Connecting the Parts

As the title hints, the group show “Glue, Screw, Wire” at Orlando Gallery is about the art of hunting, gathering and putting together materials to create assemblages.

The eight artists work in a 3-D medium that requires assembly as well as conceptual logic, and they meet those demands with varying degrees of success.

Pat Cox’s “Shelf Life/Vanity” shows ambiguous yet meaningful objects placed on a small shelf, alluding to the still-life tradition and the way we define our private life through small, sentimentally charged possessions. With “Victoria’s Secret,” Ursula Kammer Fox combines domestic artifacts--a cookie cutter, tea cup and photograph of a Victorian-era woman.

For comic relief, Lois Ramirez creates chairs fitted with breasts. Sci-fi has its day, too, with Frank Miller’s “Accumelator”, presenting blob-like masses--alien life forms? voracious diseases? environmental hobgoblins?--out of which tiny hands protrude.

Some of the work has religious themes. Eva Kolosvary’s assemblages include saints, flames of hellfire, and the design sensibility of religious assemblages, albeit funkier. Jari Havlena, too, alludes to religious relics, along with ghost towns and other dusty, archival materials. For Barbara Gawronski, smaller and simpler is better, as with the Dadaistic, fur-lined coconut titled “Holy Grail.”

In the impressive work of Annemarie Rawlinson, simplicity becomes her. Rawlinson relies on the leitmotif of old-fashioned wooden shoe trees and dangling orbs--a ball-and-chain image--to evoke psychic tensions, fear and loathing.

* “Glue, Screw, Wire” through Friday at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; (818) 789-6012.