CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS

November, 2007


On the heels of the show on LA art of the ‘50s mounted by the Pompidou in Paris, here is our own local comprehensive exhibition tracing the vast contributions California artists made to modern art, culture and design in the mid 20th century. The title of the show borrows from a locally designed, super sharp Miles Davis album from that era, called aptly "The Birth of the Cool." As that title suggests, you will see a vast array of the urban and suburban moderne that hit LA as we caught up with Europe and the East Coast during the 1940s and ‘50s with respect to modernism in architecture, product design, graphic design and varied arts. Included are objects and images ranging from the paintings of local abstractionist Karl Benjamin; to chairs and other accoutrements imagined by the unsurpassably gifted Eames duo; to Julius Shulman’s photos of houses designed by visionary purists who landed locally, like Schindler. The venue  has depth and breadth, covering all aspects of material culture; we are thus reminded that even in the ‘50s we were no cultural backwater, but an open and experimental territory willing to sample many art ideas but ever demanding technical excellence and good taste (Orange County Museum Art [OCMA], Orange County).


Lorser Feitelson, "Dichotomic Organization,"
1959, oil on canvas, 60 x 60".
© Feitelson Arts Foundation


"Humor us" is a group exhibition of twenty Asian American artists with ties to Southern California who employ humor in their artistic practice. Guest curators Viet Le, Yong Soon Min, and Leta Ming have put together a compelling array of over one hundred artworks in a variety of media, which are consistently engaging and insightful. The approaches range from using humor in the form of absurdity, slapstick, or satire. Among the many highlights are Joseph Santarromana's video work "Malambing Thang." This collaboration with musician William Roper, in which both artists explore issues of race, assimilation and vulnerability, avails itself of tropes taken from cabaret and stand up humor to offset the pathos being explored. Sandra Low's pictorial exegesis of the seven vices effectively mixes high and low culture, historical and popular image banks with goofy humor and corrosive social critiques (Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Hollywood).


Sandra Low, "Chastity," 2007, oil on canvas, wooden dowels,  59" x 24".
Courtesy of UBU Fine Arts


The dA Center decided to break with tradition with this collaborative exhibition, “Blurring the Line. . .Atzlan 5” presented together with the Downtown Center. Unlike past shows, this year the show includes works by non-Chicano/a artists whose works relate thematically, visually, and politically to Chicano art. Hallmarks of Chicano art since the 1970s are certainly part of the mix--images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, bold acid bright colors, active brushwork, low rider cars, and Mexican symbols. Additionally, there are still-lifes with the coloration of van Gogh and reinterpretations of the labels of canned goods in the manner of Pop Art. “Blurring the Line” successfully challenges viewers’ expectations of what Chicano/a art is and can be (dA Center for the Arts, and Cal Poly Pomona Downtown Center, Pomona).




Kristine Marx, still from “Serpentine”, 2007
“Serpentine” is a projected video work by Kristine Marx. It envelops the darkened space of the gallery in swirling black and white lines that overlap as they curve and straighten, gliding along the gallery wall opposite the door. Viewers traversing the space soon become part of the installation and although it doesn't induce vertigo, the projections seem to bend and warp the gallery's architectural structure. The programmatic abstract imagery of “ Serpentine” is clearly informed by Op Art, and is similarly achieved through use of a calculated series of permutations. Like a Jesus Rafael Soto sculpture, the line segments overlap and separate. They start out sparsely, then build to a dense, nearly illegible complexity.
What has changed over time is that this digital version of Op is not much effected by the Utopian tensions that motivated its historical predecessors. In the lower gallery, Elizabeth Simonson’s “Fast Forward” consists of two related works that show how perfection in calculation and fallibility in execution are an integral part of the condition for creating something beautiful. On the floor, “Whisper” consists of thousands of thin wires stretched across a gird of white panels. Each wire arches over the panels and creates a chaotic pattern, even though it is governed by an organizing principle: each wire end punctures the grid surface at increasing distances apart from the prior one. Over 4,000 wires actualize the system behind the work, acting in a sequential logic. More importantly, the beauty of this kind of activity (also visible in many natural phenomena) is both visually and conceptually satisfying. Accompanying “Whisper” is “Sweet,” a video that animates each sequence of “Whisper” by using stills generated from the color-coded drawings done by Simonson to make “Whisper.” Although the result is a kind of steady hypnotic addition of color and line that follows the same procedure, “Whisper” steals the thunder (Fringe Exhibitions, Downtown).


Desy Safán-Gerard is a psychoanalyst who paints, a musician who translates music to the visual, an artist who reacts to geography and events in her life which need expression. Her earlier totemic paintings harken back to her Chilean roots, where her textures are manipulated in homage to nature mingled with ritual. But she is best known for her small, intimate works that make the viewer experience her feelings and thoughts about music, life, nature and even the lowly oak leaf. Incorporating elements of surrealism, abstraction and expressionism in her line and textural surfaces, Safán-Gerard varies the mood and the modulation to create an intuitive abstraction. Her work is lyrical and poetic, which for the artist leads into dream motifs (Santa Monica College Gallery, Santa Monica).


Desy Safán-Gerard, "Shades of Vice and
Virtue", 2007, acrylic on raw canvas, 24"x 30".




Won Ju Lim, "Broken Landscape #1," 2007,
paint on canvas, silk pins, foam, 24 3/4 x 30 5/8 x 5 1/4".
Won Ju Lim provided one of the highlights of the “Ephemeral” thematic exhibition at the Claremont Museum (see last month’s C&R) with her “Elysian Field” installation. The emphasis of this solo show is on paintings that fracture into dozens of small pieces, while hulking, rectangular sculptures overflow with fluorescent ooze in this powerful exhibition. These landscapes call to mind a looming disaster, be it nuclear or environmental, and strike a perfect balance between humorous parody and serious commentary. Familiar materials, such as traditional paintings of idyllic landscapes and tiny train-set trees, are taken apart or otherwise eradicated by gloppy, colorful ooze.
Reminiscent of a child cutting the hair of a doll, the frenzied and playful destruction of common or mass-produced items provides a playful but troubling glimpse of a post-apocalyptic scenario (Patrick Painter Gallery, Santa Monica).


We all know Peter Shire for his functional and sculptural tea pots--some mad as the Hatter. This show sees Shire venturing into into steel and wire as materials from which he designs Crayola hued chairs that remind one of the designs of early Post Modern Italian architects and the Memphis Group, with which Shire is has been associated. One chair sports insect-like orange legs, the other a slick black back on a collapsible seat made from wildly toned cylinders. Of course you can't sample the wares, so we do not know if funny form follows function enough to make these wild objects comfy and usable. Easy on the eye and well conceived, they most certainly are (Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica).


Peter Shire, "Seggiolino Del Soraz #3," 2007
steel and enamel, 41 1/4 x 18 x 20 1/2".





Francisco Zuniga, "Juchitecas de Pie," 1983,
crayon and pastel on white paper, 25 1/2 x 19 3/4".
To mount a show called "Woman as Icon" is to open up a huge can of late Feminist worms: Icon according to whom? Iconic of what? You get the picture. All that not withstanding, as Carole Duncan has argued the history of Modern art is the special terrain of white men looking at and mythologizing sexualized females. And there is no more accomplished Modernist than Francisco Zuniga. The good news is that because Zuniga stands outside the Western canon to an extent, his women are not frail classical or mass media eros nymphs. Captured in sepia ink, conte, pastels, wood and metal, this artist sees woman in all her power and inner/outer diversity. He gives us lumbering Earth emblems with limbs that look like trunks of stalwart trees. He is not beyond the Degas-esque nude seen from behind; and he is a master at lush, rotund self confident women kneeling or resting unconsciously in poses that allow flesh to move and squish to the forces of gravity--the way bodies actually work! (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, West Hollywood).