Courtesy Sister Gallery, Los Angeles

Kirsten Stoltmann, "I Will Make This Work If It Kills Me" (2008). Mixed media on paper, 102 x 80 in.

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The turbo-consumerist ethos of the past decade has been tracked by a parallel — if less materialist and more meditative — boom: yoga. While the reasons for these twinned currents are obscure, Kirsten Stoltmann’s show, "Motivational Posters and Meditation Sculptures," wades into both. The LA-based artist’s collages and sculptures (all 2008) approach enlightenment from both sides of the above contradiction: expensive cars, swinger sex, and florid domestic aesthetics, as well as a fawning New Age sensibility. The large-scale collages often feature floral wallpaper, porn-y wood paneling, ’90s swinger ads, and hot rods, while stenciled or scrawled sayings variously channel the adolescent (FAT MOM), the artist (I WILL MAKE THIS WORK IF IT KILLS ME), and the very dirty minded (LAVERNE IN THE BUTT AND SHIRLEY IN THE VAGINA). The stenciled collages could seem merely a witty retort to Richard Prince’s joke paintings, but the aesthetic pleasure of Stoltmann’s works takes them a notch above the one-liner, particularly when the words form a flowery camouflage, or the blooms are rendered as vivid smudges of paint. Three large sculptures, shiny with an automotive-spray top coat, are less coherent. Like an X-rated Barbara Hepworth, Meditation Sculpture 2 (Seal on Rock) comprises a modernist-inflected cock and balls at rest, while another work features a shiny peach hand cupping a much-darker ball; the third, in a Ronald McDonald palette, is subtitled Hot Dog with Ball. Although the works seem obscurely New Agey — fit for a yoga studio courtyard or health food restaurant — their critique of that ethos remains opaque. Taken together, the effect of the collages and sculptures is nasty and funny but not, finally, sufficiently discomfiting. The subjects — porn, cars, flowers — are simply too static and familiar to make the works bite with any new, and inspired, urgency.

"Kirsten Stoltmann" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.