Andrew Sexton: Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery.

A series of wry inside jokes instantiated via improbable materials and processes, Andrew Sexton's recent solo debut was built around what at first seemed a similarly unlikely organizing principle: His drawings and multimedia conglomerations were devised as "portraits" of friends and family members. Although its symbolic vocabulary occasionally suggested a familiar brand of neo-Gothic kitsch, Sexton's bricolage nevertheless managed to avoid the self-conscious seriousness that often plagues work in the idiom, forgoing moody introspection for genuine exuberance. And the artist was comfortable enough to occasionally play things for laughs as well--the individual assays, like the show in general, mostly pulled off the difficult trick of being simultaneously funny-strange and funny-ha ha.

Sexton, a 2005 Yale MFA grad, often taps former classmates as subjects. Adrian Wong, 2006, one of two slightly anomalous works on paper, apparently celebrates a fellow sculptor through a dense cartoonish drawing in ink and soy sauce on rice paper. Meanwhile The Yellow Rose of Texas, 2006--a huge construction of painted aluminum suggesting a map of the Lone Star state, coated with ochre flocking and pimped out with electric blue fiber optics and LEDs--was emblazoned with the word ROSSON (undoubtedly for the Dallas-born painter Rosson Crow) in an especially juicy '70s "Price Is Right"-style font.

For a certain demographic, the subjects of and references in Sexton's "portraits" may ring some bells; for those outside looking in, they're intriguing (if abstruse) vehicles for a risk-taking mode of assemblage that endows unlikely collections of objects with narrative resonance. Louis Hopper, 2006, for instance--probably the only work of art in history to involve a skateboard, a cobra-head beer tap, and a skull made of aged Cheddar cheese--vividly captures a funky burnout milieu, right down to its black Spinal Tap-style wall-painting backdrop and the mingling aromas of stale ale and party food left too long on a kitchen counter.

Sexton's persistent courting of strange adjacencies was also on show in The Michael Stickrod Experience, 2005, a bewildering conglomeration whose materials ran to steel, glass, wood, aluminum, foam, leather, tequila, car doors, and paint, not to mention a "custom Michael Stickrod Experience T-shirt," a Discman playing Hall and Oates's "Private Eyes," and a masseuse. Though the backrubs had long since ended by the time I saw the show (the therapist was apparently an interactive component conceived primarily for the opening), the booze and the tunes continued to occupy a little shelf enfolded within a pair of car doors, each adorned with one half of a painted butterfly emblem--a junkyard reliquary that somehow manages something approaching delicacy in its mock-serious representation of its subject.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Like any good mad scientist, Sexton also performed his experiment on himself, and his own Self-Portrait, 2006--made of steel, rubber tubing, and propane--was entirely in character. As I paused near it on my way out, the artist himself stepped from behind the counter and offered to "get it going." Wandering over to a large propane tank, he turned the handle and put a lighter to the bottom of the sculpture, and the thing burst into flame like a stage prop for a heavy metal barbershop quartet. Self-Portrait catches the tone of the show just about right--a peculiar and appealing confection of mood, material, and method whose brand of fond hyperbole is just over-the-top enough to charm.