Art review: Aaron Curry, Richard Hawkins at David Kordansky

At David Kordansky Gallery, Aaron Curry and Richard Hawkins have built a gallery-within-a-gallery. “Cornfabulation” is a work of art unto itself. It’s also many other things: a 3-D frame for 27 painted collages and nine collaged sculptures; a photographic backdrop for those same works; a stage on which visitors play out unscripted dramas; and the ground for individual flights of fancy, which take place in your imagination.

At its best, that’s what art does, even if it sounds corny. There’s nothing naive about Curry and Hawkins’ art, which has no illusions about life’s cruelties yet still makes room for dreaming.

Curry and Hawkins have covered the walls of their three-room museum with cardboard sheets they have silk-screened to resemble a cartoon version of the interior of a country bumpkin’s shack. The faux wood grain and nail heads drag the super-saturated palette of newfangled consumables into a world far away from life in the big city, where mom-and-pop shops have not yet been replaced by chain stores.

Their freestanding sculptures and wall-mounted collages are slapdash masterpieces that seem embarrassed by their own virtuosity. It is as if the artists want their pieces to disappear into the hyperactive camouflage of their DIY wallpaper.

But none is a wallflower. Each fails to fade into the background. This willful failure gives their loaded show the bittersweet twang of art that sticks in your memory.

-- David Pagel

David Kordansky Gallery, 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., Unit A, (310) 558-3030, through Dec. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Image: Aaron Curry and Richard Hawkins, "Cornfabulation" installation view. David Kordansky Gallery

Art review: Siri Kaur at Blythe Projects

Siri Kaur’s photographs at Blythe Projects are all nouns, no verbs: barn, man, boat, goat, tree, owl. This, then this, then this. They typify the most basic of photographic precepts — point and shoot — which is not to say they are hasty snapshots. Far from it. If anything, they err on the side of preciousness, each subject a carefully set gem of private poetry. Radishes in a plastic bag on the kitchen counter. A goat alone in a leaf-strewn grove.

An image of a dead bee and broken robin’s egg on a windowsill is unusually poignant, a still-life teetering between bleakness and promise. And a portrait of a seated young man with mismatched socks emits a quiet buzz of friction, triggered by the mix of humility and elegance, warm amber and cool green.

Tenderness prevails throughout the L.A. artist’s work, but the whole doesn’t manage to exceed the sum of its parts. There is little in the way of connective tissue, as in Liza Ryan’s work, which comes to mind here and makes more effective use of sequencing and image combination to effect some synergy. Kaur’s pictures are bound simply by their stillness and interiority, and by their beautiful dusk and dawn light, which helps turn up the emotional volume in the absence of a more compelling approach.

-- Leah Ollman

Blythe Projects, 5797 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 272-3642, through Dec. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.blytheprojects.net

Image: Siri Kaur, "Jamie," from Blythe Projects

Art review: F. Scott Hess at Koplin Del Rio

F. Scott Hess’ new paintings at Koplin Del Rio give palpable answers to questions we’ll never know. They suggest allegories of uncertain moral persuasion. They give clear and reasonable form to situations obscure, improbable and deliciously ambiguous. A tsunami-scaled wave crashes into a beachfront house and a young woman greets it with ecstatic abandon. Five ballet dancers heave the waxen bulk of the dead French painter Bouguereau toward an open, upper floor window, as if to toss him out. A young woman, nude among equally ripe raspberry brambles, sucks her thumb and fingers her hair in the manner of a toddler.

Several discernible themes do emerge: aging and generational succession, natural cataclysms, violent upheaval, sexual energy and assorted human vulnerabilities. Among the strongest works are self-portraits, overt acts of exposure that Hess loads with autobiographical details of place and process. In “Self-Portrait as a Masterpiece of Creation,” he stands naked in his studio, facing us and holding a blank panel like a challenging mirror to our eager gaze.

Hess, who has lived and worked in L.A. for nearly three decades, is among the more visually generous painters around. His surfaces glow from within, thanks to his facility with Old Master techniques. His colors ring with vitality, his forms have convincing tactility and texture, and his compositions are taut. He drops multiple clues to his sources and influences — Velasquez, Beckmann, Freud, Rembrandt, Michelangelo — and something of the spicy strangeness of Tooker and even Balthus can be found in the work too. The paintings have verve to spare. Hess will be completing the large title painting, “In Transit,” in the gallery during the run of the show.

-- Leah Ollman

Koplin Del Rio, 6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-9055, through Dec. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.  www.koplindelrio.com

Image: F. Scott Hess, "Self-Portrait as a Masterpiece of Creation." From Koplin Del Rio.

 

Art review: 'Have You Seen Me' at Las Cienegas Projects

The emotional center of “Have You Seen Me,” a whimsical, bittersweet tangle of a group show at Las Cienegas Projects, is not an artwork as such, but an empty chair, just big enough for a child, that is tucked into the hollow of a large wood-and-paper tree trunk. 

Curated by Tanya Haden and Anna Oxygen, the show weaves the work of a dozen women artists into what feels like a fairy tale stage set. There are several more trees, between which papier-mâché storybook characters created by Haden mingle with strange plush totem poles by Megan Whitmarsh and a family of Marnie Weber’s marvelously chilling “scarecrows.” One corner is wallpapered to resemble a little girl’s bedroom, with a giant doll whose torso opens to reveal a puppet stage. (Several performances — puppet and otherwise — were held within the installation the night of the opening.) In another corner, Little Red Riding Hood collapses on a bed, out from under which slithers a sparkling green snake by performance artist Johanna Went. Paintings by Haden, Flora Golden and Allison Schulnik dot the walls.

Each of the trees has something tucked inside, but it’s the chair that brings the show together. In clearing the space for an actual child, it grounds what might have been a flippant meditation on female imagination and fantasy in the real sensations of childhood, evoking feelings of loneliness, fear, delight, bafflement and humor. It’s hardly new territory, as the show’s multigenerational nature attests. Handled thoughtfully, however, as it is here, it remains a rich reserve.

-- Holly Myers

Las Cienegas Projects, 2045 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 595-8017, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.lascienegasprojects.org

 

Art review: Terry O'Shea at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art

“Terry O’Shea: Actual Size,” at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, is an intriguing counterpoint to the sublimely polished works of the Light and Space luminaries — Craig Kauffman, Helen Pashgian, De Wain Valentine and others — so prominently featured in Pacific Standard Time. A contemporary of those artists, though far less known today (he died in 2002), he was similarly immersed in the artistic exploration of the resins and acrylics that were being industrially developed in the 1960s. 

His approach, however, was strikingly different.  The dozen or so cast resin pieces included in the show — a series of wall-mounted panels, another of sculptural slabs and another of small, colorfully striped capsule-shaped objects — are rougher, messier and less precious than the work one tends to associate with the Finish Fetish ethos. Though geometric in shape, with smooth, clean edges, they’re filled with what look like smudges, smears and stains: amorphous, seemingly arbitrary blobs of pigment, floating as if fossilized in the translucent resin.

The effect is darker, more psychological than the work of Kauffman or Pashgian. The wall-mounted pieces, which range from 1 to 3 feet square, have an air of woozy decadence, with gleaming flecks of phosphorescent pigment churned into fields of deep, glossy black. The slabs are pools of pallid skin tones, filled with smudges of color that are vaguely biological in character, evoking the realm of a petri dish. Even the capsules feel mildly sinister, with their sickly sweet colors and medicinal implications. 

What’s most surprising about the work is how contemporary it looks. The cultivation of the stain, the smudge, the accident; the decadent quality; the almost slacker indifference to pictorial cohesion; the somewhat sour sensuality and dark psychological tone are all qualities that come to fruition in subsequent generations. One sees traces in O’Shea of artists as diverse as Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhodes, Sterling Ruby, Jedediah Caesar and Martin Durazo.

O’Shea’s subsequent obscurity is a bit of a mystery. But for a handful of anecdotal allusions — Peter Alexander called him a “real odd bird” in an oral history conducted in the 1990s — there is almost no evidence at all of his career online. Thanks to an untitled 1971 conceptual piece included at the start of the show, however, we know that at least one of his works found a place in, or, in any case, near, LACMA’s collection — and we gain some insight, perhaps, into his thoughts on posterity. 

The piece — which consists of the image of a triangular, cast resin sculpture framed beside a notarized letter from the artist — was made in response to having won the museum’s New Talent Award in 1965, one condition of which was that the artist would donate a work to the museum.  The photograph depicts the work he elected to donate. The letter attests to his having hurled that work over the fence and into the tar pits alongside the museum, where it presumably remains.

-- Holly Myers

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through Nov. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cardwelljimmerson.com

Artist Judy Chicago revisits Southern California [video]

Never mind the fact that Judy Chicago now lives in New Mexico. She has spent the better part of the last two months in Los Angeles — her hometown in the '60s and early '70s. It was no vacation: As one of the most visible artists included in Pacific Standard Time, with works appearing in roughly a dozen gallery and museum exhibitions, she was busy preparing for openings and giving various talks.

(She will be back in January to kick off the performance art festival and get ready for a pair of solo gallery shows in February — at Nye & Brown in Culver City and Jancar Gallery in Chinatown.)

The Times caught up with Chicago and curator Rebecca McGrew to talk about her work from her L.A. days, like her spray-painted car hoods that came well before those of Richard Prince — a fact that she says John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha pointed out to Prince himself. In the Times video below, taken at the Getty Center, Chicago says that early on she painted "like a man" to gain acceptance in the male-dominated art world.

Some would call her work from the period pre-feminist. Chicago sees it as proto-feminist. Either way it packs a graphic punch and represents a serious attempt to infiltrate a macho art scene all but closed to women.

Art review: Betye Saar at Roberts and Tilton

 
Call it a serial retrospective, the sprinkling of Betye Saar’s work throughout a substantial spread of Pacific Standard Time shows. Whatever each exhibition’s context—overall survey of the postwar decades, focus on the evolution of L.A.’s African-American art scene, a look at art of the late ‘60s/early’70s as cultural critique—Saar’s work matters and is seminal to the particular art historical lesson being taught.

For a more concentrated jolt, and a sense of how Saar’s potent sensibility manifests on its own terms, head to Roberts and Tilton. Her “Red Time” installation there occupies a single, modest-size room and functions as a macro-assemblage in itself, a grouping of objects whose individual resonance deepens and grows more complex in relation to the others. The walls are painted an intense cherry red, and works are mounted high and low, suspended from above and resting on the floor. Each of them is red or at least partly so, and the references range from blood to fire, from the heart to the stereotypically oversized lips of a little black Sambo character, from the flesh of a watermelon slice to the fabric of a mammy figure’s dress. Red is the color of life and of power, of passion and pain—all of which pulsate at once within this richly textured chamber.

The found objects and assemblages here date as far back as the ‘60s, but the bulk of the work is recent. Saar has a crafty way with time that helps give the whole continuity and coherence. She steeps her work in memory but charges it with immediacy. New and old pieces alike look backward and by implication, project forward. Materials with a timeless, spiritual aura (a Haitian-style beaded and sequined flag, a Coptic cross, a tabletop altar, a sculpted Buddha) co-exist among objects referring to a distinct place and period—racist clichés from the material archive of American popular culture, ships and chains recalling the transport of Africans to slavery.

Art review: Charles Gaines at Susanne Vielmetter

 
The austere and often confounding work of conceptual artist Charles Gaines makes an appearance in several Pacific Standard Time exhibitions but finds its fullest expression in a solo show of recent work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Coming at the height of a 40-year-plus career, it is an elegant, rigorous and challenging show, one that asks a good deal from the intelligence of its audience but amply rewards the investment.

Working in the tradition of John Cage and Sol LeWitt, Gaines generates his work by means of complicated, predetermined systems of rules. For “String Theory: Rewriting Bataille,” a series of drawings installed in the gallery’s front room, he rearranged passages from the French writer Georges Bataille using a complex method of his own devising to produce sentences that are grammatical in structure but random in word choice, such as: “Even Eros excuses violent trembling where emptiness must triumph.” 

The result is transcribed in type-like print across large, beautifully executed graphite drawings depicting what appear to be plumes of smoke. The drawings, like the  texts, are seductive but impenetrable, presenting a semblance of poetic content while blocking the viewer at the level of the surface, thus drawing a compelling parallel between the surface of language — words whose meaning is nonsensical or opaque — and the surface of the picture plane.

Art review: Margarita Cabrera at Walter Maciel Gallery

 
Drawing on strands of several recent projects, Margarita Cabrera’s third solo show at Walter Maciel Gallery offers the most comprehensive glimpse yet of the El Paso-based artist’s impressively ambitious enterprise, an astute amalgamation of conceptual art, craft and political activism. 

The show includes a number of works produced in recent years in the collaborative workshops that are her modus operandi, involving volunteers from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border: sculptures involving the tools of farm workers, beautifully adorned with ceramic flowers and butterflies; a stuffed cactus made from border patrol uniforms; a flock of 500 life-size Monarch butterflies — a species whose annual migration stretches from Canada to Mexico — made from copper using traditional Mexican techniques and stamped with images of the American penny. 

What’s new is the introduction — by way of a taco cart stocked with items of Michoacán copper work, all for sale at reasonable prices (with proceeds returning to the craftsmen) — of Florezca Inc., a functioning, for-profit, multinational corporation, founded by Cabrera, that will serve as a kind of umbrella organization for future collaborative projects. It is a brilliant stroke of critical pragmatism: a mechanism to facilitate the production of art on a community scale while conceptually addressing issues of globalism, labor practices, corporate legality and immigration, as well as allowing Cabrera, who herself immigrated from Monterrey, Mexico, as a child, to formally designate her collaborators as shareholders, thereby conferring upon them the profits of their labors and granting “members of the Spanish-speaking immigrant community in the U.S., the same rights and protection accorded to the shareholders and employees of other multinational concerns.” 

-- Holly Myers

Walter Maciel Gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 839-1840. Ends Oct. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.waltermacielgallery.com

Above: Margarita Cabrera's "Craft of Resistance." Credit: Courtesy of Walter Maciel Gallery

 

 

 

Art review: 'Chris Barnard: Toward Trinity' at Luis de Jesus

Romantic traditions of American landscape painting get apocalyptic comeuppance from our post-nuclear era in eight new paintings by Chris Barnard. Dubbed "Toward Trinity," presumably after the New Mexico blast site where the first nuclear weapon was detonated 66 years ago, the works are a pointedly unhealthful concoction of glamour and destruction, thrilling power and impending ruination.

Last year Barnard showed paintings fusing imagery of military power with abstraction. He goes for a similar blend here, at the new Culver City location of Luis de Jesus Gallery. The balance is tough to capture, but he manages it more often than not.

The most compelling example is a desert vista with a florid sky as dramatic as anything Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Edwin Church painted in 19th-Century expansionist glorification of a Jacksonian Western landscape. Barnard puts a modern viewing stand -- a notably empty grid, the spectators absent or perhaps vaporized -- in the foreground; there, it faces a cold white flash of intense light at the distant horizon.

Almost imperceptibly, the heavenly clouds begin to wrap the viewing stand far below. (The stand also seems to be dissolving.) It's an impossible feat of natural science, but a direct hit of painterly artifice.

Luis de Jesus, 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 838-6000, through Oct. 15. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.luisdejesus.com

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photo: Chris Barnard, "Crowd Pleaser (New Mexico)," 2011, oil on canvas, 48x64." Credit: Luis de Jesus Gallery