Boldly linking all the pieces

Freud did not invent ambivalence, but he gave us some pretty good ways to talk about it. The Surrealists turned his attraction-repulsion syndrome into an art form, creating all sorts of queasy, soul-searching messes. Then high-end advertising took psychoanalysis and Surrealism to the bank, polishing their rough edges and tying up their loose ends to churn out a cornucopia of sexy grotesqueries that demands so little of viewers that it would be a joke if it didn't contribute to diminishing attention spans.

Wangechi Mutu's painted collages and sculptural installations take the eye-grabbing slickness and bold graphic effect of fastidiously designed imagery back to its slow-simmering source in the primordial stew out of which all life emerged. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Mutu's third solo show in Los Angeles gives stunning visual form to the interconnectedness of just about everything.

Think of her exhibition, titled "Little Touched," as an awesome and intimate portrait of the worldwide web of living systems: animal, mineral and vegetable as well as earth, air, water and fire, not to mention humans, beasts and machines.

It's a five-room extravaganza. In the main space, Mutu has used cheap packaging tape to make seven small mountains -- or seven huge breasts. However you see them, the flesh-tinted "Mountetas" appear to have pushed themselves right out of the similarly colored concrete floor.

On one wall, Mutu has assembled an 8-by-9-foot collage. Made of animal pelts, watery paint, packaging tape and scraps of blood-red paper, "Foxy Lady" pays homage to Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim and Hannah Hoche while evoking genetic mutations or a nightmarish vision of a tree turning into a two-headed beast whose orifices are models of multipurpose, multi-tasking efficiency. That may be what employers want from employees, but when it comes to one's digestive tract, most folks prefer to keep things simple -- in one end and out the other, one task at a time.

Mutu's abstract images leave such simplicity in the dust. Reveling in complexity, they transform distasteful subjects into ravishing satisfactions.

On the other walls, the New York artist has hung 13 of her diabolically beautiful collages. Each consists of one to nine framed sheets, arranged salon-style so you can look at the page-size parts individually or as elements of larger monsters.