Laid Out in Hollywood

A couple of pieces come across as a bit too obvious. Star cluster consists of nothing more than a handful of Styrofoam balls of various sizes, painted bright colors and clumped together with caulking, to suggest the title conglomeration. It hangs from the ceiling, as does the rotating Superstar, for which maybe two dozen or so vinyl LPs have been softened and combined in a big, irregular sphere. Among the titles I was able to make out are the Smiths' The Queen Is Dead, James Brown's Dead on the Heavy Funk, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume II, The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, and a Gershwin recording.

But Oré's lightboxes (there are four of them) actually deliver on his promise to rearrange the heavens. Birth of the Cosmos, for example, offers up an otherworldly welder — God? — at work, with face mask and glowing torch. Best intentions interprets a smattering of stars as the outline of a pair of canine-looking creatures kissing. And best of all, Why you don't hold a shark by its tail gives us an elaborate stellar rendering of a shark with a disembodied human hand clamped onto its tail.

While Oré has a clever concept that he gamely runs with, I'm not so sure it would sustain a full-scale one-man exhibition, which suggests that the Project Room idea of presenting emerging artists on a smaller scale is a solid one. The Art and Culture Center has come up with a worthy program and has proved it can find good artists to present. Now it just needs to work a little harder on the details of the presentation.