Openings: Mindy Shapero.

For centuries, Europeans had the means to cross the Atlantic but didn't. The biggest challenge to ocean navigation wasn't technical, as one might suppose; rather, explorers had to conquer their staggering fears of the unknown. S'engoulfer, or taking the plunge, the French said of those with the hubris to sail beyond the offing.

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"Take your eyes out to sea," the title of Mindy Shapero's solo show this past spring at Anna Helwing Gallery in Los Angeles, is a gentle solicitation to travel the high seas--not the Ocean of Darkness, as the Atlantic was once known, but its metaphoric double: the realm of the invisible. Simply put, Shapero's "sea" is an abyss of philosophical and spiritual mystery, in which ontological questions and homespun fabulism give rise to eccentric, phosphorescent, and antirationalist objects. The centerpiece of Shapero's show was a seven-and-a-half-foot sculpture of a flocked white Buddha sitting lotus style on a conical pillar of curry-green lanyard cord; he looks like he's being shot up on a geyser. At its base is a wonky red circle with a stencil of backward text running along its perimeter. The looking-glass message, which also serves as the piece's title, reads I AM DISAPPEARING AND BECOMING THE SEA, THE SUN AND THE SKY. I AM EVERYWHERE AT ONCE. It's an impressive and ghastly construction with a strange, visionary aura. In the same room were a warped, multicolored spheroid (The Orb, 2003); a papier-mache rock (The Spirit Rock, 2003) with a vivid, orifice-like, rainbow "eye" painted on its surface; and a carbon-black floral cluster (Smoke Bomb, 2003) combining the spindly elegance of Calder's kinetic sculpture with the symmetry of Chinese fireworks. One had the overwhelming sense that these objects must signify something specific, mystical, psychedelic--but what?

A native Kentuckian, Shapero received her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2003 and works for pop surrealist enfant terrible Jim Shaw. She is a participant in the California Biennial, currently on view at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, and will be included in a show of LA sculpture at the UCLA Hammer Museum in February 2005. Yet despite her immersion in the burgeoning LA art world, the influences she cites most readily are the paranormal images of English Romantic painter Henry Fuseli, Andre Breton's automatic writing, and offbeat works of fantastic literature like Jan Potocki's 1804 Saragossa Manuscript--the last a transfixing mise en abyme that abounds in supernatural forests, esoteric rites, and gothic horror. A tribute to and parody of Enlightenment thought, Potocki's masterpiece is a key element in the lineage of Walpole, Coleridge, Hoffmann, Kafka, Lovecraft, and Borges, all writers who operate in a scission between fantasy and material reality.

When I visited Shapero at her studio in Highland Park (the stomping ground of Shaw, Mike Kelley, and Liz Larner), I asked about her Buddha sculpture. "Oh, he's passed through to the other side of the sky and is becoming a cloud," she said. Her tone implied credulity; I thought of young Blake telling his mother he'd seen angels in the trees. Shapero continued: "And the Spirit Rock--the sculpture with the rainbow eye? If it's pointed at the Smoke Bomb, it releases all of your phylogenic memories. If it's pointed at the Orb, the Orb tells you everything you've ever wanted to know." Then she added, with a half smile, "But you only see these things right before you die."

In addition to her works in visual media, Shapero also writes prose that ranges from slightly vexing to downright kooky. Like the literature she references, Shapero's supernatural is and isn't to be taken as normative. Her photocopied 'zine I Am Here for You (2002) includes a vignette about a "furry eye sack" that rolls around a village--as well as between two and three dimensions--stealing people's eyes and stuffing them deep into its fur. (A degree of rationality remains, if only in the villagers' desire to protect themselves from having their vision robbed; they fashion talismans and hang them on their doors.) While Shapero adheres to her own dream-logic, she makes no pompous, head-broken-open claims to shamanism or chthonic truths. Rather, she provides a playful space where metaphysical musings orbit (like non-Cartesian fur balls) around quasi-Jungian axes.

Included in her recent LA show were drawings of botanical, Rorschach-like, and peacock-feather imagery, as well as sculptures of clouds, which lent a humorously literal sense of landscape to the exhibition space. Simultaneously substantive and ethereal, Shapero's clouds consist of clusters of ruched and bristling spade-shaped cutouts of different kinds of paper, glued edge-up and packed together like metal filings. One, with rounded stratocumulus crests, resembles the petaled globes of hydrangea blooms; another is icy and polar, a rimed confection you don't see in Southern California except in undefrosted freezers. It's tempting to link Shapero to artists like Pae White and Lucky DeBellevue, who similarly build labor-intensive installations, coaxing intricacy and wow-factor from humble craft materials, yet the decorative aspect of Shapero's work is not the point. Her meanings are cognitive more than they are aesthetic. Shapero says her use of paper to construct three-dimensional objects "brings to mind issues of drawing, and pages of literature." Her sculptures are narrative compressions twice over: They tell a story, and the paper they're made of signifies what paper freights--language. But in an oscillating framework where text informs sculpture and sculpture both illustrates text and contains hidden narrative components--like the rules and latent capabilities of The Orb, Smoke Bomb, and The Spirit Rock--certain object-ideas result that defy not only logic but any deductive coherence between words and material reality. The limits of language are duly pressed; meaning is built from and disinterred via words. In an increasingly abstract trajectory, language eventually kills itself off. In Shapero's drawing Skinned Alive, 2004, one piece of paper, rendered with intricate markings that resemble fur, or perhaps tree bark, lies crumpled over another smooth sheet, like an integument that's been flensed. The drawing portends what's admissible here: dimensions stripped of their properties, meanings of their supports.

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Among the much-discussed current of artists like Sue de Beer, Olaf Breuning, and Banks Violette, whose content is largely driven by a discursive interest in goth subcultures and their heavily mediated relationship (through music, fashion, fangs) to a set of originary referents, Mindy Shapero operates in a different province--more metaphysical than metal, and where spirit isn't teen, but darkly Hegelian. With all due respect to New Goth (or should I say, "Nu Goth"), this is Old Goth, tending toward phantoms of the imagination that similarly haunted the likes of Poe, Moreau, and Redon. Her most recent work is Burnt Rainbow, 2004, consisting of an arc of layered spectra rendered in puffy paint and resting on the floor; another arc, of bare steel rods, rises vertically from the colored rainbow's ends. The piece is a rainbow and its reflection, but it's the colorless architectonic element--suggesting a rainbow's rebar understructure--that stands, and the brightly hued archetype that reflects. Both a playful joke and a proper wake, the work at once celebrates and mourns Keats's irreducibly poetic, nonempirical rainbow, which he famously defended in "Lamia" (1820), condemning Newton's cruel reduction of the spectrum to a mere prism belonging to the "dull catalogue of common things." Alas, Shapero's skeletal rendition, stripped by the cold heart of science, hovers pathetically over an unattainable, effulgent fragment of its Romantic past.

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In this ongoing series, writers are invited to introduce the work of artists at the beginning of their careers.

Rachel Kushner is a Los Angeles-based writer. (See Contributors.)