The Valley

A Few Good-Natured Blows: With an idiosyncratic, self-clarifying system of symbolic objects and drawings, Vida Ratzlaff Hackman takes a few good-natured swings at the posturing and self-absorption of artists and the art Establishment. It’s fun, but the blows strike home nonetheless.

In Hackman’s litany of disillusionment, artist and art object merge into gussied-up items of ridiculous veneration. Plastic common crows dressed in peacock feathers are placed on a pedestal, well-worn animal salt licks are encaged and thereby preserved by a system that removes them from being useful.

In wall-mounted photo assemblage pieces, the art satirizes itself to best effect. “Quack” is a jokey, symbol-laden series of objects that clearly show all the round-robin workings of the art-about-art system of thought that an artist is heir to. Progressing from a past where the saintly artist shoe salesman tried to literally “fit” viewers with a Braille-encoded message through the “soles” of their feet, the artist is now a perpetual motion machine of production and reproduction. Turn a crank and the photo assemblage quacks mechanically, thereby making it clear that this art is itself completely caught up in the system it criticizes. You know, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . . (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to next Friday.)