WILSHIRE CENTER

There is an urgent, Dionysiac vitality about Kenneth Ferguson’s pots and platters that inject his basically utilitarian works with a strangely animalistic eroticism. The veteran ceramist mines the muscular, fluid decoration of Japanese Oribe pottery, as well as the 17th-Century tradition of Staffordshire “Adam and Eve” iconography to create an idiosyncratic hybrid that is at once graceful, voluptuous, and slightly clumsy, much like the contours of a Rubens nude.

Ferguson’s favorite form is the lidded jar, in this case a tall, smokestack-like piece, whose gun-metal metallic glazes, protuberant lines and patinaed surface suggests aging industrial architecture rather than a decorous household object. The platters and baskets are slightly more genteel, particularly those in white clay with ethereal blue salt glazes. Yet their deeply etched motifs (mermaids, Adam and Eve, bounding rabbits), crusty surfaces and creased rims, express a barely restrained bawdiness, as if the malleable clay were metamorphosing into human flesh, ripe for kneading and probing.

Anne Kraus’ autobiographical “Narrative Vessels” seem positively virginal by comparison. Her tea sets, plates and vases become the stages for love-lorn, anxious scenarios and texts, where Edward Gorey-like figures pine for lost loves or revive their spirits with sudden inspirations seemingly conjured from Samuel Smiles’ “Self Help” manual.

Kraus’ heavy-handed forms and decorations (bottle green and blue washes juxtaposed against clashing pinks and beiges) creates an hermetic, overly precious world that evokes a repressive Victorianism, where taking tea or arranging flowers in a vase become ritualistic escapes from the rather barren torment of brooding loneliness and despair. Form thus perfectly complements content, although one can’t help thinking that Kraus has sealed herself up in an aesthetic backwater that ultimately suffocates her creativity rather than nourishes it. (Garth Clark, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to April 2.)