Keith Edmier at Friedrich Petzel

Some people go to Hawaii and come back with leis and ukuleles. Sculptor Keith Edmier went there and returned with research on lava, prehistoric plants, pregnant male animals and weeds that proliferate in fire-charred terrain. And this, in turn, helped him to formulate his latest sculptures, which reprise his familiar obsessions with sexual identity, reproduction and death, cultivated in a hothouse environment of narcissism and decadence.

In the past, Edmier depicted his pregnant mother contemplating him as an embryo through her transparent belly, and asexual flora such as orchids and lily pads. (He also portrayed his first childhood crush and collaborated with TV's untouchable "Angel," Farrah Fawcett.) This time around, his unconventional interest in gender found shape in Cycas Orogeny (2003-04), depicting a pair of cycads, or palm-treelike plants that evolved 250 million years ago, survive in male and female pairs, and reproduce by means of spermatozoids. Rising full-size and anatomically correct from puddles of cast basalt lava, Edmier's polyurethane trees have gray trunks and flat leaves crowned by vibrant yellow genitalia, making them the art world's most graphically aroused pair since Jeff Koons and Cicciolina. A nearby 3-foot-high basalt plinth supported a cycad "pup," or baby, implying the successful union of the leafy couple.

Less wanton was My Father, My Son (2004), a 4 1/2-foot-tall polyurethane and dental acrylic sculpture affixed to the gallery's floor, and consisting of a pink coral tendril topped with a small male sea horse about to exercise its evolutionary privilege of giving birth. The work possesses a beauty as fragile as the endangered creatures it represents. Completing the exhibition was Fireweed (2003), two 6-foot-tall reeds with realistic flowers and leaves created from materials that include vinyl, paper and volcanic ash. Like the sea horse, these sculptures have an almost timorous charm; one took care not to breathe too hard near them for fear of snapping their lengthy stems.

What did this Chelsea U. biology lesson mean? Aside from providing some obvious visual contrasts--for example, the solidity of basalt puddles versus the ephemeral-looking sea horse and fireweed leaves--Edmier encoded some interesting associations in the show as a whole: cycads, for example, possess root systems that resemble coral, while fireweeds extend lengthy networks of underground roots that thrive in burnt areas like fresh lava fields. Still, Edmier has been down this naturalist path before, and his flora and fauna don't have quite the resonance of his relatives, first loves and celebrity associations. He suggests that the link between plants and man lies hidden in primeval ecosystems inhabited by cycads, rhizomes and coral. In the end, though, Edmier's explorations of the root systems buried in popular culture seem likely to bear the greater fruit.

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