Ron Fondaw gives you the (messed-up, beautiful) world at KCAC

You can’t help feeling like a science-fair judge as you move through the Kansas City Artists Coalition’s Mallin Gallery and look at Ron Fondaw’s self-titled solo exhibition. Throughout, the artist draws magnetic poles and sacred geometry into his gaze, shifting his materials to match Earth’s geological churn.

In “Shifting Ground,” one of two mixed-media installations incorporating an outdated school globe, Fondaw finds an easy synthesis for this show’s key themes: astral mysteries and terrestrial woes. The piece’s large backdrop marries molecular precision with nature’s wild variegations: Loose seaweed squiggles share the space with tiny etchings of concentric circles and intricate angles. A few hand-scrawled equations and backward phrases (“newtron spinn” [sic]) add human error to the mix, capturing the potential energy of a theorist bent to the wheel.

The star of the multidimensional piece, however, is the globe itself. Wall-mounted, beneath the canvas, it juts forward like a professor’s chin, providing a concrete model for an abstract lesson. Fondaw is exploring a real phenomenon here. As molten iron spits and sparks in the planet’s core, Earth’s magnetic poles shift. As a result, magnetic north — pinpointed on Fondaw’s globe by a weight dangling from a red string — has drifted several degrees from geographic north.

Fondaw’s other sculptures are no less assertive or evocative. “Solar Max” is a handsome disk of rusted cast iron, laced with the kind of sacred geometrical appointments that you might find in H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. Spindly cutouts give one half of the hulking sculpture an uneasy fragility. Even iron, the piece suggests, can be volatile to the point of frailty, its strength enervated by years of rust. The solar connection is solid: The disk’s intricate cutouts evoke dark spots on the sun’s surface, fractures in the photosphere where magnetic-field lines break through.

Smaller sculptures are sprinkled throughout the gallery, but their shapes are less immediately recognizable. Many seem more like flea-market treasures, crafts assembled from river rocks and chicken wire, marbles and scrap wood. “Dark Matter” appears straightforward enough — a matte-black wood cone in a wire cradle — but a smooth, dreamy circle of glass on top works like a telescope lens, magnifying the base underneath. Stoop to look through, and dozens of sparkling blue ripples suddenly leap to attention.

Fondaw’s lenses offer glimpses of alien worlds, but the artist seems most interested in the answers that they hold for our own. On one wall, two squares of thick, handmade paper hang in simple frames. “The Water We Are” is the stronger of the two, its focus not on astral bodies but on homegrown contaminants. A gentle circle stains the paper’s center like a ring from a water glass, and grain and tonal flecks provide a pleasingly toothy texture. A treatise nearby states that hormones and antibiotics are poisoning our water supply.

The actual effect of these contaminants on human health remains an empirical question — research is limited, findings controversial — but Fondaw isn’t taking any chances. For the past 18 years, he has distilled his own tap water, and the circles on his homemade papers represent the toxic residue mined from the bottom of his home distiller.

“Burnt Blocks” has a similar environmental bent, imagining the aftermath of wildfires fueled by thirsty fields and scorching summers. The tiled wooden sculpture is a cindery carbon-black, but a few marbles embedded in the wood seem like buried glimmers of hope. The tiny spheres evoke healthier planets, microcosms of life and color within the charred remains.

As dire as the exhibition’s subject matter may seem — pharma-polluted water, geomagnetic reversal, wildfires feasting on drought — Fondaw’s work still taps into a sense of wonder, even a giddy playfulness. He invites us to marvel, to puzzle, to peer through a magnifying glass at an old world made new.

As a result, the show feels less like a politicized call to action and more like field notes from a curiosity bazaar. Some dangers are man-made, but others are just this planet’s growing pains, the slow shifting of magnetic currents along geological timescales. Fondaw remains sensitive to these concerns without smoothing over their complexity, allowing his sculptures and drawings to skew off-kilter and, yes, a little flea-market odd.