Frederick John Eversley’s recent exhibition of cast resin sculpture at the Jack Glenn Gallery embodies for me most of the vices of high-class Los Angeles plastic light art.

The bulk of the exhibition consisted of a number of centrifugally cast-plastic resin discs, approximately two feet in diameter and six to eight inches thick. These discs were of several configurations, rather like lenses. One configuration was a double concave lens producing a powerful reducing effect as the eight-inch rim thickness diminished to an inch or less in the center. Another configuration was plano-concave—one surface flat, the other concave—and yet another was a “doughnut,” double or single concave with an opening through the center. All were tinted in subtle colors—grape, pink, smoke gray, pale blue. Another smaller group of sculptures appeared to be rather like sections, but on the bias, of hollow spun plastic cylinders, producing objects with a compound curve, rather like large fingernails in configuration.

Eversley’s works are pretty because they are elegant in shape, seductive in color and obviously complex of manufacture. One admires them rather as one admires Fabergé Easter eggs or crystal flowers. They look as though they took laborious hours to make up and polish, and certainly they make perfect coffee table conversation pieces as well as being perfect coffee table sizes. Endless remarks about their subtlety (which hardly makes them subtle) and craftsmanship will be heard.

They are closed in form, easily comprehensible objects which radiate a clear-cut “effect.” The crystalized, closed circular shape is easily and directly understood. It is an object, perfect in its completion, yet seemingly given purpose beyond its form by the visual effect one perceives when looking through the work. Thus the object not only exists, but it “does something” as well, gratifying for the moment, but one quickly finds that the “something” the work “does” is one-dimensional and its ability to sustain interest terminates quickly.

Los Angeles, like New York and Boston, is seeing the increase of non-gallery exhibitions organized by individual artists or loose coalitions of them, to show their work in an environment congenial to it and uncharged with the commitment to money implicit in most gallery exhibitions.

—Thomas H. Garver