Hollywood

When Jeff Price turns a human torso into a bronze sack strung up like a desert water gourd, he stretches the form into new, sometimes disturbing realms of sculptural and psychological investigation. Akin to Peter Shelton’s formalized, objectified human forms, Price’s transmogrified body parts are more sexual and visceral.

Somewhat haphazardly this exhibit traces Price’s evolution of organic forms through various stages of development. From piece to piece dangling scrotum-like forms become stretched, weighted bags that wind up suggesting female lower torsos. The impact of this transformation is felt most keenly in the rough, massive bronze sculpture “Census,” a wall-pinned phallus that hangs from a steel peg like a gigantic, heat-warped bottle opener with buns. Next to this kind of overwhelming physicality Price’s paintings retreat into soft peddled intellectualizations. The drawings feel more immediate but substitute elegant mutation for primal force. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Oct. 7.)