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Art review: littlewhitehead at Marine Contemporary

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One of the first works encountered in the U.S. debut of the Scottish duo known as littlewhitehead is a portable record player, its needle extracting a drone of scratchy distortion. The piece is more materially complex than it appears — the album isn’t vinyl but cast in resin and the ashes of a burned-out building, à la Dario Robleto — and its bleak, abject whine sets the tone well for what comes after, a smattering of remnants of violence and warnings of trauma.

Craig Little and Blake Whitehead invest their works with personal associations, but what comes across most overtly is the universal, broken-record quality of “Bad News,” as the show is titled. Destruction, murder and evidence of systems gone awry flood the news cycle and thus our consciousness. Littlewhitehead’s work taps into the pervasive sense of anxiety and loss that results. Their approach veers from comically grisly (a bloodied burlap bag hanging by a noose from a leafless tree) to oblique (paintings and photographs that pause and condense car wrecks and suicides in the manner of film stills).

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The most poignant and promising works in this uneven but intriguing introduction at Marine Contemporary are two life-like sculptural figures, both with silicon-cast heads of grown men atop child-size bodies. One, dressed in a business suit, teeters on a window ledge mounted high on the wall, his eyes turned upward as if awaiting a sign to jump or not to jump. The other lies sprawled on the floor in Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas, dead to the world in the deep sleep of children or perhaps actually dead, the victim of a horrible crime. Innocent young body and aged, beanie-topped head join seamlessly, but the cross-generational union is creepy and reeks of some sort of broad, societal damage. --Leah Ollman

Marine Contemporary, 1733-A Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 399-0294, through June 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marinecontemporary.com/

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