“Your Mouth Undone” presents the pairing of new sculpture by Michelle Carla Handel and new paintings by Eve Wood, a two-person show about the impossibility of making yourself understood, and the irrepressible impulse to keep trying anyway. Handel’s sculptures are mixed-media constructions of nontraditional materials, the sort of stuff you’d find lying around a garage: fabrics, plastics, rubber, tape. From these, Handel fashions sculptural objects that resemble creatures in constricting bindings or other gravitational predicaments and/or bulbous sex parts, but which still stubbornly straddle the fence of abstraction. For her part, Wood’s paintings are awkwardly edgy, allegories for a related idea: the tense standoff between images and their meanings. Her wild animals, human figures and tokens of industry coexist in the quirky, paradoxical universe of her imagination much more easily than they ever could out in the world. While Handel’s work has a tight, solid dimensional quality, and Wood’s oil stick-on-panel paintings are raw, both visually and emotionally, the two artists together give a quirky spin on the modern, bifurcated condition. They question humanity’s place in the natural world that we seem hell-bent on destroying, and the psychic, as well as physical consequences, of this disconnection on our existence. Garboushian Gallery, 427 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills; Thurs., Aug. 9, 7-9 p.m., thru Sept. 6; free. (310) 274-5205, garboushian.com.

Thu., Aug. 9, 7 p.m., 2012

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