Ooey Gooey
Dirt Gallery
7906 Santa Monica Blvd., No. 218, West Hollywood


Working from the premise that "all the best things in life are gooey," a deliciously lighthearted little show at Dirt celebrates the aesthetics of viscosity. Curated by artist Mery Lynn McCorkle, it features five New York artists whose work simulates the slimy, the sticky, the gummy and the gelatinous.

Elizabeth McGovern's quirky sculptures -- two mounds of hardened spray foam crowned with colorful plastic shopping bags -- explore the tactile potential of common objects and fall somewhere on the playful side of the junk-art continuum.

Karen Rich Beall's contribution to the show is a small brigade of translucent, jellyfish-like creatures that hang from the ceiling. With delicate coloration and long, thin tendrils, they are at once convincingly oceanic and wonderfully fantastical.

The bulbous forms and slick, candy-colored surfaces of Victoria Palermo's sculptures -- which look just like blown glass but are in fact made from rubber -- convey an infectiously cheerful tone.

The two most arrestingly sensual works, surprisingly, are those made in the least tactile media. They are also, perhaps less surprisingly, the two that involve food. Maggie Miller's "Passion" is a short, looped video in which we see a hand squeezing a goopy red substance that resembles cherry pie filling out of a hole in a small pastry--an image that, while clearly benign in actuality, is weirdly alarming in a video close-up. In Meredith Allen's photographs, we see Popsicles shaped like the faces of cartoon characters held up to melt beneath a summer sun, their unnaturally bright, sticky colors dripping down to coat the fingers that hold the stick.

Simultaneously childish and erotic, these two works proclaim overtly what the rest more discreetly imply: that art is a messy business -- and therein lay its most basic pleasures.

- Holly Myers