Art review: David McDonald at Carter & Citizen

David McDonald’s characterization of his solo show at Carter & Citizen as a collection of self-portraits would seem to mark a curious turn for an artist whose committedly abstract paintings and sculptures have long resisted narrative implications. His is that rare brand of abstraction that feels convincingly organic: neither secretly symbolic nor aspiringly decorative; capable of drawing true poetic meaning from the conscientious arrangement of things in themselves — paint, wood, ceramic, cement; circles, squares, lines and curves.

None of that has changed in the current work. In fact, if the term “self-portrait” didn’t appear in the title, it wouldn’t likely come to mind at first. Low to the ground and modest in size, composed of raw and painted wood and cement primarily, the sculptures fall clearly in the vein of McDonald’s other recent work, but for the addition  of a single central element in each: a slender, enamel-coated cement column, sheltered or exposed to varying degrees by a host of other fragmentary elements. Gangly, awkward, conspicuously solitary and thus poignantly vulnerable, the columns act as surrogates for a self that might just as well belong to viewer as artist. 

Paired with a handful of small, wall-mounted, collage-like pieces that are made primarily from chips of dried paint and also evoke vaguely anthropomorphic associations, the work has a quality of tenderness not lacking in the previous work but merely extended here in a new direction: toward a more explicit exploration of the human condition.

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-- Holly Myers

Carter & Citizen, 2648 La Cienega Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 359-2504, through Feb. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday. carterandcitizen.com

Image: David McDonald, Self portrait (Protected Self), 2011. Courtesy Carter & Citizen.

Art review: Glenn Kaino at Honor Fraser

"Bring Me the Hands of Piri Reis,” the title of Glenn Kaino’s first gallery show in several years, at Honor Fraser, refers to a 16th century Turkish cartographer known for having made one of the earliest extant maps of the Americas. In a series called “Knowledge Transfer,” Kaino makes ink-jet transfer reproductions from Piri Reis’ maps but intervenes before the prints have dried to smudge and smear the pigment with his hands, thus obscuring and distorting geographical delineations that, made only a few years after the death of Columbus, sought to define the shape of the then-rapidly expanding world.

It is a trick that Kaino plays repeatedly in this ambitiously multi-faceted exhibition: the disruption of some commonly held epistemological strategy — a map, a diagram, a model, a photograph — to call attention to the ways in which knowledge is formulated and systematized. How do you know what you think you know? It is a question posed in every piece, often playfully, but with an undercurrent of social critique. 

Art review: 'Ingrid Calame' at Susanne Vielmetter

In the 1960s, Sol LeWitt did his part to invent conceptual art by giving assistants simple directions that instructed them to draw complex networks of lines on gallery walls. Ingrid Calame does something similar but different. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the results of her labors are out-of-this-world beautiful and anyone-could-do-it easy.

Rather than making up arbitrary instructions, Calame chooses two or three locations that strike her fancy. Her first L.A. solo show in 10 years, “From the LA River to Lackawanna,” features the concrete expanse of the Los Angeles River and, from Lackawanna, N.Y., an empty wading pool and the loading dock of the steel mill where her father once worked.

Calame sent groups of assistants, armed with pencils and huge rolls of paper, to all three locations. They traced every line, crack, stain, spill and chip of paint on the ground. The contours recall the lines police once drew around crime scene corpses, only far more elaborate.

Back in the studio, Calame selected sections from various locations and, assigning a color to each type of mark or its place in the composition, transferred it to a sheet of Mylar. Some of her drawings focus on a single location. Others overlay sections from paired locations. The show’s drop-dead centerpiece is a 50-foot mural Calame has drawn in raw pigment on the gallery wall.

The variety of shapes in all of her drawings is infinite. The uniqueness of snowflakes comes to mind, the miracle of endless difference all the more stunning for its origin in the grubby residue underfoot.

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-- David Pagel

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City. (310) 837-2117, through Feb. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com

Image: Ingrid Calame, "#346 Drawing (Tracing from the Perry Street Project Wading Pool, Buffalo, NY)," 2011. Credit: From Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Art review: Adam Ross at Angles Gallery

The icy precision of digital imagery meets the hot-blooded romanticism of hand-painted pictures in Adam Ross’ new works at Angles Gallery. Bolder and bigger, more focused and formidable than anything the L.A. artist has exhibited over the last 23 years, his gripping collisions of up-to-the-minute attitude and old-fashioned atmosphere form a gorgeous dystopia that is not all that different from reality — and all the more fascinating for it.

All titled “In an Indeterminate Place,” Ross’ hallucinatory stews of oil- and water-based pigments are nothing if not out there. Each seems to come from a far-off planet, accessible only by time travel or great leaps of the imagination.

The three biggest, at 7 by 6 feet, suck your body into a vortex where gravity quickly loses its power, leaving you suspended high above a landscape that looks lunar, only stranger: maybe Martian, possibly aquatic. Scale is hard to pin down. So is distance. It’s a little like looking into the Grand Canyon, whose mind-blowing, perception-messing vastness is both thrilling and humbling.

Ross’ paintings, often made of as many as 60 layers of variously translucent paints and glazes, simultaneously suggest microscopic views of cellular structures. In every one, the view Ross presents seems to have been enhanced by powerful lenses and intensified by the latest high-def technology. Giving the naked eye a power-boost, his works suggest that we are all cyborgs, at least in terms of how digital technology has transformed human consciousness.

Space-age surveillance and its military applications also come to mind, especially as they are celebrated in big-budget Hollywood productions in which nuance disappears in spectacular orgies of special effects.

That’s the opposite of what happens in front of Ross’ paintings. Their richly detailed surfaces compel viewers to attend to more than one storyline, which often unfold slowly, mysteriously and with no end in sight. While wondering about the size, substance and significance of what you are looking at, you also wonder about the relationship between photography and painting, abstraction and representation, fact and fiction, pleasure and dread, fear and excitement, life and death.

Mondrian’s palette of the primaries plus black and white lies behind Ross’ meticulous pictures. Malevich’s diagonals also haunt his evocative images, as do Jack Goldstein’s high-keyed canvases from the 1980s. Creating unexpected connections across time and space, Ross’ curiously contemplative paintings are slow burns that sizzle.

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-- David Pagel

Angles Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com

Image: Adam Ross, "In an Indeterminate Place #3," 2012; Credit: From Angles Gallery

Art review: 'Brian Bress: Under Performing' at Cherry and Martin

The multipurpose nuttiness that ran riotously through Brian Bress’ exhibition three years ago is tamped down and polished up in “Under Performing.”  The L.A. artist’s two-part show at Cherry and Martin struggles and sputters, sometimes transforming nonsense into serenity while at other times getting stuck in smart-aleck sarcasm.

Projected on a wall in the first gallery is “Creative Ideas for Every Season,” a 20-minute road movie that relies too heavily on a script based on Agnes Martin’s rambling writings. The dialogue is a mix of clichés and wisdom, earnestness and stupidity. Too often it comes off as a repackaged rehash of image-and-text conceptualism, its words called on to do more than they can manage and its visuals short-shrifted.

Bress is at his best with DIY sets, costumes and props, as well as with raucously collaged backdrops, preposterous dream sequences and whiplash edits. All are overshadowed by the streamlined stylization of his frugal movie, which smooths over the rough edges necessary for him to strut his stuff.

The eight works in the second gallery are also digital videos. Each flat-screen monitor hangs on the wall like a painting and sports a custom frame. Narrative slows down to a crawl. Scenes do not change. Nor do camera angles. And the characters pretty much just stand there, as if they inhabit tableaux vivants gone wrong. Weirdness gives way to something like tranquillity, which doesn’t come easy and keeps you attentive to every little detail.

More art reviews from the Los Angeles Times.

-- David Pagel

Cherry and Martin, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-0100, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cherryandmartin.com

Image: Brian Bress, still from "Creative Ideas for Every Season," 2010. Credit: From Cherry and Martin

Art review: John Divola at LAXART

Between 1973 and 1975, John Divola made an exploratory group of black and white photographs that built on the deadpan anonymity of Ed Ruscha's photo books while also scuffing up their pop-culture sheen. Divola's "Vandalism Series," shot mostly in abandoned houses, oozes the poetic mixture of lament and curiosity amid collapse that speaks of their conflicted moment in American history.

Like Divola's slightly later yet better-known "Zuma Series," examples of which are in the Museum of Contemporary Art's current show, "Under the Big Black Sun," the artist took spray paint to ruined walls to explore a question dating back to camera work's earliest years: What is the relationship between painting and photography? The 67 prints at LAXART, which become steadily more involving as you work your way through the show, keep complicating the question, here updated to absorb abstract painting.

Silver paint echoes photographic silver printing, the dominant mode until color photographs moved into the foreground in the 1960s. Divola uses it to draw on walls, subtly announcing the light reflections that animate all photographic processes, and sometimes juxtaposing it with light-absorbent black marks. In some of the most compelling works, he shoots into corners formed by walls and floor or ceiling, emphasizing three-dimensional volumes that get flattened out by paint marks riding the surface.

Art review: Zackary Drucker, Amos Mac at Luis de Jesus Gallery

Remember "the male gaze," the much-discussed feminist theory of asymmetrical power in gender relations between the viewer and the viewed? Zackary Drucker, an L.A. photographer, video and performance artist, and Amos Mac, New York publisher of the 'zine "Original Plumbing," toss an elegant monkey wrench into all that in a suite of 25 photographs -- and one doormat -- at Luis de Jesus Gallery.

Drucker is a male-to-female transsexual; Mac is a female-to-male transsexual. In these photographs, whose gaze is which is very much up for grabs.

The photographs were made during a winter visit to Drucker's childhood home outside Syracuse, N.Y. Looking very much like Candy Darling 2.0, the next generation of the late-great-Warhol-superstar, she poses at home and in youthful haunts in a pseudo-fashion spread.

Some pictures are disturbing and poignant, like a gray stroll through a snowy cemetery. Others, including a high school sports field with a now-silenced scoreboard no longer keeping track, make you smile. And still others, including Drucker sprawled on a bathroom floor or, naked, atop a dining table, conjure resonant sources high and low, ranging from art-star Cindy Sherman to tabloid-queen Anna Nicole Smith.

Art review: Whitney Bedford at Susanne Vielmetter

Whitney Bedford’s hauntingly beautiful new works at Vielmetter draw from a strand of maritime painting tradition exemplified by J.M.W. Turner, incorporate a bit of the Gerhard Richter signature smear, and cast a loving backward glance at old engraved illustrations. They are temporal and stylistic hybrids that hold together spectacularly well.

Bedford has been painting shipwrecks for nearly 10 years and most of her recent works could loosely be categorized as such. Her real subject is the sublime — nature’s fearsome, awesome power to evoke it and paint’s exquisite potential to describe it, to become it. “Untitled (Yellow Swell),” among the smallest panels at just 18 by 24 inches, depicts a placid sea with electrifying intensity. The ocean is a thick slab of purple beneath an acid yellow sky; the stillness belies an atmospheric toxicity.

On the grand scale of the largest paintings (up to 8 by 12 feet), the L.A.-based Bedford keeps the horizon extremely low, texturing the roiling sea with dense black ink hatchmarks, dangling in the sky oddly languorous streaks of lightning, tilting ships in the tempest and staging a consistently tense friction between flat brown planes and luminous turquoise gestures, concrete gray and that buzzing, ozone-charged yellow.

A small group of glass vials and a vaporizer (made in collaboration with Dane Mitchell) are more esoteric, and less interesting, attempts at capturing a scent specific to the expanse and volatility of the sea. The paintings more than manage that visually, delivering both a jolt of immediacy and a lingering, time-release intrigue.

-- Leah Ollman

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 837-2117, through Dec. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.vielmetter.com

Image: Whitney Bedford, "Untitled (Yellow Swell)." Credit: From Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, photograph by Evan Bedford.

Art review: Judie Bamber at Angles

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The seven works by Judie Bamber hanging now at Angles make a stab at answering the show’s interrogative title: “Are You My Mother?” It’s a rare question for a daughter to ask, but Bamber’s subject is the mother she couldn’t have known, the woman who lived and loved prior to the artist’s birth.

Bamber bases her modestly scaled watercolors and graphite drawings on photographs taken by her father. An earlier series by the L.A. artist transposed snapshots of him as a young man, and other previous works explored aspects of female sexuality. In this group of images, memory and sexual identity collide as Bamber pieces together a portrait of her mother as a young woman.

A few of the scenes are typical domestic snapshots: woman curled up on the couch with a book, or seated with light evocatively casting half her face in shadow. Bamber introduces a sense of time’s slippage in a second view of her mother reading, this one with a subtle doubling of the subject’s shifted limbs. All are gorgeously drawn, meticulous but not fussy, akin to Vija Celmin’s touch.

Things get more complicated, emotionally, in the images of her mother nude, pensively examining her body in the mirror or sprawled out on blood red carpet, laughing. Bamber’s scrutiny of these private performances feels at once like both a breach of intimacy and a precious manifestation of it

--Leah Ollman

Angles Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 396-5019, through Dec. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.anglesgallery.com

Image: Judie Bamber, "Mom With Tan Lines #1." From the artist and Angles Gallery. Photograph by Brian Forrest.

Art review: Linda Stark 'Adorned Paintings' at Angles Gallery

Linda Stark’s paintings are not carved in stone. But they might as well be.

At Angles Gallery, the 10 paintings Stark has made over the last five years are as decisive as ancient icons that have been incrementally chipped, scratched and scraped into existence, every millimeter of their surfaces an anonymous record of total devotion and singular purpose. Likewise, each of Stark’s intensely distilled oils on canvas has the presence of a talisman from a lost civilization, its mysteriousness all the more charged for being a rare remnant of a time and place that has vanished and is on the verge of being forgotten forever.

Even more haunting is the sense that the civilization Stark’s paintings memorialize is ours. To look at her quietly harrowing works is to see the present from the future, long after our cherished ideals and humanistic impulses have died.

That’s a fantasy. And a dark one. But its reality is embodied in Stark’s one-of-a-kind works, which turn easy-to-read images (a belly button, a woman’s crotch, the palm of a hand) and familiar symbols (a peace sign, a valentine, a swastika) into enigmatic emblems.

You do not read Stark’s paintings, like signs or texts. The undulating contours of their slow-built surfaces transform abstract depictions into flesh-and-blood experiences — nothing more and nothing less than face-to-face confrontations between our best and worst selves.

-- David Pagel

Angles Gallery, 2754 La Cienega Blvd., (310) 396-5019, through Dec. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com.

Image: Detail of Linda Stark's “Stigmata” Credit: Brian Forrest, courtesy of Angles Gallery