The pairing of these two artists at the adventurous Steven Wolf Fine Arts gallery offers a means to explore, from opposite ends of a personality spectrum, a similar impulse to re-create mundane, manufactured objects with the human hand. Oshiro — born in Japan in the late '60s and based in LA, makes faux dorm fridges and audio equipment that are convincing relics from the life of a wannabe rocker. Springfield, who is in her late 20s and lives in Washington, DC, painstakingly renders versions of photocopied pages from books; her pieces have a direct line to the mind of a lit or art history grad student. More than 20 years after artists like Richard Prince used the camera to coolly claim ownership of other artists' work, the practice of handcrafted appropriation addresses a pervasive yearning to give our prefab, but very personal, laptops and iPods warmth and fuzz.

The three-dimensional nature of Oshiro's work, along with its pop culture foundations, makes it the more immediately accessible of the two artists' projects. The spare installation of his objects in the gallery calls to mind an underfurnished warehouse loft more than an exhibition space. In one corner there's an unassuming stack of familiar white speakers — Bose Entertainment Sound System (2002) is its title. Nearby sits a small, lonely amp — Fender Vibro Champ #3 (2005). The materials listed for each of these are acrylic and Bondo on stretched canvas.

Trashbin #9 (2005), an object that seems hijacked from a Wendy's dining room, almost abuts a pillar. There's just enough room to peer around and see that there's no back to the thing — you can see right into it, a vision of the familiar backside of a painting canvas stapled to a wood support. There are stains of cola-colored liquid pooled on the top of the bin. The piece is a convincing enough re-creation that guests attempted to dump plastic cups into it at the opening.

This kind of art may be a one-liner, relying on the awe of being fooled by trompe l'oeil, or it may be simply an appropriation of movie prop–building practice. Yet there's something about the hollow interior of the rubbish bin that nudges the viewer toward a consideration of positive and negative space and the visual construction of the world we inhabit. What's plainly visible inside the backless pieces is the artist's signature. Wall Cabinet #5 and Small Fridge #5 (Black Flag) (both 2005) — the latter with a reference to the punk band expressed in an artist-rendered sticker on the fake wood-grain appliance — are installed realistically against the wall. Their trickery is not visible, a strategy that introduces an existential sense of futility. All that time and effort, and for what?

Springfield's monochromatic graphite drawings invoke the same question. They're actual-size renderings of murky copy-machine output: Call her a photocopy realist. The sheets of thick rag paper, with a subtly rippled texture that is one of the few signals that this is "art," are hung from the wall with an upscale version of office clips. The show includes 14 drawings, making it clear that hers is a committed practice that's dour and daft.

These works gain their power from the way Springfield lavishes attention on the tiny though often legible typefaces. You can read them if you're so inclined. The selections are quite conscious, although the artist has been known to nab a random subject from the copy center floor to shake things up. Astute readers will note a spread from Elements of Style ("11. Don't explain too much"). The artist engages language as an aspect of conceptual art in the same way that, say, Eva Hesse did by making wall works that extended from the wall. In fact, one of Springfield's drawings, Hang Up (2005), includes an illustration of Hesse's similarly titled 1965–'66 piece. The younger artist's act is as much a gesture of hero worship as an act of self-conscious art referencing. The land of academia, after all, is very much about deliberation.

Oshiro’s latest pieces, the washing machines and stacking washer/dryer units, are significantly more realistic than Kitchen Project, whose sink and stove hood sprout none of the faucets, handles or buttons needed for actual operation. Although still unplumbed and unplugged, the new work is all about the minutiae of simulation, panels of instrumentation articulated with tiny brand name logos and bondo knobs. Unlike the pared-down kitchen, it evinces little interest in the formal inquiries of minimalism (no economies of form or exaggerated scale) and is pulled down from other potentially iconic pedestals by systemic signs of everyday use. A trompe l’oeil virtuoso, Oshiro humanizes his sculptures with a variety of fabricated blemishes–chipped corners, drips and stains, paw prints, fingerprints, duct-taped doors and ubiquitous rock band stickers. The imperfection acts as a lock on humdrum reality and distinguishes the work from Warhol’s idealized reproductions. This oeuvre is also a step removed from last year’s guitar amp stacks and fast food artifacts with their accessible retro/pop appeal. Its distilled simplicity is all but devoid of easy allusive hooks.

The revelation of the artist’s construction techniques does not detract from the work’s asceticism; if Hollywood is lurking in the background, it’s as well-camouflaged as the artist’s hand, but surfaces as a voice in the debate over what these domestic set pieces are about. By stripping away many of the other art identifiers, attention is drawn to the artist’s (almost) invisible volitional choices and craft. Even the exhibition title–"Drone"–invokes a monotonous semi-inaudible soundtrack. In a phenomenological sense, these are prima facie objects whose meaning is conferred through a kind of reverse entropy peculiar to the domain of art–objects accrue meaning during metamorphosis from original to copy. This process illuminates Oshiro’s work in an objective and detached way, playing against the subjective implications of these workaday consumer goods. The tension poses questions–what kind of litany of the machine does the murmurous humming of our washing machines and dryers suggest? A connection to the relationship between work and mechanization is implied, after all, the exhibition is named "Drone" and these are labor-saving devices. If work and labor are key concepts, then play and leisure must be as well. The industrial revolution polarized work and play on a conceptual level but experientially they remain part of a single continuum, enhancing each other’s characteristics and value by contrast. So the sculpture’s raison d’être feeds ouroboros-like upon itself as the artist’s idiosyncratic vision acts as a foil to the "assembly line" experiences of the ascendant culture and its collectively-driven ethos.

Here, the single room exhibition presented a set of washers and dryers along with a wall cabinet. If it wasn’t for the stark, minimal gallery and the “do not touch” sign, the installation could possibly pass for an anonymous Laundromat. However, Oshiro’s deliberate revealing of the seams in the works opens up a rift in the boundaries between art and everyday. All the works are constructed of acrylic on stretched canvas with the exception of the washers and dyers reveals their falsehood. Other slips in the details allow for a visual chasm between the real, functioning object and its artistic counterpart. While the knobs have been molded with bondo to give the effect of actually being a dial, the temperature setting information is obviously painted on. The colors used to articulate this information are not quite accurate giving the effect that something is “off.”

Oshiro’s use of canvas and paint to construct a three-dimensional form is a definitive move on his part to reference and challenge the painting discourse, one that others such as minimalist Donald Judd and John McCracken have delved into extensively. The difference here is that Oshiro parlays this discourse on the boundaries of the painterly and sculptural into pop art realm. His modeling of mass-produced objects while hinting at and, at times, directly referencing minimalist works problematizes the purist notions of color and line that has defined the movement. The resulting effect is a mixing of syntax: pop with minimalism, and the everyday with contemporary art.

The idea of the doppelganger, a ghostly double that haunts the physical object, serves as an easy metaphor to define the semiotic theft and switching of signs. Moreover, the doppelganger is hauntingly present because of the underlying threats that it represents to the physical real. It represents to the corporeal world that it may be an illusion, opening up doubtful questions of its function and role in the practical everyday. In reference to Oshiro’s work, the installation is a cultural doppelganger as the everyday intersects with the artistic enterprise. The artist’s replication of daily objects through esoteric means such as art threatens or reinforms both worlds. The minimalist reference of the translucent blue and pink drips on the washers is simultaneously the casual mark of spilled fabric softener. The cabinet doors that have been closed off with duct tape are also a minimalist mark that can be regarded in terms of compositional balance and line.

Oshiro’s intersection of these various cultural borders in enterprising as it engages them at their junctures. The witticism and immediate familiarity of the works reveal the humor of the installations. It will be interesting to see how far and exactly where Oshiro will be able to take this method of verisimilitude in future projects. His current practice is reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s later series of painted brushstrokes that were an ironic blend of pop and minimalism. Similarly, there is an irony in Oshiro’s simultaneous comment on both the commercial and art worlds. If we consider the eventual direction of other artists such as Lichtenstein who have generated intersected commentary on the same terrain, it seems inevitable that Oshiro will have to take on more of the abstract nature of the minimalist concept. As in the doppelganger, either the haunted or the haunting will subsume the other; it is a tenuous existence that cannot maintain itself indefinitely.

Kaz Oshiro's work at Rosamund Felsen Gallery is amazing, as well-executed trompe l'oeil work tends to be, and also superficial, as trompe l'oeil work also tends to be — technique overwhelming all other concerns. Oshiro smartly references Pop, Minimalism and the Dada ready-made, but at heart he's an amusing trickster.

He uses the standard tools of painting — stretched canvas and paint — plus Bondo, an auto-body filler, to create spectacular likenesses of ordinary, mass-produced objects. He has made stereo speakers and trash cans, microwave ovens and car bumpers. In this show, the Japanese-born, L.A.-based artist presents a panoply of washing machines, dryers and wall cabinets, as well as a portion of a kitchen.

Oshiro is masterful at mimicking the textures of white enameled appliances and Formica countertops. Gooey, candy-colored soap-spills on the washing machines seal the persuasive deal, as do grimy fingerprint stains on the cabinets and stickers applied to their sides.

One of the stacked laundry units has a pitch-perfect trail of gray paw prints across the washer door.

The disproportion between Oshiro's extraordinary technique and his generic subjects generates a nice frisson. So does the contradiction between the stark functionality of the subjects and Oshiro's elaborate, esoteric, even fetishistic effort. The work is admittedly, proudly hollow, in the physical sense. The experience of it is enjoyable, and just a tad deeper.

Kaz Oshiro’s surprising re-creations of commonplace objects are trompe l’oeil mind-teasers that slyly extend and invert the esthetic end-game initiated by the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Flawless illusions, they appear to be what they depict--amplifiers, kitchen cabinets, trash cans, washers and dryers--complete with evidence of wear: scuff marks, stains, scrapes, stickers. As bland objects from the bottom of the consumer chain, they seem unlikely inhabitants of a museum or gallery.

All are non-collectables; they are slightly worn containers for things, receptacles of rock music, garbage, dirty laundry, plates, and mugs. Without aura or singularity, they seem too ordinary to consider as pathetic or abject; they have none of the appeal of Mike Kelley’s stuffed animals or Jim Shaw’s thrift store paintings. As presumably found objects, they don’t have the romantic patinas of rust or age.

A glance at a wall label or checklist, however, changes everything – along with a look at their backsides. Oshiro’s works are composed of acrylic paint on canvas, with accessory details molded in bondo, the substance used to repair car bodies. Beautifully crafted props, they are usually installed so that viewers can discover the backstage artifice of canvas and stretcher bars.

Oshiro’s painstaking replications endow seemingly empty emblems of consumer culture with meaning. Growing up in Okinawa, Oshiro was bred on a hearty mix of American and Japanese pop cultures. His teenage enthusiasm for punk and new wave music and involvement as a young adult with pop collectibles eventually led to disillusion with the commodity-controlled world of fashions and trends. While in art school at California State University, Los Angeles, Oshiro became intrigued by the Photorealist paintings of Daniel Douke, particularly his masterfully convincing painted replications of paper bags and various forms of metal. Oshiro became interested in making free-standing objects using Douke’s illusionist techniques.

Like a good magic act, Oshiro’s works inspire a curiosity that leads to insecurity. We don’t really like knowing that our senses are fallible. Although we admire a good magician, we want to understand how we were tricked. To examine Oshiro’s works is to understand that things are not always what they seem. But his objects offer more than just slight-of-hand. The works take on new significance after a viewer sees their canvas and stretcher bar supports and examines their surfaces closely for indications of the artist’s touch. There are real signs of life within the masquerade.

Oshiro’s painstakingly accurate models of unremarkable objects neatly extend a long established art history of illusionism. Since ancient times, artists have created trompe l’oeil paintings of faux windows, desktops, cabinets, and vistas that have bemused viewers with their convincing 3-D effects. Renaissance artists painted full-scale frescos that used perspectival rendering seemingly to extend corridors or architecture and to emulate exterior views. Ostensibly real insects or plants carved from wood or cast from metal were often included in collections of curios or cabinets of wonder.

As early as the seventeenth century, artists depicted in convincing detail the stretcher bars and backside of a painting, jokingly toying with the most basic convention of two-dimensional art. Such pranks were more than simply stunts of virtuosic rendering. Paintings capable of deceiving the senses tweak the hegemony of visual reality, opening the doors to the illusory worlds of fiction and the imagination. In their survey of trompe l’oeil works in western culture, art historians Eckhard Hollmann and Jürgen Tesch point out, “Behind the entertaining surprise that a picture initially triggers often lies a deeper reflection on human shortcomings and the transience of objects. The observer is both entertained and disturbed, aware of how superficially and imprecisely he usually sees the world. To deceive the eye also means to open it.”

Around 1915, artist-trickster Marcel Duchamp cribbed the forms of a store-bought urinal, snow shovel, and bicycle wheel, claiming them as his own art. The greatness of the readymades stems not simply from Duchamp’s conceptual audacity in pronouncing common objects as art. He was able to see that these everyday things could serve as sleek, beautifully designed sculptures—formally resolved in the mode of Brancusi’s sculptures or African masks. Performing a kind of conceptual trompe l’oeil, Duchamp made his readymade art simply by titling the everyday objects.

In 1964 Andy Warhol extended Duchamp’s ideas by presenting replications of Brillo soap pad boxes as sculptures. In a variety of ways, Pop Art embraced the depiction of mass market goods, celebrating everyday life and the universality of consumerism. In his exact appropriation of the size and look of the boxes, Warhol challenged the distinctions usually made between art and non-art. In a sense, the full-scale copies of Brillo soap boxes cleansed art of its usual content, claiming even consumer goods as suitable subject matter.

Warhol’s Brillo boxes can also be seen to be joking commentaries on the simple geometric works just beginning to be made in the early sixties by Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Like the crisply lined, regular forms of Judd’s cubes or Morris’s platforms, the Brillo boxes are simple rectangular solids, “scoured” of irregularity or organic shapes. But there is a crucial difference: the Warhol boxes have been silkscreened with product logos and a price tag. The philosophical purity and Zen-inflected presence of Minimalist sculpture is gleefully corrupted in the appropriations of Warhol’s Pop Art.

Playing off Warhol’s twist of the formal tropes of Minimalism, Oshiro has chosen to appropriate objects from everyday life whose shapes consist of simple geometric solids. Oshiro’s works are all variations on rectangular box-like forms that reference the unornamented look of Minimalist sculpture. In “Peavy Stack” (2003-04), the six components are arranged in a neat rectangular grid. Oshiro’s various kitchen cabinet works hang on the wall like Judd’s modular units. Oshiro’s trash bins feature bright monochrome faces that recall the fiberglass inserts in many Judd works. “Sony Bookshelf Speakers” (2003-04), a vertical row of six, evenly spaced, faux, wall-mounted speakers, is a direct parody of Judd’s stacks from the mid-sixties of rectangular, galvanized metal or stainless steel.

When Warhol declared in reference to his assembly line production of soup can and celebrity portrait paintings, “I want to be a machine,” he was placing himself in opposition to the spiritual and philosophical aspirations associated with art movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. He challenged the uniqueness of painting through repeated use of silkscreens, creating dozens of variations on his best known images.

While also made in series, Oshiro’s works are far from assembly line productions. Their time-consuming facture invests them with a perversely positive value, one generated from Oshiro’s personal philosophy that “To survive, you better hate the thing you like and like the thing you hate.” Following this twisted logic, Oshiro re-creates low subject matter in the style of a movement whose ideals he mistrusts. Questioning the efficacy of art, his plain-spoken works are kitchen-sink dramas, finding a kind of poignancy and purity in mundane vessels for garbage, rock music, trash, and dirty laundry.

In addition to Pop, Photorealism, Minimalism, Appropriation, and trompe l’oeil painting, Oshiro also draws on the poetic associations of found-object assemblage in his meticulous re-creations of the objects’ marks of ownership. These indications of daily use humanize the works, hinting at everyday lives beyond art and the act of art-making. Oshiro provides only the scantiest details about the owners of these objects. Like evidence from an archeological site, the rock band stickers, food stains, and detergent spills might spark theories about early twenty-first century lifestyles and culture. Oshiro’s trompe l’oeil objects are implicit memento mori, quietly asserting the fallibility of our senses and the mortality of all things.