Fashion 86 : Gallery’s Decorative Jewelry Is Also Fine Art

In the aspiring and wealth-conscious ‘80s, the idea of jewelry as social statement may sound like a throwback to 20 years ago.

But for Cross Creek Gallery co-owner Lee Spiro, decorative jewelry isn’t enough. He’s attracted to pieces that “break every rule you can think of”; to artists who “push the envelope.”

And they’re not making love beads. The Malibu gallery, founded 18 months ago by Spiro and L.A. artists Phil and Evelyn Rotblatt, carries jewelry and other “three-dimensional art” priced $100 to $25,000. It features about a dozen artists from throughout the country.

The gallery’s conceptual bent becomes clear after even the shortest encounter with Spiro. With little prompting, this intense, bearded man of 37 will launch into a discussion of Renaissance methods in contemporary jewelry or the Miro-like appearance of a bracelet.

Spiro says he and the Rotblatts look for artists “who are trying to expand the definition of art,” people who see “wearable art as fine art.”

Pieces in the gallery mix the unlikely: Faceted and unfaceted stones, precious and non-precious materials. Upstate New York artist Earl Pardon, for example, combines abalone, gemstones and a mixture of metals in one necklace. Another New York artist, Claudia Kuehnl, combines sandblasted gold with diamonds and cubic zirconium.

“Any material can be art--depending on what the artist does with it,” Spiro says. He notes that the studio artists represented by the gallery design pieces that cannot be duplicated by machine.

“We’re talking about obsessive people here. People who specialize to the nth degree,” he says, pointing to Central California artist James Barker, who hand sculpts gold into “assemblages,” and Mary Lee Hu of Seattle, who weaves pieces of 22-karat gold wire.

Though the artists are eclectic, most prefer 18-karat gold, often textured and low sheen, rather than polished 14-karat gold, Spiro says.

This third-generation jeweler says the most frequent message of the artists is to “make art part of living.”

But that message can seem obscure--even for aficionado Spiro. He describes a silver bracelet, decorated with a miniature teacup and a saw, which California artist Christina Smith entitled “Work?”

“I wish I knew what her statement was,” Spiro says, recouping moments later with a post-Modernist theory: The bracelet means “beauty is not related to preciousness. It’s something that’s connected to day-to-day life.”