Art review: Los Angeles Free Music Society at the Box

Walking into "Beneath the Valley of the Lowest Form of Music,” an ebullient survey of art, ephemera and artifacts charting the 30-year history of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, is like walking into the garage of a cool, eccentric uncle. In the cavernous main space of the Box’s new Traction Avenue location, one wall is plastered floor to the ceiling with concert posters advertising the many bands affiliated with this loose collective of experimental musicians (Le Forte Four, Doo-Dooettes, Smegma, Extended Organs and Airway, among others).

On another wall, an immense grid of black and white photographs introduces viewers to the musicians themselves: a gaggle of gangly, often goofy young men (and the occasional woman) — a dozen or so in the core group, many more, it would seem, in the extended circle — who came together in the pre-punk days of the early 1970s to explore the outer reaches of rock, using instruments, electronics and just about anything else they could find.

Art review: Suzanne Adelman at Weekend

Suzanne Adelman’s recent work, at Weekend, draws on the malleable nature of digital photography to explore the highly provisional operations of visual perception. The nine photographs on view in this modest but handsomely composed show each depict a common Southern California scene while blurring or blocking out one segment or another to simulate the selective manner in which the brain sorts the information that channels through the eye.

The most appealing are the simplest and more abstract of the works: a blurred gray and white interior wall studded with the square of what looks like a window or a mirror; a larger piece featuring a dark gray blur, completely indecipherable, hammed left and right by slender strips of some predominantly orange and red scene. Others depict a blurred urban or natural landscape interrupted by horizontal registers of clarity, a trick that produces a kind of ripple effect through the image.

The science of visual perception is a rich and virtually bottomless topic, against which this show, "Hide the Evidence," feels like only an initial sketch — but a compelling one.

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-- Holly Myers

Weekend, 4634 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 514-4433, through Feb. 26. Closed Monday through Friday. www.weekendspace.org

Image: Suzanne Adelman, "Untitled #8," 2011-12. Credit: from the artist and Weekend.

Art review: Emilie Halpern at Pepin Moore

A conceptual artist with a minimalist sensibility, Emilie Halpern rides a delicate line between economy and dearth. Her works can be slight nearly to the point of disappearance. When they click — which is to say, when a well winnowed concept comes into alignment with a gracefully refined form — the effect can be dazzling. When it doesn’t quite, or when the trick relies too heavily on a news release or other explicative mechanism, one has the feeling of being left with very little.

"Jamais Vu," Halpern’s second solo show with Pepin Moore, is a bit of a mix. An installation on the floor involving 29 black, hollow emu eggs, many of them cracked or shattered, feels insubstantial and mildly bewildering in a show in which the most eloquent themes revolve around the sea, the solar system and, in some fainter sense, birth and death. "Earth & Sky," on the other hand — a sculpture in which a small, black meteorite rests on a larger white stone that sits on the floor — is flawlessly composed, a neatly ironic material expression of its archetypal title, one that that echoes a number of other references in the show to the meeting point between the land and the heavens.  

The show’s most haunting piece, by far, is "Drown," an installation consisting only of a single, transient gesture: the pouring of four liters of ocean water onto the concrete floor of the gallery every day. It is a modest and, for at least some portion of the day, a nearly invisible act that assumes on alarming poignancy when you learn that it is the volume of water that would fill the human lungs. 

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-- Holly Myers

Pepin Moore, 933 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 626-0501, through Saturday. www.pepinmoore.com

Image: Emilie Halpern, "Mysticeti," 2012. Credit: From the artist and Pepin Moore, Los Angeles.

 

Art review: Ahmed Alsoudani at L&M Arts

The paintings of Ahmed Alsoudani, at L&M Arts, are packed with everything that big, expensive paintings should, by some market-savvy measure, be packed with: strong colors; muscular gestures; requisite homage to painters like Picasso and Guston; and dense, ambiguous imagery — contorted, vaguely ghoulish figures, fragments of furniture and other objects — that flouts the boundary between abstraction and representation. What’s more, they tackle the classic big subject: war, namely the war in Iraq, where Alsoudani was born. (He left for the U.S. 15 years ago, went to college on the East Coast and got his master of fine arts at Yale. He now lives in New York.)

For all that, however, the work is surprisingly lackluster. Alsoudani’s handling of paint, while perfectly capable, is uninspired. The paintings read more like references to the work of other war painters — several directly mimic the compositional energy of "Guernica" — than expressions of any deep, emotional conviction. They’re not, as a result, especially disturbing. Indeed, they’re kind of jaunty — not cheerful exactly, but lively to look at, and certainly difficult to imagine being shaken by. In flirting with the carnivalesque (in the spirit, one suspects, of the German Expressionists), he stumbles into the cartoonish and holds on to it, as if hedging his bets against too great an agitation.

Alsoudani was one of six artists to represent Iraq in last year’s Venice Biennale — the country’s first showing there in 30 years — and there’s no reason to doubt to sincerity of his concern, whether for Iraq specifically or the atrocities of war generally. The approach, however, is lacking teeth. One is unlikely to be moved in any substantive way by work that’s trying so hard to be liked. 

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-- Holly Myers

L&M Arts, 660 S. Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 821-6400, through March 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lmgallery.com

Photo: Ahmed Alsoudani, installation view. Credit: Joshua White/JWPictures, from L&M Arts, Los Angeles.

Dance review: 'Cleopatra, CEO' by Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre

 

The 51st floor penthouse suite at 515 S. Flower St., the site of Heidi Duckler’s latest dance-theater piece, “Cleopatra, CEO,” is a scenic design come true for the Los Angeles choreographer.

 

At “Cleopatra’s” premiere over the weekend, audiences were guided through dance-theater scenes spread across 30,000 square feet of marble, burnished wood, beige carpeting, exquisite cabinetry and executive boardrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, and one with a fireplace.

What more could a site-specific artist want than these rambling hallways and power chambers — once the opulent headquarters for oil corporation Atlantic Richfield — as settings for seduction, legislative mischief, war and suicide? 

PHOTOS: "Cleopatra, CEO"

For the most part, Duckler unleashed her imagination for a poetic riff on events from Cleopatra's life and mythology. Johanna Sapakie, a charismatic Cleopatra, climbed atop the furniture and upon the shoulders of her servants while yards and yards of fabric unfurled across the chamber. Greek attendants, with clipboards attached to their paddles, “rowed” their stationary boats (two stone secretary cubicles). The battle between Greeks and Romans for control of the ancient world was a mad dash through a hallway, while viewers pressed against the walls.

Dance review: Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo's 'Cinderella' in O.C.

Jean-Christophe Maillot’s three-act “Cinderella” for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, seen Thursday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, just might be the only ballet of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale with a barefoot heroine. 

Who needs a glass slipper when you’ve got lovely high arches that sparkle like gold, as did the evening’s gracious and warm Cinderella, Anja Behrend? Maillot has no use for a fireplace or ashes, either (though he makes fun of all that in a ballet-within-the-ballet). While other “Cinderellas” exist as an excuse to open the trapdoor and rev up the theatrical machinery, Maillot focuses on underlying allegories. Take notice of the Sisters’ rotted black toes. 

This is not a children’s ballet, though the little princesses seated near me grinned contentedly. Maillot crafts steps with cold precision, using a contemporary dance language of whip-fast classicism, scooped torsos, oversized gestures and exaggerated pantomime. He saves the flowing, exultant pas de deux for Behrend and her quite charming Prince, Asier Uriagereka, for the ball, in the night’s most rewarding apotheosis. 

PHOTOS: "Cinderella" in O.C.

Art review: Amy Green at Monte Vista

In “Grids, Stains, Stacks,” at the artist-run space Monte Vista, Amy Green is clearly wrestling with some worthy questions — the legacy of craft; the shifting relationship between painting, sculpture and architecture; the creative potential of the accident, the scrap, the stain, residue — and hits a number of transcendent notes. Working primarily with acrylic paint on felt and wood, she creates patchworks of color both painterly and sculptural. Whether staining the felt with thin washes of pigment or binding individual sheets into loose, multicolored stacks, she builds on the material’s friendly, folksy character to produce works that are generally appealing and occasionally riveting. 

Some works hang on the wall like traditional paintings, others rest on the floor. Several appear inconspicuously on the ceiling, wound in among the rafters and light fixtures. Approaching the worn Highland Park storefront on its own terms, blemishes and all, she engages the space in a genuine and, it seems, mutually rewarding conversation.

There’s room here, however, to go several steps further, whether in the direction of more (expansion) or less (refinement). A handful of exquisitely sensual and delicate stained works leaves one wishing the show had been winnowed down to only these few faint but stirringly sensual traces. The chunkier works have a raw, brawnier appeal that triggers a longing for rooms full of felt. The middle ground, where the show remains, falls short of this compelling potential.

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-- Holly Myers

Monte Vista, 5442 Monte Vista St., Los Angeles, through Feb. Closed Monday through Friday. montevistaprojects.com 

 

Art review: Benjamin Britton at Ruth Bachofner Gallery

The paintings on view in “Prevailing Conditions,” Benjamin Britton’s second solo show at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, are brassy, internally spring-loaded abstractions that have the feel of being much bigger than they are. Fragmented nearly to the point of pictorial dishevelment — pattern upon pattern, gesture upon gesture, with vague allusions to recognizable forms strewn in among heaps of indeterminate strokes and swirls — they manage to contain the energy of an impact: a fevered, climactic coming together that only just precedes a falling apart.            

It is a winning palette, more than anything, that keeps the paintings contained. Energetically varied and deliciously nuanced, bold without being gaudy or simplistic, Britton’s use of color has an intriguing edge, a confident, indissoluble character that carries the chaos with apparent ease. 

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-- Holly Myers

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., G2, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300 through Feb. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.ruthbachofnergallery.com

Image: Benjamin Britton, "A Treasured Ability to Set Fires and Feed Them," 2011. From Ruth Bachofner Gallery.

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.