Art: Irony will be on full display, along with demolished buildings, voodoo ceremonies and the human condition in area galleries.

Achair clothed in ceremonial garb.

A sensuous woman made of barbed wire.

An ancient archeological site illuminated by neon.

These are some of the works San Fernando Valley art galleries will be showing in the next few months, when irony will be on full display. Other highlights include drawings of voodoo ceremonies, sculptures made of demolished building parts and vases from 5th Century BC Greece.

The clothed chair--made of black wood and draped in kimonos and elaborate jewelry--is part of a group show titled “Furniture as the Artist’s Subject,” which opens Jan. 21 at the Century Gallery in Sylmar. The show, which runs through February, features chairs, lamps, tables and beds, some functional and others representing fantasy.

Included in the exhibit is a crouching steel and fiberglass man, whose hands form the seat of a chair. Also featured is a bedroom installation, with a welded steel bed and silk-screened sheets.

“The works use furniture as a metaphor for the human condition,” says Cynthia Carr, who curated the show. “They seem to stand for an individual.”

The human condition is also the subject--and title--of a group show at the Artspace Gallery in Woodland Hills. Opening Jan. 22, the show features figurative sculpture, paintings and photographs based on the human figure. “It’s about the psychological aspects of what we go through--emotional stress or just happy, gay times,” says Scott Canty, the gallery’s curator.

The show includes the work of Jo-Anne Morgan, who uses barbed wire to make “very sensuous human figures,” Canty says. “The human figure is soft and very pliable--who would think of using barbed wire, something that will tear the flesh? She has made something that could destroy the human figure, and made it very appealing.”

Also featured is the work of Los Angeles artist Marg Starbuck, who paints with her hands, creating abstract paintings with a vague sense of figure. “There’s always a close association to the human,” Canty says.

In March, the gallery’s focus will shift from the human to the environment, with a group exhibit titled “Interiors/Exteriors.” The interior works include close-up, time-exposed photographs of door knobs and a clay kitchen based on the artist’s memories of her mother’s kitchen. The exterior works include impressionist paintings of freeways.

Interiors also will be the subject of an exhibit at Woodbury University in Burbank. The show, titled “Steps and Stairways: Designers on the Way Up,” features the work of the school’s interior design students.

Ancient Greeks will be the theme of upcoming shows at other galleries.

The Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, for instance, will feature the paintings and sculpture of Enzo Palagyi in a February show titled “Gods and Goddesses,” and authentic Greek vases will be on display in March at the Cal State Northridge Main Gallery. The 53 vases, from 5th and 6th Centuries BC, are part of the collection of Los Angeles residents Hanita and Aaron Dechter.

The vases will be accompanied in the main gallery by an installation of an archeological dig that includes a small-scale amphitheater. Artist Jan Sanchez uses neon light and natural materials such as sand and stone to create surreal feeling on an ancient site, says exhibit coordinator Ann Burroughs. “It’s like ancient history but with a futurist fantasy.”

Voodoo is the subject of the next show at the CSUN North Gallery. The exhibit, which opens Feb. 12, features the black and white drawings of professor Dolores Yonker, who has been initiated into Vodoun of Haiti--”what we know as voodoo,” Burroughs says. “There are few people who have seen these ceremonies, let alone participated in them.”

Yonker’s drawings are based on a 10-year study of voodoo ceremonies, which involve chicken sacrifices, snakes and candles and are performed by people wearing white robes.

The CSUN South Gallery will exhibit the work of Steve Appleton, who photographs buildings before, during and after they are demolished and creates sculpture from the structures’ remnants.

In February, Contemporary Images in Sherman Oaks will feature highly decorated ceramics in a group show titled “Lowfire Highlights.” The eight artists, who all studied together at Glendale College, have used several techniques to make containers, plates, lamps, sculpture, vases and boxes.

Pottery of a different sort--from the turn of the century--will be on display at Valley College in March in a show titled “Pottery and Photography: Selections From the Fidel Danieli Collection.” Danieli, a writer and former Valley College professor, died in 1988.

Through mid-February, the Wing Gallery in Sherman Oaks will feature the works of Montana artist Jerolyn Dirks, who scratches illustrations of farm animals onto inked wax poster board. Also featured are the wildlife water colors of Debbie Cotter, a Northern California artist.