Prying perceptions loose during ‘The Perfect Ride’

A decade has passed since Jennifer Pastor knocked the socks off viewers with a solo gallery debut that featured a visually astounding, conceptually complex, monumental sculpture of elaborate Christmas trees engulfed in a torrential flood of simulated water fabricated from a glistening sheet of formed plastic. (If you missed the show -- yes, you read that description right.) Pastor was then 28. A distinctive young artist had arrived.

Ten years is a long wait for a second solo gallery exhibition, and along the way Pastor has turned up in group exhibitions (and a solo at the Museum of Contemporary Art). But “The Perfect Ride,” her current outing at Regen Projects, turns out to be a worthy successor to that long-ago debut.

The work is composed of three independent elements. One is a sculpture of a human ear, both outer and inner (where it coils into the brain), which rises from a sleek, waist-high pedestal. Next is an animated line drawing, projected on a wall, that shows a cowboy riding a furiously bucking bull. Third is a looming sculpture of a mighty dam, complete with hydroelectric power facility burrowing through a mountain made of billowing fiberglass.

The ensemble is far more visually subdued than the earlier holiday adventure, with its glittery Christmas hues and rush of energy. The three individual parts are almost without color -- black, white, gray and translucency predominate -- which emphasizes a fragile, almost diagrammatic quality.

Yet the ensemble is nonetheless eccentric and accomplished. First shown last summer at the Venice Biennale, “The Perfect Ride” uses clever shifts in sculptural scale as a tool with which to pry perception loose from its moorings.

The ear, for example, is many times larger than life-size, yet it remains the smallest of the three works. In this company it’s simultaneously huge and small.

The dam, likewise a schematic model of the real thing, is much smaller than life, but it commands the central space. You feel dwarfed by the “little” maquette.

The animation of the bull and rider is projected life-size. Any direct correspondence with your body is undercut, though, by the ephemeral medium of video and the frugal black line of contour drawing. As you watch the cowboy elegantly keep his seat atop the spinning, leaping beast, your own flesh and bone feel strangely fugitive.

Disorientation is a leitmotif for Pastor. She further emphasizes it by setting these sculptures off-axis. The dam, mountain and hydroelectric plant are raked at 45-degree angles, like the Starship Enterprise poised for warp-speed emergency flight. The ear is cocked. The bull and rider enter the frame from the right, execute an elegant three-minute pas de deux, then exit again where they came in.

The sculptural shifts in scale are subtly effective, burrowing quietly beneath the skin of your perceptions. Because of these precisely calibrated shifts, you automatically begin to draw other connections among them -- connections that may or may not be (you should pardon the expression) “real.”

“The Perfect Ride” articulates vernacular systems for the transfer of energy: sound vibrations out in the world to brain waves inside the body, fluid water to flowing electricity and animal to human. Force fields, which have no visible boundaries, are given form. The distinction between nature and culture is conceived as a permeable membrane. For a person looking at a work of art, this experience is bracing.

Pastor works slowly. Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas served as partial inspiration for one segment of this three-part installation, and that colossal feat of engineering took five years to build. So did “The Perfect Ride.” Both were worth the wait.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through May 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Mass, volume and air, by Wegner

For his fifth and most accomplished L.A. show, New York artist Peter Wegner has removed two double-doors from a side exit at Griffin Contemporary and filled the empty space with paper -- reams and reams of it, in various shades of red (this being an exit door), all standing on edge and stacked in 13 rows. To a spectator whose passage is blocked, only a striated plane of red is visible. Still, because you know it’s a spatial passageway, the wall of striped pigment reads visually as a physical chunk of color.

A similar economy of means yielding rich results characterizes “81 Unnamed Yellows,” a painting on board that shows, well, 81 unnamed yellows. On each of seven abutted vertical panels, Wegner has painted 11 or 12 horizontal stripes of yellow enamel in a panoply of shades. The glossy enamel is reflective, and the wide variation in hue -- how dark can yellow get before the light goes out? -- creates spatial illusions. If “Red Exit” feels like a dense mass of color, this bright yellow plane suggests an airy volume of it.

Rigorous, carefully controlled formal structure plays against the loose, irrational and evocative quality of color in Wegner’s work. “Architecture of the Air,” the monumental three-part mural in the main gallery, ups the ante to include letters and numbers. It doesn’t quite click the way the others do.

The huge triptych, 17 feet high and 80 feet wide, employs a pattern of connected squares and rectangles that superficially resembles Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” Wegner’s palette is blues, greens, yellows, grays and whites. The crisp edges of the white squares and rectangles suggest that they were taped off before painting, while the fuzzed edges of the bars of color imply that they were painted freehand. Black numbers and letters are dispersed around the irregular grid, either on or under the transparent color.

No design system is apparent, save for a general sense of harmonious balance within each section and among all three. Building a compelling structure requires intuitive perceptual acuity. “Architecture of the Air” does that, but it feels a bit like a lesson plan.

Griffin Contemporary, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6886, through June 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The inhumanity of animal shelter

There is apparently no end of young artists ready, willing and able to adopt the system of visual classification perfected 40 years ago in the industrial photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who built upon the earlier German example of August Sander’s epic taxonomy, “Man of the Twentieth Century.” Michael Schnabel is the latest.

In an American solo debut at the Bank Gallery, the Stuttgart-based artist shows a dozen large-format color prints whose subject is empty animal cages built in German and Swiss zoos during the last century. Frontal and formal, they record architectural spaces that range from the decorative and domestic (an elaborately tiled room for giraffes) to the minimal and austere (a blank, bunker-like enclosure for elephants). Some of the tiger cages look like late adaptations of modern Case Study Project designs for mass-produced suburban housing.

The photographs, professional and sleek, create a stark inventory of inhumane shelter for unseen animals. At this late date, however, the familiar taxonomy of a well-worn photographic method undercuts this work.

The Bechers codified camera-vision as an industrial method of perception; their grain elevators and turbine engines are stand-ins reflecting the machinery of their camera.

Schnabel’s dull cages are similarly self-reflexive; they suggest traps for an art world disciplined, tamed and put on routine public display.

Bank Gallery, 400 S. Main St., Los Angeles, (213) 621-4055, through Saturday