Rona Pondick first garnered attention in the late 1980s with her primal and disquieting assemblages of disembodied part-objects and prostheses, such as shoes, baby bottles, or mouths. Since 1998, however, the New York–based artist has taken a different tack, fashioning her own body parts in stainless steel and bronze and mating the results with a variety of flora and fauna, from muskrats to monkeys; for Pyracantha, 2005–2006, for example, she cast an exotic evergreen bush in stainless steel, replacing its pomes with minuscule self-portrait busts. Such hybrids formed the core of “Rona Pondick: