CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS
March, 2006
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The next time your kid threatens to turn blue unless you get him that toy that comes with a Happy Meal, give in gladly if he promises to grow up to be another Jonathan Callan, the British sculptor who transforms children’s toys into the bizarre with injections of silicon. Or Walter Martin or his cohort Paloma Munoz, who subvert snow globes and install them in public places like the Wilshire/Normandie Metro Rail Station. Or any of the eleven sculptors, painters, video or performance artists in From the Land of Misfit Toys who have customized playthings in ways that play up humor, cultural criticism and the questioning of preconceptions (Otis College, Ben Maltz Gallery, West Side).
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 Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz— info to come on “snow globe” |
 Liza Ryan, "Untitled," 2006, inkjet print & graphite, 4 7/8 x 4 7/8". |
 Leon Golub, "Fleeing Figure I," 1971, acrylic on linen, 39 x 33". |
| Creative license may be suspect in the world of literary nonfiction, but photographer Liza Ryan’s “enhancement” of selected bits of human anatomy and landscape with graphite, charcoal and collage elements. Ryan has you look at how a twig or a vine can fuse with human hair, or how the veins of the skin are similar to those of a leaf. These quiet works are lush and dense, and successfully draws the viewer into an intense examination of the tenuous relationship between reality and illusion. While Ryan quietly suspends disbelief in the main gallery, the late Leon Golub infuses two adjacent rooms with explosive work. A colorful collection of drawings based on classical myths is overshadowed by Golub’s dark, intense explorations of the violence of war. Scrubbing paint into unstretched fragments of linen that suggest tattered, blood stained banners, Golub confronts us with images of violence that are impossible to deny or ignore: “Burnt Man,” “Fleeing Figure,” “Fallen Warrior” (Griffin, Santa Monica). |
 Clytie Alexander, installation of "Diaphan Orange" and "Diaphan Tan,” 2005, perforated kozo and shellac based ink, 34 x 25”. |
Clytie Alexander moved from L.A. to Mojave and is now in New York, and the changes from urban to vast open spaces seem to be inspiring some very fine work. Titled “Diaphans” due to the see-through quality of the 12 metal and 2 paper rough squares, each is rendered diaphanous by pristinely ordered holes Alexander has punched into painted planes. The works are crisp and clean, but they are not in the least bit cold like much process-focused sculpture. The panels are installed so that they hang just away from the wall support, and the backsides of works have been strategically painted in colors that cast a hued shadow on the wall that is readily visible through the holes of the work.
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| The color-plays and hued halos thus created “frame” and enliven the cool blues, icy greens and rich oranges of these handsome pieces. Here op art meets minimalism meets perceptual color mixing that would make Monet proud (Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Santa Monica). |
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Two light sculptures and a third sculpture illuminate the gallery walls, filling them with colored light. Ann Veronica Janssens’ work is about how light and space coexist, and it most certainly relates to the aesthetic associated with the California Light and Space artists. She searches for a perfect interplay between projected and available light seen in relation to the body. At first glance the works appear too simple yet they change as you move around them. In addition to the projected works, “Aquarium” is a perfect sphere, which floats in a glass cube and reflects both the viewer and the surrounding space (1301PE, West Hollywood).
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 Ann Veronica Janssens, “Aquarium,” 1992-2005, glass/water/methanol/silicone oil, h: 15 x w: 15 x d: 15”. Photo: Frank Nilson |
 Bobbie Moline-Kramer, "Face to Face VII," 2004/05, oil on panel, 6 x 6". |
So distanced have we become from our feelings that they are medicated, simulated, packaged, analyzed--everything but actually experienced in our bodies, full force. Bobbie Moline Kramer shows a new portrait suite in which several large-scale faces and a series of 6 by 6-inch additional faces capture varying degrees of intense or contained emotion. Moline-Kramer works from composite photos of a person randomly spliced together so that identity and symmetry are re-imagined and portrayed at moments of emotion so intense that there is no filter. Those moments where we have no more shame, when we laugh until we cry and the intimacy afterward is embarrassing. Those moments when we suffer so, that our noses run and saliva gels unattractively at our lips (This you will see in a large indigo toned image of a black woman in great despair, lit from the right as if caught in some dark physical as well as psychic space).
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“Face to Face” is the show’s title, and in it Moline-Kramer confronts us face to face with human emotion writ large, writ really large. Here we see folks in the throes of being human in the most unedited way, and it is unnerving to watch them feel so intensely. . .it reminds us that we can too. It is hyperbolic? You bet. It is manipulative and theatrical? Absolutely. Intense human pathos manipulates us and others, is by definition dramatic, and to render it otherwise would be to pander to the flat lined emotive world that relegates the privilege of feeling to the likes of Madonna (heaven help us), the child, the id, or the rarified, kooky “artiste.” As for her technique, form hangs onto your attention as paint, as translucent medium judiciously able to trap light in some 4th dimension unique to the pictorial. These oil on panel works handle surface with Renaissance precision (Paul Kopeikin Gallery, West Hollywood).
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Alexander Ross’ signature abstractions look like branches of hardened green viscera, green fossils, or some other oozey analogue that suggests the growth and movement of nature in the most lush yet non specific ways. Ross actually builds these organic looking contraptions out of plasticine medium, photographs the models, studies the resulting shapes judiciously to maximize visual and emotive resonance, and then paints the unctuous green accretions against innocent sky blues. The finished works call to mind cells, magnified fingerlike microbes, or a bizarre growth on some extra terrestrial planet. The canvases are large and sumptuous; it is clear that this artist is beyond facile with paint. Yet the formula, however virtuoso, is becoming predictable. Smaller works that loosen and experiment with the paradigm more freely have an inventive warmth that is less expected, no less appealing, and full of fresh possibility (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, West Hollywood).
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 Alexander Ross, “Untitled,” 2005, oil paint on canvas, 98 1/2 x 72 1/2”. |
 Makiko Kudo, “I Don't Know,” 2004, oil on canvas, 71 5/8 x 89 3/8”. |
Very well known in Japan, Makiko Kudo paints large canvases with landscapes and foliage in eccentric blues, dirt browns and unlikely goldenrods. The style of rendering invokes (but is not exactly) that uniquely Japanese craft form in which landscape is constructed from bits of tissue. Here the lyrical shapes are of astoundingly skillfully handled pigment. The sensibility lies somewhere between abstract mark making and the caricature that gave rise to the anime phenom. In Kudo’s hands however, land, a distant volcano, green knolls, and Hello Kitty snows are inhabited by cartoony,
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| lanky Japanese school girls with cropped coifs, drawn loosely only as outlines in a dry brush that makes them appear to be spectral or graffiti afterthoughts competing with the more poetic theme of nature. This strange and stunning work aptly draws on the old and the ultra new in Japanese graphic traditions, as it refuses to settle into the amine legacy, while insisting that we take the weird, portentous emotion of its quirky stick-figure girls most seriously (Marc Foxx Fine Art, West Hollywood). |
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When we think of landscape painting, it’s usually in terms of bucolic or urban vistas or dramatic seascapes aglow from within. Few of us would readily conjure up images of what looks like a runaway surfboard adrift in a sea, or mounds of congealed paint festooned with shells and flowers. But as Landscape Confection points out, traditional concepts of landscape have been dramatically expanded. While artists have put their imagination into high gear, we as viewers will have to look with an open mind or gain nothing from the experience. As we see in, for example, Jim Hodges’ curtains of delicately strung together silk flowers, silvery spider webs and carefully constructed neo-baroque forms, it’s very much about shattering preconceptions and a spirit of adventure.
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 Rowena Dring, “Pool,” 2004, stitched fabrics. |
| Australian artist Neal Rock’s lumpy, candy-like constructions look as if he’s subbed brushes for cake decorating gear. Rock creates lumpy sculptural reliefs in his “Polaris Range” series by squeezing globs of colored silicon onto metal armatures, then filling in any gaps with tiny flowers and other decorative elements. Rowena Dring’s carefully delineated landscapes look, at first glance, like a paint-by-numbers exercise. Up close, one sees that these are not paintings at all, but shapes cut from cloth and sewn onto canvas with meticulous care; “Untitled (Stream)” is a tour de force. If it looks as though some artists have raided grandma’s sewing basket, all the better. Anything goes here. Beauty is in and decorative is no longer the d-word (Orange County Museum of Art [OCMA], Orange County). |
 Susan Rush, “So Sweet That Cat,” mixed mediums with collage, 36 x 24”. |
The title Beyond Borders is a metaphor. I t describes both the differences and contrasts of the four exhibiting artists--international and California--the media they use, and the images they create. Daggie Wallace and Manuela Reitz are from Germany, Salma Arastu is Islamic and Indian-born, and Susan Rush is a Californian. The exotic flair of their diverse art seems to come even more alive in the warm and colorful setting of the gallery. While the exhibition is intimate and limited to a few works by each artist, the art runs the gamut of expression. Wallace creates in luscious painted pastels, forming sensuously realistic individual portraits.
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| Reitz’ acrylic paintings are mystical semi-abstractions where a story is told, but the details are more in the colors, texture and composition than in what is really happening. Arastu brings together the spiritual nature of her heritage with the sophistication of living in New York. Her mixed media and acrylic on canvas natural subjects, such as the sun, flowers, or moonlight, exude an Oriental enchantment. Rush makes a dramatic switch from realistic charcoal cityscapes to rendering an inventive assortment of figures that are reduced to living in small circular spots that float in a broad field of colorful tribal-looking abstract mixed media collage (Space on Spurgeon, Orange County). |
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A provocative project poignantly titled Leaving Aztlan denotes an important departure from race, from racial thinking, and the confining lure of heritage as defined for minorities by centrist notions. The Latina/o or Chicana/o artists in the show are bent on making works that contravene stereotypes of Latino art (magic realism, street life, acid colors, the barrio). They instead offer up some very sophisticated concept works that insist on being read more broadly, and only through the current theories of art practice. Connie Arismendi’s mixed media “Noche de Boda” celebrates a Latin coming of age ritual with a crocheted-like snow flake and a delicate orchid--more Victorian in its references to feminine desire than South of the Border; Carlos Fresques spoofs Americana, as any Pop visual critic might, with a thickly textured, readymade spoof on our ubiquitous, pan racial “happy face.”
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 Salomon Huerta, “Untitled Head (#4),” 2001, oil on canvas on panel, 12 x 11 3/4”. |
| There is excellent work among this group show of ten promising artists who push forward the notion that good art is thoughtful rather than racial (Santa Monica Art Studios Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica). |
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