No one would mistake Phyllis Kloda's introspective examinations of human experience for the inaccessible navel-gazing of other artists' reflections on human life and culture. She knows that some questions demand the answers of many sources, and the woman does her research. Kloda is the perfect example of an artist connecting the personal to the universal experience, and makes poignant or humorous visual remarks on our culture, our fixations, and that bewildering veil at the end of life.

You can view four groups of works by Kloda now at the Genesee Center for the Arts and Education, which is also celebrating its recently completed renovations. The center's director, Janice Gouldthorpe, says that the two-year project to make the 110-year-old former firehouse building fully handicapped accessible was a "daunting task." But thanks to private and government grants, as well as substantial donations from local artists and members of the community, more than $110,000 was raised to upgrade the facilities to include a new brick ramp to the front doors, an elevator, and handicapped-accessible restroom and darkroom. What's more, Genesee Center transformed the inside of the building without erasing its history, says Gouldthorpe.

The renovations now enable everyone to partake of the cultural events hosted at the community darkroom, galleries, and printing and pottery studios, and the opportunities afforded to individuals like Phyllis Kloda. Gouldthorpe says that Kloda was an artist in residence at Genesee Center years ago, which helped her decide to get her masters degree and become a professor. After teaching around the country for a while, she landed back at SUNY Brockport, and now serves on the board at the Genesee Center.

As mere objects, her ceramic works are beautiful and crawling with symbolism; some meanings are apparent and some mysterious, the latter clarified neatly though her provided statements. Kloda is adept at the universal-as-personal interplay, initially inspired by anecdotes from her own life and brought into higher definition with the addition of other people's personal stories.

"One Size Fits All" is a large installation, a grid of cast clay and mixed-media oversized pacifiers. In her statement, Kloda explains that she found an oversized pacifier in a costume shop, and it started her thinking about the implications of this comfort device on our culture, and our tendency to soothe ourselves using "physical, spiritual, and/or obsessive types of behavior." Each piece is coated in items used and abused by us, some of which house dual meanings: pills can ease our ailing enough or too much; sharp pins signify pain but also represent acupuncture; cigarettes sedate our nerves and kill our lungs. Other items, like the feather-coated binkie, serve to comfort, but are not something you'd want to put in your mouth. One pacifier is covered in dripping translucent "honey" glaze, but also crawling with clay bees.

A series of six sculptures entitled "Pampered Freak" discusses a fixation of another sort. The title comes from a phrase Kloda overheard her friend's husband shout at football players he felt were "getting away with something" in the game. For the artist, the phrase was associated with the "pampered freaks" in our society: superstars and their sense of entitlement. "As a culture," she writes in her statement, "we have gone to great lengths to imitate these behaviors and create extraordinary objects that are associated with this mentality." For the series, the artist envisioned "small objects that demanded special attention and treatment. They needed to be intimate in size and set on a pillow." She used rubber dog toys for the shapes (which look suspiciously like toys of another kind) and a "playful aspect" when designing the surface.

Each organic, curvy object gives the feeling of exaggerated, distorted anatomy and rests on a sumptuous clay pillow, with tassels at the corners, and relief simulating embroidery. The surfaces of the unbalanced "freaks" are adorned, swathed, gilded in flowers, birds, and gold. The shallow gossip in me set about trying to recognize some hint of an individual celebrity represented in each, but no go. The closest I came was intimating Gwen Stefani from the little anime cartoons of the gourd-shaped "Red Birdillo," but I think that was projection on my part. Kloda's mocking eye is focused on all of us: even if we don't try to emulate the stars, we fall into casting judgment when the human cracks appear in their televised fairy-tale facades. Here, the privileged position is living safely outside of the critical eye of the limelight.

Kloda also examines the diverse lives of real women in the "Home Series," which was inspired by an article she read on the concept of the two homes that women have. The artist spoke to three women about their concepts of home: "physical," or material surroundings, which is represented by the clay sculptures; and "pyschogical," including activities and friends in which the ladies take comfort, which is represented by the laser-transfer decals and china-painted imagery. "Momma Michele" has two squealing babies and a book among the objects, and the images includes beetles and leaves, hinting that this woman finds peace in nature. "Sarah B." is an entirely different gal, with two cell phones bearing images printed on their screens (one is a lone figure standing on a beach, the other is Dubya making a goofy face), cocktail olives, what looks like seafood claws, and a clay New York Times paper.

The most personal and secret grouping is a series of five collaged wooden boards in the shape of soaring gothic cathedral windows, each with a pair of clay hands cradling birds jutting out from the bottom. Gouldthorpe explained that Kloda noticed that we rarely see dead birds, and wondered where birds go when they die. This is easily analogous with the greater mystery of death, which in the end secrets us away to some uncertain ultimate or oblivion. "As the Crow Flies" supports the largest bird, lying on its back across the hands, its head hanging over the edge, its curled feet hovering over its belly. On the bird's chest, the golden ratio spiral and other mathematical graphs are printed. The series hints at both celebration and loss, but without a word from the creator, confronts us as silently as the end.

Candid Reflections

By Phyllis Kloda

Through July 25

Genesee Center for the Arts and Education, 713 Monroe Ave.

271-5183, geneseearts.org

Mon-Fri 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat noon-4 p.m.