LACMA

figure prominently in the sculptures, paintings, and installations of Victor Estrada. What is more, he often presents these biomorphic forms and organic images not as individual, discrete components of a coherent overall anatomy but rather in a continual and spreading process of uncanny couplings and mutual penetrations that may be the action of an unfathomable life force. Adrian Esparza suggests a similar restlessness and commingling, though in a cultural rather than a biological milieu. In a current body of work, he cuts up posters depicting Mexican and American pop culture into strips, which he then weaves together in a sprawling and unruly thatchwork that announces the interpenetration of two very different cultures into a visually exhilarating, almost incomprehensible, mosaic. Cultural and cross-cultural transformations are the foundation of Rubén Ortiz- Torres's art. His widely exhibited kinetic automobiles are wildly funny riffs on lowrider automobiles. Whereas lowriders may deploy hydraulic systems to make the cars bounce, shimmy, tilt, and dip in entertaining visual display, Ortiz-Torres exponentially exaggerates the kinetic capabilities of his cars so that they lurch, buck, fling, careen, and all but run amok; they must be put back together manually before they can repeat a performance. If lowrider devotees transform conventional automobiles into displays of automotive peacockery, Ortiz-Torres transforms lowriders themselves into lunatic vehicles that verge comically on self-destruction. His video series 2nd Generation (2003) is a cavalcade of improbable and preposter- ous transmogrification. He employs a computer program to morph images of popular children's dolls, comic book heroes, cartoon characters, masked lucha libre wrestlers, and religious figurines, including Christian saints, Buddhas, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, all endlessly changing into one another, to hilariously jarring effect. In the work of these artists, the nature of reality is never certain or even set but is forever shifting and elusive. The same may be said for their visions of individual and group identity. The unexpected new creatures that appear in their art, the cultural interpenetrations they reveal, the new sights and ways of seeing that inform their practice are metaphoric expressions of how individuals, societies, nations, and cultures interpose on one another. Strange and wondrous as those transformations are, there is nothing violent or destructive in their transmutation. To the extent that art may intercept and inspire life, their art seems altogether life affirming and life sustaining, a kind of aesthetic libido for today's world. Another highly complex strategy explored by these artists involves compound layers of content and embedded meanings in what could be called "false objects"— something quite opposite to what minimalist sculptor Donald Judd called "specific objects," ones characterized by a fidelity to their undisguised materiality and an insistent, even obdurate, literalism. There is always a conundrum, some aspect of unknowability, to the false objects produced by these artists; they point out the unre- liability of appearances, and display a resistance to easy and familiar categorization. 90 Both physical and psychological transformations fascinate Carlee Fernandez. In a series of still lifes (2002), she used taxidermy forms to create impossible hybrids that, like Frankenstein's creature, are grafted together from multiple origins: a life-sized deer sitting on all fours, as if relaxing in a forest glade, whose trunk happens to be a laundry basket; a rabbit that is part strawberry plant; a flock of parakeets whose legs and wings merge seamlessly with the branches they roost on. In Bear Studies (2004) she photographed her own nude body merging with a bearskin or sporting a bear's head. More recently she has photographed herself posing with life-sized photographs of men who have been important in her emotional or intellectual life, appearing to merge into them. And in a photographic diptych, Self-Portrait: Portrait of My Father, Manuel Fernandez—a work she also calls Man (2006)—she presents herself as the exact, nearly clonelike, double of her father seen in an accompanying photograph from his youth. Fernandez explores the permeable bound- aries and shifting descriptors of selfhood—of one's intellect, personality, gender, and identity. A sense of anxiety that may be induced by disruptions to the status quo and by uncertain transformation is a recur- ring theme in the work of Danny Jauregui. A group of draw- ings from 2005 plays upon the tension between Jauregui's quite realistic, matter-of-fact renderings of typical California suburban ranch houses and the fantastical circumstance in which he presents them: each is depicted as inexplicably torn from the very ground it sits on, sliding into a free fall into empty space. The falling houses are perfectly intact, yet the viewer understands them as plunging to inevitable, imminent doom. A subsequent series of abstract works pursues the theme of change in a more subliminal mode. He applies a filmy wash of ash mixed with water over an arrangement of parallel bands, causing his visual system of serial, methodical, regularly repeating forms to become blurred and obscured by this ashen fog. If Jauregui's earlier works depicted fantastical nightmarish images, his recent drawings suggest abstracted allegories of predictability and certitude destabilized. Protoplastic blobs, cellular forms, embryonic shapes, heads, eyes, reproductive organs, and brainlike lobes all

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