Downtown

French artist Daniel Brandley creates installations offering a personal mythology via distinctive re-formations of toys and other denatured objects.

“Orbital Beach” is a wall covered with an irregular scattering of sand-covered plastic mask fragments. Torn into bits and gently blanketed into anonymity, they suggest the aftermath of nuclear explosion.

In “Desert Piece,” a tender life-sized mask of a sheep’s head is covered with a fine silting of sand. It rests on a spread of plaster in the shape of an animal hide. The reference might be to the encroachments of the greedy civilized world on a natural kingdom, peaceful perhaps only in death.

Brandley takes the cuteness out of toys by giving them new suits of clothes and using them with the utmost seriousness. A cross-hatched grouping of sand-covered wooden staves (“Noah’s Arc”) parades a menagerie of miniature animals each drenched in sand. The eye revels afresh in the astounding variety of creation and the brain somehow short-circuits the fact that the critters are simply dime-tore stocking stuffers.

Unexpected scale works both ways in these pieces. In “Three Blind Mice,” the close-knit trio of fragmentary mouse heads are big plaster-covered objects, their ears coated in tar that seems at once to emphasize a heightened sensitivity to sound and to deny it by virtue of the muffling effect of viscous blackness. (Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., to July 9.)