Terry Allen, "MOMOloMismo," mixed media, dimensions variable.

Los Angeles painter Rebecca Campbell presents paintings that are at once abstract and representational. Campbell has mastered the ability to combine gestural abstraction with detailed description to evoke the psychological states of her subjects. In this exhibition two large paintings of women, one in the bathtub the other on the beach by the Santa Monica Pier, function like bookends holding the other paintings in place. The others: paintings of rainbows (“Bow”), fireworks (“Bang”), and bomb blasts (“Bomb”) are presented along with portraits of young girls (“Beauty”). The works’ titles reference the impact of these disparate subjects, suggesting they have more in common than one would initially suspect and that the relationship between the man made and nature is something not to be taken lightly. Terry Allen's multimedia work "Ghost Ship Rodez: The Momo Chronicles” references the life of Antonin Artaud as its point of departure. Part radio play, part video installation, and part a presentation of multi-panel drawings, the installation illustrates Allen's imagining of Artaud's seventeen day journey restrained in the hold of a ship in 1937. Allen has an uncanny ability to weave a narrative through his works, and in this installation allows viewers to look at how he presents it in different media. In "MOMO Lo Mismo" six flat screen monitors of varying sizes present fragments of a women's face. The disembodied figure's facial features are suspended from the ceiling and held into place by a complicated lattice. This figure (Jo Harvey Allen, the artist’s wife) appears whole in "Ghost Ship" where her image is projected onto open books carefully laid out on the gallery floor to simulate the waves of the sea. "Ghost Ship" alludes to Artaud's journey as well as to his film career as fragments from films in which she appeared are projected onto the ship-like sculpture. Allen's thought provoking installation demands to be read, watched and listened to (L.A. Louver, Venice).
Jody Zellen

A cartographer engaged in current day charting of the overwhelming rise of imperialism, capitalism, and corporate domination, Sam Durant proves that the maps we once relied on as evidence of progress are now visual representations of thwarted corruption. The title of the show “laissez faire et laissez passer, le mode va de lui même” is borrowed from Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay, a French Commerce Secretary during the 18th century who popularized the “laissez faire” mentality of the free market. A series of six large scale globes, supported by cables extending from the ceiling and the floor, create the illusion that the fabricated globes are levitating and thus enacting the title of the show, “Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself.”  From a distance the globes seem a common artifact found in classrooms and libraries, but upon closer inspection the viewer stumbles upon statistics that Durant has infused across the representations of various nations. “Fortune 500” reflects the world as home to giant corporations, which transforms countries into ephemeral commodities. Overwhelmed by Pepsi Co., Pfizer Inc., Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobile Corporation, Lockheed Martin and a slew of others, Durant seems to suggest that as the world “has gone on by itself” it has become overwhelmed by grandiose imperialist prospects infused by the profit motive. One globe charts the “top ten places for tax evasion and money laundering,” while another compares the top ten countries famous for their prisons and art auction houses. The juxtaposition of art and crime runs though the entire exhibition, as the artist’s medium is the hand the renders humanity into a state of affairs marked by corruption. The “Mirrorplanisphere” is a twenty-four foot long metal floor map cut to the shape of an orange peel, the blotches of shifting color representing nations. While Durant invites the viewer to stand on top of the sheet, which literally reflects their position on the map and thus their place in the world, the piece feels foreboding. The forms collide together and appear like PANGEA, the world’s enormous single land mass dating to the Paleozois and Mesozoic era around 250 million years ago before continental drift began. “Mirrorplanisphere” envisions that the expansion of the universe is coming to an end; now it must contract in order to start anew (Blum & Poe, Culver City).  
A. Moret

Capturing us in their space and spelling out their mysterious and silent secrets stories, Cecilia Miguez’s “Poetic Forms” again transcend the barriers between ordinary reality and mythological worlds. In “Catching the Winds I and II” two female figures test their elongated, delicate dragonfly wings, their arms reaching and stretching towards imminent flight. In “Roulette” a silvery female figure rises out of a carved wood roulette wheel, contemplating the fortune or future that the turn of the wheel will bring. In “The Gaze” an enigmatic figure encased in sheets of bronze and wearing a tall pointed hat makes eye contact from behind her white mask: what secrets does she hide? A silvery procession of female bodies bearing antlered deer heads turn toward each other, questioning and appraising their transformation in “Burning Question.” As in her previous shows, Miguez’s sculptures reveal the elegant finesse of a world of magical mystification in finely modulated figures that find completion through found objects, carved wood and astounding patinas (Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood).
Margarita Nieto

Robert Heinecken (1931-2006) was a renowned and influential image-maker who was celebrated in the world of photography but less known in the art world. That is changing however, and the art world is beginning to embrace him posthumously, swallowing up his unique images. His career was marked by a continual attempt to push the boundaries of his medium, and we see that here. Heinecken was obsessed with broadcast media and made complex montages using television and magazine imagery.  His ironic wit made for a body of work that both criticized and celebrated media culture. The continuing exhibition includes his photographs from the early 1960s printed as unique images together with a selection of the signature assemblages, in which he combined multiple images to creating complex juxtapositions. Heinecken looked at and through the media, and his works have not lost their edge (Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Miracle Mile).
JZ

Gerald Davis' brushy oil paintings offer a unique approach to figuration, with a slippery aura that vacillates from an earnest melancholia to a flaunted, deadpan sexuality. The six works, each roughly 6 1/2 by 4 1/2 feet, exist in thematic pairs. The skyscapes (or still lifes amidst skyscapes), in which candles, body parts and figures emerge cloud-like and out of wet paint, to form a meandering totem with a subtly pervasive sense of comic desperation. In "Dancing Girls" one woman, perhaps more, dances madly in a softly orgiastic swirl of activity in a style that may owe something to Cubism, but reads more as a mix of El Greco and Mad Magazine. But any referents are hazy here at best. Then there are the two outliers: a mound of warm, if dying, large-scaled tulips, and "Frowny Face," in which a penis protrudes through its own specially-appointed cozy, a glistening, mask-like affair apparently being tried on for our benefit.  Davis' images have a toned-down but still generously colorful palette, and often feel lit from within. The overall effect conveys a sense of pseudo-romantic seduction that fits snugly with his own particular brand of light-handed humor (Parker Jones, Culver City).
Michael Shaw

In her first solo exhibition recent Laguna College of Art graduate Judy Nimitz presents "Transfixed," a series of paintings of isolated figures. All are women depicted dancing or walking on rocks, engaged with their activity and the environment in which they move. The women are poised and sturdy, we see strength not vulnerability. Nimitz brings an accomplished technique, and portrays her subjects in delicate detail. While Nimitz's paintings grace the front of the gallery, two sound sculptures by veteran Mineko Grimmer fill the back space. These pieces, are kinetic sound sculptures, in which frozen pebbles fashioned into the shape of an inverted pyramid begin to cascade, dripping both individual stones and bits of ice onto bamboo or guitar string lattices that are suspended over a pool of water inside a redwood frame. The pitter-patter of the melting substance introduces a soft and often melodious sound into the space. The two sculptures work in concert with each other and reference the passage of time in the cones’ shrinking size. The pitch and intensity of the sound gradually changes as the ice melts. First presented about 25 years ago, these are meditative works that heighten awareness of time’s slow passage (Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver City).
JZ

As cleverness goes, this show – a collaboration consisting of three artists from New York's Kate Werble Gallery - is especially satisfying in its inventiveness. Christopher Chiappa makes the most spectacular impression: "McMiracles" is an inkjet print diptych featuring a man sitting casually beside his immaculately-inspired creations: a gravity-defying hamburger arc in one, and a skull carved out of french fries in the other. He continues to mine consumer culture – and literal arcs – in "Speed Stick," in which the particular type of semi-transparent green substance that makes up a Speed Stick deodorant arcs, rainbow-like, from one canister to another.  Gareth Long's two large-scale lenticular prints – in which the image changes based on where you move in relation to it – rest vertically on the floor, and merge abstraction with advertising/pop visuals to an intriguingly sculptural effect. Sarah Wood's untitled nunchucks, after the other two artists, come off as Carl Andre-style minimalism. Its subtlety makes her work a tough fit n this context. Still, the trio brings a fresh take on conceptual object-hood, a niche which always seems to stick around (Francois Ghebaly, Culver City).
MS

Richard Walker presents a three screen video installation projected on the gallery walls that is a philosophical meditation on the sounds and the space of the desert. As the protagonist of his video works. Walker filmed himself both making and playing sounds in the empty landscape. Wearing a bright red shirt, it is obvious he is an intruder in the environment and while he tries to both blend in, as well as add something to the experience it is clear that nature is the dominant force. The nine minute loop shot in the California desert depicts the shifting landscape as the light moves from east to west, changing the illumination and shadows on the distant hills.   Entitled "the speed and the eagerness of meaning," this work combines spoken text, song and music and as an attempt by the artist to integrate himself into the vast desert landscape and make an impression without leaving a mark (Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica).
JZ

Each of the seven artists featured in “Photography from the New China” was born in the 1960’s, a time when Mao’s Cultural Revolution initiated censorship and restrictions designed to erase centuries of cultural heritage. Today most of these artists have studios or galleries in expanding urban centers where they produce work that examines issues triggered by rapid transitions in China’s social/political values and rapidly expanding economy. Wang Qingsong‘s brilliant, large scaled works, inspired by historical paintings, create “scenes in which old hopes are replaced with contemporary desires for money and power.” Hai Bo’s diptych, “I Am Chairman Mao’s Red Guard,” re-stages the photo of a lovely, good citizen from the past, pairing her with a current portrait of the now middle-aged woman in Westernized dress. Song Yongping’s personal work is a heartfelt testimonial honoring the passage of his parents through the late years of their very ordinary lives. Liu Zheng counteracts historical restrictions on the depiction of nudes with sensuous sepia toned prints. Rong Rong’s “Wedding Gown” series is a hand colored, dreamlike metaphorical documentation of his performances in an abandoned village. Qiu Zhijie reconstructs the dramatic postures of operatic Communist ideology. Zhang Huan, an established international artist who has studios in New York and Shanghai, formulates a sense of isolation and cultural loss by capturing the disappearance of his facial features when Chinese calligraphers cover it with family names and stories from his homeland.

Felice Beato (1832–1909), a naturalized English subject born in Venice, lead a fascinating existence as a pioneering war photographer, esteemed for chronicling life and death in the Eastern outreaches of Great Britain’s colonial empire. After learning to produce albumen glass-plate prints from his brother-in-law, James Robertson, Beato managed to lug the heavy equipment needed for this process to dangerous and/or remote sites. This extensive collection of his work covers Beato’s sharply detailed depictions of a 17th century Islamic mosque in Constantinople (1855-57) through his speculative photos of tourist sites in Burma (1905). Beato managed to photograph the last three days of the Crimean War. He enhanced his record of slaughter in the so-called Indian Mutiny (known in India as the First War for Independence) by adding human remains into the foreground of his composition. He was onsite to chronicle the Second Opium War in China, provoked by British merchants illegally importing the drug from India. Numerous photographs of Japan, collected over Beato’s prolific 20-year stay in that country, are also assembled here. Beato’s photographs are made from the point of view of a Westerner in sympathy with colonization, playing to an audience awed by the romanticism of the foreign. Fascinating on their own, when contrasted with the insider’s deconstruction and use of new technologies explored by artists in the adjacent “Photography from the New China” exhibition, they challenge viewers to reassess the role photography can play in our perceptions of events  (J. Paul Getty Museum, West Los Angeles).
Diane Calder

Richard Hawkins has been weaving images from popular culture and literature to create funky low tech works since the late 1980s. While he is an accomplished draftsman, painter and writer, he purposely makes pieces that are casually put together. He uses pictures clipped from teen magazines, attaching them to drooping pieces of felt with paper clips or to the underside of a card table. His evocative juxtapositions fetishize the male figure and scrutinize how the male body is presented to both gay and straight viewers in literature, art and popular culture. In his first retrospective exhibition, organized by The Art Institute of Chicago, more than 60 works are presented including drawings, paintings, sculptures and collage. Hawkins’ work is challenging but there is a method to his madness: a clarity of vision and subject matter that has been refined and perfected over time (The Hammer Museum, West Los Angeles).
JZ

Ed Ruscha visits some familiar themes through paint in “Psycho Spaghetti Westerns.” They display a flare that appears warm in contrast to the cool aesthetic of his familiar pop-inspired imagery. The installation of each work allows for a generous spacing, ten works in three rooms, that serves to evoke the importance of Ruscha’s historical importance as a conceptual artist. There are only ten paintings in a total of three different rooms. The oddly symbolic landscapes are dotted with just enough imagery to pull the viewer through. A hill, a knoll of grass, or a black strip of asphalt — these backgrounds are rather bare and contain little detail other than the baseline and texture required to situate the viewer. The assortment of items that dot these landscapes is depicted in a soft realism that calls attention to the fact that these are in fact paintings. Collectively the subjects featured are trash, found objects, and forgotten bits of consumerism. A blown tire, comic book, and an empty beer cartoon are all represented in different works, and they sit in front of interchangeable fields of hazy atmospheric color. The debris clutters the idyllic context and feels unnatural, much like trash blowing around the park. “Spaghetti Western #8” features an old mattress next to the remnants of a blown tire. Sitting atop the horizon line, it’s like a still life, poorly arranged by the arbitrary forces of nature along the side a the freeway. The arrangement is odd, somewhat disturbing, and somehow still enjoyable as these cultural objects are reclaimed from inevitable decay (Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills).
G. James Daichendt

If you're not looking for it, you may not even notice it's there: on the long street-facing façade of the gallery, Dianna Molzan has paint-splattered the entire wall, with the exception of an "X" running from corner to corner, existing as the byproduct of negative space. It's a rare outdoor painted work that seems to embrace its exposure to direct sunlight, the mass of paint flecks burrowing in and around their stucco crevices, reading vaguely as a seashell-encrusted collage up close, while fading into atmospheric fuzziness at a distance. It's a surprising large-scale extension for an artist whose work emphasizes deconstructing the fundamental structure of what makes a painting (LAXART, Culver City).
MS

As part of its roving exhibition series begun in 2010, Launch has settled its wings into Merry Karnowsky's expansive space for “Solid Stripes,” an uneven show with a few notable standouts. Andy Moses has taken his undulating waves of stratum to a new level of mastery, complexly pearlescent colors molded into rippling patterns so tight in their execution they almost read as frozen, excessively warped video frames. The concave canvases add subtle additional emphasis to the distortions, which push delineated edges to the limits. Far across the visceral spectrum, Christopher Mercier builds out boxy shelters for paint made up of slivers, wedges and slabs, with the occasional odd smearing, set off against white expanses of panel. This approach of paint-as-building-blocks across an architectural structure yields intensely dense effects from a relatively intimate scale. As the lone photographer in the group, Jay Mark Johnson's landscape format ink-jet prints of digitized stripes - one set off by a truck, the other a train, implying a sense of warp speed – feel all too familiar; see Jason Salavon, among others. However, his two "Storm at Sea" photos, heavily manipulated beach/seascapes which exaggerate depth and a certain amount of chaos, are oceanic Frankensteins that are threatening not by their wave sizes but rather by their turbulence. They offer a new take on a well-traveled subject. Alongside Moses' wavy striations, the works' inclusion appears to have been pulled off (Launch, Miracle Mile).
MS

Susan Logoreci’s painstaking color pencil drawings are about the size of a decent-sized TV screen and contain an alarming amount of visual information that your brain is at best nearly sure of comprehending. Like a Haruki Murakami novel, the impression of urban normalcy is a false one. For instance, in “Hollywoodlandgrab” what appears to be a matter-of-fact depiction of a Los Angeles neighborhood (often pieced together from collages of aerial photographs), is missing quite a large amount of information. The geometric patterns of blank space superimposed over the gaily-colored buildings is faintly sinister in this unpeopled landscape. Logoreci seems to be in the business of mischief-making, and is at her best when she wreaks major havoc with pictorial space (Cirrus, Downtown).
Jeannie R. Lee

Can good art also be hideous?  In Larry Mantello's collages and sculptures, which are riddled with a kitchen sink-filled preponderance of pop-cultural effluvia, including hefty doses of SpongeBob SquarePants, Hannah Montana and Mickey Mouse, he seems to be saying:  "here you go, America:  this is what you want; enjoy."  That's not to say that “Together Again,” the show's title, isn't without aesthetic merit; indeed, the objects are quite thoroughly aestheticized through complex and carefully thought out sculptural arrangements. The use of various decals, transfers, acetates and other semi-transparent layering make up a series of relatively subtle wall works, such as “Come to Me” or “Banner Year.”  But look closer, and you'll find beefcake shots, or even isolated porn mixed in with the rainbows, the "Happy Birthday" plates, or the Mickeys. (Or, is it the Mickeys that are mixed in with the porn?)  Additional works on paper feature tattoos, tape and assorted transfers that range from couplings of assorted eyeballs and insects to multiple-intersecting cartoon mascots in interestingly colored layerings. As a group, with the numerous sculptures – including one with a Ray Charles tune emanating from within that provides another obstacle that denies that old fashioned practice of quiet contemplation – wall collages and works on paper all compete to reach the very top of 'over-the-top.' His deliberately over-saturated boldness finally comes across as an attempt to exorcise the demons of pop-cultural overstimulation for our collective well-being (CB1 Gallery, Downtown).
MS

For “Grayscale” Analia Saban has left bright color behind for a singular warm, bluish gray as she digs deeper into the foundations of paint and the painted object itself. "Paint Bag (Gray)," which sits on the floor and leads one to wonder whether you've walked in on an installation in progress, typifies the material exploration. The canvas is entombed in a plastic bag, and the gray acrylic paint, likely still wet, bulges in a clump where the plastic meets the floor. Other sagging paint pieces hang on the wall, their bulbous protrusions reminiscent of Byron Kim's more literal belly paintings. "Representation of a Chair" – at four-foot square the largest work in the show - is a painting in which the primary elements of a folding chair appear to have been cast, in sections, from acrylic that's been laid over them, and then laid onto a white canvas, the relief of the object providing as the work's "painterliness." It resonates as a more tactile reconsideration of Joseph Kosuth's landmark conceptual work, "One and Three Chairs." Saban also utilizes laser-cutting technology in several works, executing various grids and lines through the process. The results, while groundbreaking in their way, come off as academic, missing much of the poetry of the more rotund, sculptural offerings. The strongest piece is arguably the most pure: "Cover," a smaller work in which one corner of a monochrome rectangle is pulled back, revealing the molded contours of the wrapped-around edge it once inhabited, and, along with gravity's pull, allowing a fraction of that same corner to fold drifting back towards where it came (Thomas Solomon Gallery, Chinatown).
MS

Continuing to eschew toxic paint fumes for outsourced inkjet prints, Ryan Tomcho’s current work narrowly escapes the skeptical comment that has plagued computer art since the Mac first came out with its Paint program decades ago: “I could do that.” “Diagram Destroyer” is a case in point; waves of neon surf make for clean leaping vertical lines, while a blurred purple and pink checked flag makes a wavy appearance in the background – it is really as sumptuous as a painting.  The eye reflexively recognizes the computer influence in the room, yet somehow, the pixilated areas and the referential brushstrokes occupy a fluid space that reaches beyond the edge of the canvas (WPA, Chinatown).
JRL

Trees are the thing in “The Weight and the Magnitude,” which highlights nature-related works in a nod to Earth Day. Steering clear of most of the gloom and doom normally associated with conservation efforts, the exhibit instead focuses on more uplifting fare. Included are Sant Khalsa’s glass and poplar wood totem series, “Seedlings,” featuring imprints of regrowth from fire-decimated forests, Andre Yi’s stunning acrylics of tree trunks spouting 2001 Space Odyssey-esque emerald monoliths, and Rebecca Hamm’s exceptional branch-inspired acrylic mosaic of woodland colors, “No. 2.” On the flipside are Sally Egan’s kitschy, untitled photo of an IE family barbecuing corn cobs in a dump, Samantha Field’s moving series of acrylic nature fires, and Constance Mallinson’s photo of a lifeless bird laying beneath a bed of leaves that spell out “me,” in “Fragile.” Also don’t miss Juan Thorp’s series of mechanical bark timbers, James Patrick Finnegan’s flower-sprouting tree sculpture and Emily Smith’s cardboard layered strata and Astroturf installation depicting our rural world. Be sure to also stop by Gisela Colon’s “Chromatic Cool” in the adjoining room for an intense explosion of vibrant color and abstraction (Andi Campognone Projects, Pomona).
Stacy Davies

A quirky set of drawings by Brad Coleman entitled “Reproductions” raises a number of issues about biology and process. A Midwesterner who has found himself at the unusual crossroads of being both an artist and a pastor, his first museum exhibition is a strong showing of realism embodied with personal narrative and perception. The subject matter is a sheep that was systematically reproduced twelve times over. Rendered in charcoal and presented in order of completion, “Sheep I-XII” is an act of both discipline and lunacy. The actual sheep is not just a biblical allusion to pasturing a flock, but is the infamous “Dolly” (1996-2003), which was the first cloned mammal. “Sheep I” is a drawing of Dolly based on a photograph that was originally published in the world’s newspapers. Over a period of twelve years Coleman subsequently drew the same image of Dolly based upon his drawing of the previous year. Because each drawing is based upon a reproduction, the later images are further removed from the ironic original reproduction. Dolly looks exactly the same from a distance but upon close examination and comparison the shading, values, and proportions change. But one has only the drawings to compare—a paradox that reveals the difficulty related to clones and sameness.  With enough time, Dolly becomes a stylistic symbol through repetition. The absence of a background and the square format heighten the sense of Dolly as an object, as the realism can become abstract line and form in the details. The origins of the project are more personal as it began when Coleman and his wife investigated fertility drugs. Dolly is in many ways an outlet for the philosophical issues relating to reproduction that Coleman embraces uncomfortably. Questioned through its application, reproducing a drawing has become more than a mechanical and biological process (Laguna Art Museum, Orange County).
GJD

This group of Latin American artists each share a common history of colonialism, each growing up in an atmosphere where violence, poverty, and political strife were the norm. In each country artistic subcultures emerge that are driven to tell how ironic it is to live in a colorful paradise that is somehow rife with social and political corruption. Rather than openly portray that atmosphere, artists find piercing inroads to convey content over beauty. The power of their art comes from not spelling out the situation, but by intriguing viewers to become involved in each enigmatic story. When hidden messages are revealed and its impact understood, the reaction can be more devastating than a direct critique. “Experi[mental]” is designed to expose this artistic underground to the light of day. Luis Fernando Ponce deals with the rampant social violence of a gun culture. Jorge de Leon, a former gang member, shows the fragility of life when young boys take on a life style that exposes them to mortal dangers. Karen Clachar creates a collection of clay “Sabaneros,” Costa Rican cowboys, who disappeared when tourism forced replacement cattle ranching. Ronald Moran confronts child and domestic violence by covering various objects with soft, fluffy white cotton. Angel Poyon creates a series of tombstones that reference the death of ancient indigenous values in place of alien western ideas. The exhibition brings home the idea that art has a transformative effect. It helps us see not only the life of other cultures, but, like a mirror, art leads us to see ourselves and our culture through fresh eyes as well (Salt Fine Art, Orange County).
Roberta Carasso

Two exceptional artists, Tony DeLap and Ruth Pastine, come together to form one powerful exhibition that passionately explores relationships of color, shapes, and space. DeLap is a master of illusion. Here he puts on a flat canvas what he might have constructed in one of his dimensional sculptures. Using black and white acrylic, against luscious spinach green and wood-like colored raw linen, DeLap works the four-color surfaces as if they were three-dimensional forms. In most paintings green seems to dominate, no matter how large or small the area it covers. While his luminous green carries with it images of money, billiards, or plants, it adds an emotional impact to the more sober colors. DeLap’s shapes turn corners, disappear, reappear, and embrace what might be seen when looking at a full dimensional form on one side then shifting to look at it from the other side. Playing with physical space, Delap creates hyperbolic paraboloids that deceptively test the viewer, who must determine which is up or down, or top or bottom. We try to see the whole or attempt to cobble together the whole in our minds, while in fact we are able only to see the parts. Pastine is a colorist pushing secondary oil paint on canvas to see how each of two colors reacts with and to the other. In working with systems of color, structure, and perception, she discovered that an Orange and a Violet, a Green and Orange, or a Violet and Green, when developed layer upon layer, tends either to conquer or surrender to the other color. Pastine’s work has a great deal of depth. In applying paint to a canvas, she considers not only the effects of the color, but the light and temperature it transmits. The convergence of complimentary colors evokes a visceral effect as the strength of one against the power of the other heats up the canvas, giving us a breathtaking experience; it’s as though you’re seeing color for the first time (Peter Blake Gallery, Orange County).
RC

Clichés, idioms and adages that refer to the places we live in or dream about abound, a testament to the significance of the home in an individual’s personal life as well as in our culture’s value system. Utilizing a simplified house-like shape, Becky Guttin explores personal identity, community, migration, heritage and our drive to provide shelter and protection. The six house forms in “Moving” (1999-2011)  are tall — 8 or 9 feet each — and about shower-size — just wide enough to stand inside of comfortably.  These structures, formed with rebar and wrapped with plastic, bubble-wrap and other materials, remind us how our houses insulate us from what is outside, both the natural world, including weather, and other people. The work titled “106-1 Installation” is more ethereal. Fifty or more tiny houses hang, on their own monofilament lines, as if suspended mid-air, giving the piece a dreamlike quality. The tiny dream-houses are made of copper, brass, wood and plastic — different enough to suit anyone’s taste, yet uniform enough in structure to fit the cultural norms (San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery, San Diego).
Judith Christensen