Deadly beautiful

It draws you in, with graceful lines and sparkling luminosity. Human faces are barely distinguishable in its wings. It is a thing of beauty.

But this lithe creature kills an African child every 30 seconds.

Laguna Beach artist Leslie Davis’ glass and steel depiction of a mosquito is one of four sculptures at her new exhibition, “Worlds in Collision: Art, Death and Alternative Medical Science in the Global Community,” showing through Sunday at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana.

Along with Davis’ brother Gregg Stone of Laguna Niguel, Laguna Beach’s Pat Sparkuhl is also represented in the installation with 27 pieces. He focuses on mankind’s most important issues: religion, illness, war.

“Truly it’s an honor for me to get to show with these people, and in addition to show a collective of my work over the past 25 years,” he said.

Davis’ sculptures depict four devastating illnesses: tuberculosis, malaria, breast cancer and HIV/AIDS. They are accompanied by portraits of four pioneering researchers.

Davis picked the world’s top three killers and added breast cancer because it has touched her personally, both as a survivor and having lost friends to the disease.

The sculptures are made from blown or kiln-cast glass and welded steel in addition to mixed media.

The faces in the mosquito’s wings are those of its victims.

Tuberculosis is depicted by a skeleton that coughs out bits of dichroic glass, to indicate the airborne nature of the disease.

“Breast Cancer” is a giant tumor, hung from a mirror-ball motor, which slowly turns and allows the viewer to notice four tiny glass women who orbit it.

“The piece shows how one in four women contracts breast cancer,” Davis said. “They are all clear, innocent. There is no right way to live to prevent it.”

And the HIV/AIDS sculpture shows a fence-like structure, symbolic of a cell in the body, which viruses try to penetrate.

“This is a culmination of two and a half years of work,” Davis said. Since beginning the project, she has forsaken her usual revenue-generating work but finished without outside help.

The issues “I’m dealing with range from health issues to issues of war and religion,” Sparkuhl said. “All of it has an autobiographical bent. Fundamentally, what I attempt to do is take familiar information and rearrange it for discussion.”

Many of Sparkuhl’s works contrast heavily with the strong Catholic roots of Santa Ana. One depicts a saber that runs through 13 bibles, with an androgynous child atop them on a sort of altar.

“It’s a piece on molestation that is sometimes difficult for people, although it’s not graphic at all,” Sparkuhl said. “It shows how children are manipulated by priests. I grew up Catholic, so I focused on the hypocrisy I see related to organized religion.”

On the show’s opening night, Davis mentioned that every 17 seconds in the world, someone dies of tuberculosis.

“This was a show that really had substance and meaning,” Davis said. “The sculptures are made to be attractive, but once I get [visitors] close to them, they read all the info about the disease and understand what needs to happen.”

Davis hopes to impart her beliefs about the pharmaceutical industry, and to teach people “not be so threatened by stem cell research,” she said.

“My whole show is about hope for people, that this is new, cutting-edge research about cures, not treatments,” Davis said.

Davis first conceived the exhibit by reading Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” which tells the story of a medical student who began a community health project in Haiti.

Since then, the nonprofit health project has grown to have a presence in Latin America, the Caribbean, Russia, and the U.S., and works with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“I said, boy, if one medical student can make this much of a difference in how we handle health worldwide, this is a man I want to recognize,” Davis said.

She portrayed him alongside the tuberculosis piece.

For malaria, Davis chose to depict a friend at Yale, Scott Matthews, who is performing cutting-edge research.

After Davis lost several friends to HIV/AIDS, it became a natural subject for her art, she said.

She chose to depict Flossie Wong-Staal, the first researcher to clone the HIV virus, who is now working on a way to literally “lock” the virus out of cells and prohibit its reproduction.

Finally, Davis chose breast cancer researcher Shunichiro Taniguchi.

“He has an unbelievable approach,” Davis said. “He’s arming a friendly bacteria in our body; it goes right to the cancer and eats it. He’s had over 99% success in animal studies.”

Davis has larger plans for the exhibit.

“My greatest hope is that it will travel around the country as an art-science installation,” she said.

She has already set her sights on the visitor’s center of the proposed Gates Foundation headquarters in Seattle.

“The foundation has dedicated all of its funding to the top three diseases. When I heard that, I couldn’t believe it — they’re the same as the three I was working on,” Davis said.

“This stuff is a contagion,” Sparkuhl said. “You just take people to an art show and you never know what’ll happen.”

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is at 117 N. Sycamore, Santa Ana. For information, call (714) 667-1517.