Art review: Stanya Kahn at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Stanya Kahn is the sort of performer who has only to walk down the street to be riveting — as proven repeatedly in the numerous video works of recent years that feature her mostly doing just that: wandering the streets of L.A. in a Viking hat and a bloody nose, carrying a wedge of fake Swiss cheese in “Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out” of 2006; hobbling down urban streets and desert dirt roads on crutches, her head wrapped in bandages, in “It’s Cool, I’m Good” of 2010.

In “Lookin’ Good, Feelin’ Good,” one of four videos in her second solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, we find her strutting through town in a giant foam penis costume: talking on her cellphone, high-fiving strangers, ordering a hot dog at Wienerschnitzel. The effect is as bizarrely amusing as ever.

More intriguing, however — and no less entertaining — is the departure she makes in the other three videos, removing herself entirely as a character and focusing on what is clearly a highly developed instinct for the visual language of video (one often overshadowed by her charismatic presence) on the activation of inanimate objects.

“Happy Song for You,” a vividly peculiar impressionistic short made last year in collaboration with artist Lynn Foulkes, appears to have served as the launching point for a looser and more richly imaginative exploration of objects.

Art review: 'Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha' at Blum & Poe

"Requiem for the Sun: The Art of the Mono-ha," at Blum & Poe, explores a rich sliver of 20th century Japanese art that, though little known this side of the Pacific, provides an illuminating counterpoint to Western traditions of Minimalism and Land Art. 

Mono-ha, which translates roughly as "school of things," was the name given to a loose group of artists — there are 10 in the show — working in Japan in the socially tumultuous period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The work, formulated largely in reaction to Western Modernism, is elemental and rigorously spare, favoring the careful arrangement of found objects over the crafting of raw materials. Of the nearly three dozen sculptures in the show, none involves more than two or three elements, composed with exquisite deliberation: a 14-foot steel pipe stuffed with cotton (by Katsuro Yoshida); a pair of black, lacquered steel containers filled so precisely with water that the liquid surface is indistinguishable from the lacquered sides (by Nobuo Sekine); a raw chunk of granite, 5 feet square, that sits like a weightless trinket in a huge paper envelope (by Susumu Koshimizu).  (Because of the originally ephemeral nature of the work, the majority of the pieces in the show are artist-sanctioned re-creations.)

The arrangements draw upon the unique physicality of each material, playing up contrasts and dialectical relationships — light and heavy; solid and hollow; hard and soft; organic and industrial — with a precision that gives them the feel of 3-D koans. Like the American Minimalists, the Mona-ha artists often employed these materials in such a way as to call attention to a work’s surroundings, emphasizing its effect on the space it occupied.

In a canonical work by Lee Ufan, the Korean-born artist who became the movement’s central theoretician, a large stone rests on a plate of glass that’s been shattered by its weight. In Kishio Suga’s “Infinite Situation II (steps),” a gallery stairwell has been filled with sand and graded into a smooth, even incline — a gesture that gently but decisively eradicates the function of the architecture, underscoring the tenuousness of the relationship between the built and the natural environment.  

Art review: Daniel Pitin at Mihai Nicodim

The materials and references densely layered in Daniel Pitin’s recent paintings at Mihai Nicodim are beyond excavation, and the work is all the richer for feeling just out of reach. Pitin, born and based in Prague, embeds printed matter — ads, scraps of books and newspaper — into his canvases and occasionally writes cryptic snippets across them.

He paints in inky dilutions and viscous crusts, cloudy grays, scorched blacks and seeping yellows. A recognizable subject anchors each painting — a beekeeper standing among his boxes, a woman sitting on the edge of a bed — but suggestion often overtakes description. Narratives elude definition. All the while, the surfaces feel viscerally immediate.

Pitin invokes the past, in part, through television and film stills that he incorporates into his paintings and sequences that he uses as raw material for his own videos.

Art review: 'Suspension,' video by Reynold Reynolds, Kevin Cooley

Kevin Cooley’s “Skyward” makes a perfect endpoint to “Suspension,” an absorbing, two-person show of recent video works at YoungProjects. Most of the gallery is taken up by the work of Berlin-based Reynold Reynolds, every piece an intense excursion into the nature of time and its representation as movement and change, the body and its capacity to endure. Nods to the stop-motion photographs of Marey and Muybridge alternate with discomfiting scenes of physical violation. Scientific and aesthetic inquiry intersect, sometimes with damaging force. In “Burn” (a 2002 collaboration with Patrick Jolly), we watch a man set fire to a bed where a woman sleeps, and another man using a sandwich to tamp out — with disturbing calm — the flames rising from his shirt as he reads. It’s not just the filmed characters who are facing something treacherous.

Then comes the physically and visually quenching “Skyward” (2012). The seven-minute loop is projected on the ceiling, so it is best viewed lying down. That 90-degree shift of position aligns us with the camera, which delivers tracking shots looking upward at the L.A. sky, edged by architecture, fringed by palm trees, sliced by power lines, etched by the paths of birds and planes. The day performs itself as usual, but with our perspective gently recalibrated by the New York-based Cooley, the view feels fresh and new.

-- Leah Ollman

YoungProjects, Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., (323) 377-1102, through March 8. Closed Saturday through Monday. http://www.youngprojectsgallery.com/

Images: Left, Reynold Reynolds, "Burn"; right, Kevin Cooley, "Skyward." Credit: From YoungProjects

Art review: 'Seven Young Los Angeles Painters I Like' at George Lawson

From its title to its sprightly array of modestly scaled works, “Seven Young Los Angeles Painters I Like,” at George Lawson, exudes refreshing honesty. There is no real agenda in play, but an aesthetic consensus forms around the sufficiency of paint on a flat surface. However self-evident that sounds, it’s a quietly invigorating experience to look at two dozen paintings by emerging artists who subscribe to “old media” and make it new.

One of the painters currently studies at UCLA; the rest earned (or worked toward) their MFAs there, at Claremont Graduate University, California College of the Arts, Otis and the University of Tennessee. Each might be privately ambitious, but none succumbs to the grandstanding arrogance so common these days among young artists eager to set themselves apart from the pack.

Jacob Melchi paints delightfully restless geometric abstractions that tamper with spatial logic. Nano Rubio stages mixed marriages of tight linear patterns and thick, fleshy swaths, permeable and opaque, fluid and solid. Among the rest — Jonathan Apgar, Christopher Kuhn and Anne McCaddon — Sarah Awad stands out for her images of monuments and ruins redolent with the tenuousness of memory, and Rema Ghuloum for “Light, 15th and Harrison at 3pm,” a potent little canvas of warm greenish-gold abutting deep aqua and dark blue-violet, the record — and evocation — of a radiant moment.

-- Leah Ollman

George Lawson Gallery, 8564 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 837-6900, through March 17. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.georgelawsongallery.com

Image: Jacob Melchi, "Diamond 1." Credit: From George Lawson Gallery

Art review: 'Breaking in Two,' visions of motherhood at Arena 1

Why is it that the opening chapter of life has never received as much attention in art as the concluding pages? Why are elegy and memorial such established art forms (not just in visual art but in music, poetry) yet no equivalent form addresses birth, much less the ongoing process of raising children?

These aren’t trick questions, nor even difficult ones to answer, given the female-centric nature of these underrecognized subjects. Sexism reigned just as oppressively in the realms of art (creation, distribution and scholarship) as it had in the culture at large until the feminist surge a scant half-century ago helped redefine legitimate aesthetic territory. Now, women artists enjoy at least nominal equality with their male counterparts, though issues of the maternal, if no longer taboo in art, remain largely on the periphery.

“Breaking in Two: Provocative Visions of Motherhood,” at Arena 1,  puts those themes front and center. Organized by artist Bruria Finkel, and graced with the Pacific Standard Time imprimatur, the show features work from the 1960s to the present by some 40 Southern California artists (including a few collectives), among them Eleanor Antin, Kim Abeles, Alison, Lezley and Betye Saar, Jo Ann Callis, Channa Horwitz, Renee Petropoulos, Astrid Preston, Linda Vallejo, Ruth Weisberg, Lita Albuquerque and June Wayne.

Artist Sarah Sze will represent U.S. in 2013 Venice Biennale

Sculptor and installation artist Sarah Sze has been tapped to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts, which is commissioning the work, announced Sze’s installation “Triple Point” will be constructed to interact with the '30s Palladian-style U.S. Pavilion, designed by architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, without actually changing it.

Art review: Jocelyn Foye at Armory Center for the Arts

Titled “Dance, Opera, Draw,” Jocelyn Foye’s modest exhibition at Armory Center for the Arts adds to a growing interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration, a blurring of the lines between performance and visual art.

Consisting of just three charcoal-covered canvases and a musical soundtrack, the show is minimal to a fault: It’s actually the remains of an event in which two dancers made charcoal imprints on the canvases while responding to an opera singer’s rendition of Richard Strauss’ "Salome." The whole idea sounds intriguing, but the results don’t live up to its promise.

The drawings are dark, murky things, only giving up faint traces of their creation: a few finger strokes here, some splotches there. Combined with the opera soundtrack, they take on a rather funereal air, but don’t really stand on their own as images or as installation art. Together, they raise a couple of questions: When is performance documentation also art? And how much do we need to know about the performance?

In Foye’s case, a crucial link seems to be missing. The drawings don’t tell us enough about the remarkable conditions of their creation — even the show’s brochure, with its photograph of blackened feet and hands, is more evocative. While it’s laudable to examine how movement manifests across different media, in this case, “dance” gets left out of the equation.

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-- Sharon Mizota

Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (626) 792-5101, through May 13. Closed Mondays. www.armoryarts.org

Photo: Jocelyn Foye's "Dance, Opera, Draw," 2012. Credit: From Armory Center for the Arts.

Art review: Jennifer Steinkamp at ACME

Jennifer Steinkamp’s latest exhibition at ACME eschews room-filling digital projections in favor of pieces that are more like paintings, or perhaps sculptures. Known for dissolving the walls in floods of flowers, clouds or streaks of light, Steinkamp here presents self-contained works that look like pieces of fabric tacked to the wall. Printed in geometric patterns with a silky sheen (reminiscent of necktie material), the layered swaths float and ripple like clothing on a line, blown by a gentle but insistent breeze. “Hanging” on the gallery wall, they are quite magical, like animated abstract paintings.

Yet the works also imply a certain violence. The pieces of fabric are ripped and full of holes, or more properly, slashed, in some cases almost to ribbons. This heightens the works’ visual interest: The tatters make for more varied movement; the holes allow us to see multiple layers of fabric at once. The projections exhibit an almost Baroque concern with light, shadow and the play of pattern and color. But the tears also suggest vulnerability. Evocatively titled “Moth,” the show evokes both the destructive effects of these hungry little creatures and their own self-annihilating urges, drawn ineluctably into the light.

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-- Sharon Mizota

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, through March 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com

Photo: Jennifer Steinkamp's "Moth, 5," 2012. Credit: From the artist and ACME, Los Angeles.

Art review: Pietro Roccasalva at David Kordansky Gallery

The best part of Pietro Roccasalva’s U.S. solo debut at David Kordansky Gallery is the first piece one sees: a neon sign that reads “You never look at me from the place I see you.” The paraphrase from French philosopher Jacques Lacan is doubled and arranged in a Möbius strip, illustrating its own paradoxical message: The act of looking establishes a relationship between you and me that is constantly shuttling between our incommensurable points of view.

The rest of the show explores this idea in the context of art history. In the center of the room is a giant still life, including, among other things, a deflated hot air balloon, a bunch of grapes (delightfully made of purple balloons) and a wooden boat resembling a lute.