Two of the best things about Randy Hussong's work are his love for his love of sculpture and his love for his subject, namely, cars and the culture that surrounds them. If, as Weber has suggested, the primary endeavor of culture is to give meaning to life, then the automobile surely is one of the most pervasive vessels for meaning in our day and age. Building, racing, tweaking, painting, selling and buying cars all represent a complicated art form whose span reaches from performance to sculpture and is practiced by the most humble and the most priviledged alike.

Hussong's work is of the kind that could easily indulge in cool, knowing satire, but the artist manifests an erotic attachment to his subject that fills his art with excitement rather than cynicism. In his workd, the automobile is a metaphor in which men (an if this exhibition is about anything besides cars, it is about men) can contain and understand their ambitions, as well as their relationship to nature, sex, death and the joys that make life bearable.

This becomes particularly apparent in Triangulation, an installation which has as its center two accelerator pedals that read "Earth" and "Moon." By invoking the engineering fantasia which is (was?) the space program, Hussong demonstrates that all human endeavor, no matter how disinterested, scientific or practical, is a function of culture and its search for meaning; all endeavor is, in a sense, art.

In his attempt to bridge the worlds of fine art and auto art, the artist indulges a well-rounded appetite for materials: the objects range from blown glass to enormous woodcuts to a stuffed sailfish. The cumulative effect of all these things is a testament to the transformative power of art-a cliche if ever there was one, but appropriate enough considering the nature of automobiles and their power to transform society.

Hussong is at his best when he celebrates this aspect of mens' lives, but he falters when he undertakes darker issues. Demolition Derby attempts to deal with the kind of death instinct which is gratified by the automobile, yet is romanticized to the point of parody. The work lacks the sympathy or attention of some of the other pieces, and as a result is unable to treat the vulnerability and fear which are among the more difficult of masculine emotions.