Un-natural growth is the disquieting subject for works by Mitra Fabian and Robin McCauley, whose show Disproportionate Priorities opens at Culver City’s Bandini Art from March 3.  The title refers to the artists’ labor intensive practices that allow the pieces to mutate in shape and direction, generating their own priorities.

Mitra Fabian works in paper and tape to make sprawling floorworks, beautiful topographies that, like fractals, confound scale. They could be urban developments flowing into the contours of the land, or at a microscopic level they may be proliferating spores, or rogue cells. Seemingly innocent, their uncontrolled growth presents a subtle threat to the balance of their surroundings.

In Robin McCauley’s work the un-natural growth is of hair, sprouting from canvas and even from the walls of the gallery. At first sight the individual hairs look like fine graphite lines, the canvases like minimalist works. Yet the slightest breeze lifts and moves the hair, bringing something of the wild into the controlled environment of the gallery.