Featured Review: Roberley Bell: Inside Out

Featured Review: Roberley Bell: Inside Out Bell takes the surplus toy stock that crowds today's craft-store shelves — chartreuse, hot pink and electric blue foam blobs, flocked plastic birds, bright inflated inner tubes, and enlarged Gerber daisies — and piles it into tenuous heaps. The teetering sculptures resemble 3-D versions of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's lurid fantasyscapes, but they might just as well be compared to the recreation-grade woods and wildlife in Laumeier's non-virtual park, observable through the gallery windows. Whether the art transports the viewer somewhere bright, light and entertaining may depend on one's taste for guilty pleasures. And perhaps that's the point: Pitting nature against its candy-colored counterpart, the exhibit seems to discourage the impulse to easy complicity. Through January 10, 2010, at Laumeier Sculpture Park, 12580 Rott Road, Sunset Hills; 314-821-1209 or www.laumeier.com. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., noon-5 p.m. Sat.-Sun. (Outdoor grounds open daily from 8 a.m. to a half-hour past sunset.)

Mike Venso/Laumeier Sculpture Park

Roberley Bell, Flower blob #83, 2009, cast foam and plastic, flocking, tree trunk, plaster, 65 by 22 by 12 inches, courtesy of the artist.

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