The (quirky) object’s the thing for a fresh crop of sculptors

Built of unfired clay, the full-scale lowrider appears to be decomposing, literally turning into dust, like a giant memento mori. The hot rod dominates a teacher’s small studio at Cal State Long Beach. Standing next to the clay car, Kristen Morgin, its diminutive maker, says with a shy smile: “It’s a little off the beaten track.”

Way out there would be more accurate.

Despite the material -- wood, wire, cement and clay -- it is a convincing replica of a car, in part because of its true proportions, in part because of its detail: the dashboard, the flames on the hood, the dice in the window, all clay.

Like a number of emerging artists working in Los Angeles, Morgin is preoccupied with material and the creation of ambitious three-dimensional objects -- old-fashioned sculptures -- done in unusual ways.

In the last few years, a number of gallery shows and museum exhibitions, such as “Mise en Scene: New L.A. Sculpture” at Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2000, have shown the vitality of the form.

Although many artists have seemed more interested in installations, performance and video work during the last decade or so, “now we have a generation that’s more interested in making objects again,” said Chris Miles, who collaborated with James Elaine, curator of Hammer Projects, and curatorial assistant Aimee Chang on “Thing: New Sculpture From Los Angeles.” The exhibition, opening at the UCLA Hammer Museum on Feb. 6, aims to capture this resurgent interest in sculpture by showcasing work by 20 emerging artists.

As four of these artists prepare for the Hammer show, a visitor finds a variety of ideas and materials coming together in studios in Long Beach and Culver City, West Adams and Claremont. Regardless of their approach, Morgin and Nathan Mabry, Jedediah Caesar and Chuck Moffit are creating work that is ambitious in its conception or scale, and they all share a dedication to contemporary sculpture.

A vision takes shape

At first, Kristen Morgin built musical instruments in wood and clay: cellos, violins, eventually a full-size piano. She had been listening to Beethoven and reading about his life when she came across a picture of his piano in a book. She decided to build its visual twin.

“The shapes of both musical instruments and cars -- they are very sexy and always evoke nostalgia,” she says. “They act to me like a precious object. And they are precious, at least to me, because they don’t always last too long. They’re like infants. They are very young, but they look really old, like they’ve had a lot of history, but they haven’t.”

Pinned to the wall behind her is a collection of her sketches -- details of the human body -- breathtakingly accurate. Morgin, who began as a painter, turned to ceramics “as a way to do something with my hands” when she wasn’t painting.

But the clay got to her.

“I really like that it’s fragile, that it breaks,” she says. “If you fire it, it’s around forever. If you don’t, it’s a pile of dirt.”

Her gloves have been flung across a ledge on the opposite wall. At first she didn’t notice that the cement mixed with the clay was corrosive. While she created her sculptures, the clay ate at the skin on her hands. Now covered in clay, the gloves look like miniature sculptures in their own right.

Born in 1968 in Brunswick, Ga., Morgin received a master of fine arts degree at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., and is an assistant professor of ceramics at Cal State Long Beach. She began building cars with the Italian Topolino (“Little Mouse”) as inspiration but quickly outgrew the scale, following it with an 18-foot hearse. She wanted to make a Cadillac hearse but didn’t have much to go on visually until she found Phantom Coaches Hearse Club, a group of hearse collectors who helped with her research. (Their motto: “We put the ‘fun’ back in funeral.”)

The disassembled Cadillac is stored down the hall. Opening the double doors of the storage space, Morgin shows off the hulking corpse of the car, replete with curtains of clay-covered gauze.

“I’m like a careless surgeon: I lose my tools inside them,” she says. A favorite C-clamp ended up inside one car. But she also slips in deliberate mementos: A newspaper clipping is tacked to the ceiling of the hearse, and her friends have carved their names in the dashboard of the car she’s making for the Hammer.

Morgin’s cars are approximations and amalgams. The lowrider she’s building for the show incorporates elements from several Mercury models made from 1949 to 1951. For inspiration, she’ll look at pictures and toy models or attend car shows, but she doesn’t draw a diagram or build a scale model. She simply begins at one end, building a wood skeleton and then adding the “flesh” -- clay and wire -- as she goes. Inexplicably, at the end she’ll have created a car nearly perfect in scale and proportion.

Finding storage space for the work can be a challenge because of its size. She had to destroy one car she couldn’t find room for.

“It makes me sad sometimes that they get such a short life span,” she says.

A bicycle she made was knocked over during an exhibition and shattered; its sad remains are propped up in the back of her studio. Morgin doesn’t know if she can bring herself to repair the work.

“It’s a chronicling of time,” she says. “They look like memory, they inspire memory,” and then, “they become memory.”

An ‘orb of junk’

In a loft upstairs from a small furniture factory, Jedediah Caesar was drowning in stuff. With sawdust dancing in the air, bits and bobs, odds and ends were encroaching on the artist in his West Adams studio. Failed projects. Aborted sculptures. He couldn’t get himself to throw it away. It wasn’t quite trash. But it wasn’t art either. “They existed in this nether place: I couldn’t put them forward by themselves, but I couldn’t throw them away.”

So Caesar, who graduated from UCLA with an MFA three years ago, began building an “orb of junk.”

Gathering studio detritus -- a coffee cup, a bottle, a sponge -- he assembled a geode, filling cavities and “gluing” with resin in different colors.

When it was about 800 pounds, Caesar decided it had reached a good size and covered it with concrete, making it resemble a giant rock that he decided should be cut in half. But the cutting presented a practical problem: Where to find a saw big and powerful enough for the job? Eventually, he found a quarry in Idaho that would do it. He built a crate, shipped the rock by FedEx. A few weeks later, it came back in halves, revealing its insides: the studio refuse was captured in resin like insects in amber.

The geode exercised a hold on Caesar, and although he resisted doing another one, he soon found that “there continued to be things in my studio -- more and more pieces.”

Creating the geode was oddly mesmerizing too. “It’s been the best thinking tool, art-wise,” he says. “I don’t know how far it can go.”

In the courtyard outside the factory, Caesar has built a primitive shed and inside is assembling his orb for the Hammer. This one he plans to have cut into 4-inch slabs. “Each slab is different, but they echo one another,” he says. “You’ll see the beginning of an object in one slab, the end of it in another, like frames on a film.”

Half of the first orb rests in a crate at the center of the yard.

“Watch out,” he says, drawing the lid on the crate. “It’s going to steal your soul.”

A ‘one-two punch’

A headless simian sits on a pedestal in a Culver City garage. Nearby, humanoid bones lie neatly stacked on a shelf. This is the studio of Nathan Mabry, a cool 26-year-old ceramist.

Born in Durango, Colo., Mabry picked up clay in high school, curious about its contradictory qualities: forgiving and malleable but also temperamental and difficult. While wet, it can collapse; in the kiln, it’s combustible.

Mabry, whose work is rich in puns and art historical references, traveled to Ecuador to study ancient clay figures after getting his master of fine arts degree from UCLA.

“I was in awe of their power,” he says.

His own work packs what Elaine, the curator, calls a “one-two punch,” juxtaposing copies of minimalist objects with what resemble pre-Columbian artifacts.

“It’s somehow to digest what they did,” Mabry says of artists such as Sol LeWitt, whose work becomes part of his work. “It’s not a critique.”

For the Hammer show, Mabry is making a clay copy of a naked flute-playing figure from the book “Sex and Sexual Magic in Ancient Peru.” (The title of the piece will be “Tooting My Own Horn.”)

“They are goofy erotic figures,” he says, adding that he’s unsure whether to copy the priapic properties of the original. “It’s a little much,” he concedes, and he doesn’t want to do a “Chapman Brothers thing,” he says, referring to the anatomically incorrect but explicit work by the British artists.

The figure will rest on a pedestal, crafted to partly resemble work by Constantin Brancusi, a pioneer of modern sculpture.

And then there are the bones -- made of porcelain (bone china), they are another pun. Mabry has made a pile of them and uses them, mounted on the wall, to spell out words.

“I wanted to attack the wall text, and the practice of someone like Lawrence Weiner,” the Conceptual artist, Mabry says. The first piece he did with the bones spelled out “bling bling.”

“Porcelain was the ‘bling-bling’ of the 17th and 18th century,” says Mabry, who plans to mount the bones on the Hammer show’s entrance wall to spell out the subject, “Thing.”

Material influences

In an industrial park in Claremont, Chuck Moffit is building a “personal mythology” in leather and chrome. With a greasy Ford motor at its heart, his anthropomorphic sculpture already dominates his small storage space.

During the day, Moffit builds classic cars. But at night he is welding, sewing and gluing something far less functional and strange. (“The world is better at night,” he says.)

Moffit, a handsome 35-year-old who wears square, rimless glasses and clogs, was born in West Bend, Wis., and received an MFA from Claremont Graduate University.

On this afternoon, half done, the leather and metal sculpture appears to be floating in a cloud of Styrofoam eggs. Several shortened exhaust pipes jut out at the back. A model on a nearby table shows a kind of aluminum cradle that may be added later.

Previous configurations of the sculpture “landed too close to car culture,” says Moffit, who draws from a lot of sources, including the architect Bruce Goff, whose unconventional expressionist work presaged New Modernism. A few days previously, Moffit realized that the red leather he had used didn’t work -- “a horrible idea” -- so he changed it to a powder blue with white trim, adding several days of work and expense.

“A lot of times the materials are the biggest influence,” he says.

He also recently shortened an exhaust pipe that had elongated the “body” of the sculpture by several feet, “like an exhaust on a classic Bugatti,” he says. “A nice sexy line, but what was the point?”

Although he doesn’t want his night work to resemble his day job too closely, Moffit is clearly influenced by classic cars: “Some of the things that go on in car culture -- it’s a macho way of doing feminine things.”

The piece is a marked departure from earlier work. Another piece -- resembling a spaceship crossed with a snail -- is lined with purple satin and velvet and functions as a bed. It looks nothing like the new leather and chrome sculpture.

“This seems as pure as it can be,” he says of the work he’s preparing for the Hammer show. “It all has to make sense, but in relation to what?” Then he answers his own question: “I guess in relation to itself.”