering through Coney Island at night. In the darkened main gallery, dozens of television monitors play looped video footage of blinking carnival lights, rickety roller-coaster rides, carousels and other mechanical whirligigs. A soundtrack consisting of organ music and disembodied screams provides an eerie aural counterpart to the dizzying swirls of lights and motion.

Of course, these multiple television monitors, linked by thick black electrical cable and stacked in shaky pyramids, towering columns, wheel-shaped wall arrangements and funky tabletop configurations, don’t look anything like an amusement park. Instead, McCaslin’s repetitive sound and video loops query the nature of amusement itself, as we experience it in the virtual age.

This prompts a range of responses, from neo-Freudian musings on the onanistic pleasures of the home entertainment center, to urban theorists’ pessimistic rants on the Disney-fication of the built landscape, where the past is erased and then replaced with its theme-park double.

More than anything else, however, McCaslin’s hypnotic digital nightscapes revel in the mutable qualities of light. Spinning carousels appear to melt into blurry, candy-colored streams, their dreamlike liquidity contrasting pointedly with the hard-edged realism of the rap song blaring from an adjacent boombox.

The exhibition’s greatest irony lies in the fact that McCaslin’s high-tech light show contains unmistakable parallels to primitive cinema’s earliest “flicker films,” which were made at a time when conventional modes of filmic narration hadn’t yet come into being. Back then, modern entertainment was still in the Stone Age, and film audiences were more than happy to watch, mesmerized, as the simplest snippets of action were repeated, over and over again, on luminous white screens.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.