Wilshire Center

One of the most basic definitions of art is that it make us see ordinary things anew. Take Pepto-Bismol. If you pour 10 gallons of the nasty pink medicine into a false-bottomed marble box (about 3 cubic feet in size) and station it in the center of a gallery, as Charles Ray has done, you transport the color and smell of a stomach ache into the realm of formal abstraction and process art. Though bubbly and pock-marked, the pink surface appears as solid as the marble walls.

Ray has created a similar--though more dramatic piece--with ink in the past; now he shows an “Ink Drawing� that traps a sea of black ink between two sheets of framed glass, filling the bottom half of the sandwich while leaving the top pristine. The wall-mounted work bows in the center from the pressure, suggesting the mess the gallery would be in if the glass gave way, but we continue to stare as Ray tells us something new about the nature of the dense black liquid: it can be a sculptural mass as well as a penned line and it can appear as suave and elegant as a black velvet cloak.

Materials are less important in two kinetic works, but Ray’s talent for engaging us in unimagined sights holds strong. “Moving Wires� consists of two computer-programmed wires that protrude from and retract into the gallery wall in a random pattern. In “Rotating Circle,� an 8-inch circle of the gallery wall has been cut out and reinstalled with a motor so that it whirls at 3,500 rpm. The movement can only be seen insofar as it obliterates texture, but it can be felt as a breeze and heard as the motor’s hum.

There’s an incredibly refined sensibility operating here that serves as an ingenious link between Minimalism, kinetic sculpture and process art. (Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., to April 2.)