Judie Bamber, “Mom with Tan Lines #1,” 2007, graphite on paper, 18-13/16 x 15-3/8”.

An exhibition of works on paper by Judie Bamber titled "Are you My Mother" use evocative images of the artist’s mother as source material. Using original snapshots taken by the artist's father, Bamber looks at her mother as an object of desire, a sex symbol while simultaneously questioning memory and family dynamics. Bamber's detailed drawings and watercolors transform the crispness of the photographic image into something warmer and more human. That many of the images present her mother in different stages of undress challenges the terms of conventional mother/daughter relationships and reflect a comfort displaying the body’s intimacies that has been a constant in Bamber's work.

Also on view are a small and intimate series of paintings by Jeremy Dickinson that are skillfully executed renditions of a single bus. Each evokes a sentimentality and sense of play based upon the age of the object represented and the proportions of such large physical objects represented on a diminutive scale. Each bus is featured at a three quarters view, much like an awkward and forced portrait. The vast difference in color, shape, and size are surprising for such a familiar object. One image features the Halifax Fleetline’s green and orange bus. The colors are slightly exaggerated but still realistic. It’s a quirky idea that is a continuation of a series Dickinson started almost twenty years ago called “Civic Pride,” where the artist depicts British city buses over the span of four decades. There is one departure from this formula; a piece of scrap metal from a former school bus was used as a canvas for one of his paintings. The combination of materials in this particular piece is a bit awkward, but the exhibition otherwise ties together the artist’s heightened awareness of public transportation and its influence on the identity and aesthetics of a city.
The third concurrent exhibition consists of new works by Los Angles painter Linda Stark, "Adorned Paintings (and more)." These exquisite works are close-ups of skin, hands, and other body parts. Some are adorned with jewelry that transforms the body into an abstraction. Stark builds up her surfaces, so the paintings have a sculptural quality. The works are as much about the surface as what lies below the skin (Angles Gallery, Culver City).
Jody Zellen/G. James Daichendt

George Legrady, "At the Table," 2011, Edition 1/5, Lenticular photographic print, 32 x 47”.

Viewers waltz in front of the 24 lenticular optical screens in George Legrady’s current exhibition, marveling at their ability to activate the art, and feeling a partner in the production of their meaning. Each of the eight 32 x 47 inch works in “Refractions” is composed from a group of 24 black and white photographs from Legrady’s stock of documentary images shot in 1972 at a Hungarian Ball in Montreal. All are revitalized by the fluidity inherent in the lenticular lens, a device in use since the mid-20th century to divert or deflect light from its course. Dynamically generated computer animation for HD or XVGA screens and a 4 channel audio multimedia installation that accompany the lenticular works further attest to Legrady’s ability to explore a variety of media that shape the substance of his artistic production. Legrady infuses connections with the cinematic by displaying exactly 24 lenticular works in this show, the magical number of frames per second that make the simulation of movement possible in films. The ghost-like quality present in the work is underscored by references to movie stills and comparisons with the still camera’s ability to stop time. Legrady’s lenticular screens allow us to shift positions to view a stuffed pheasant perched on a doily, elevated above or meshed with images of those doomed to be served on china plates stacked high in “Display.” Dualities are amplified by our realization that the celebration of lavish events such as the one that engages us here, are viewed from a different perspective under current economic conditions. The wait staff in “At the Bar” brings to mind the experimentation with mirrored imagery and tensions of class evident in Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” While Manet’s barmaid is trapped between roles as participant and outsider, Legrady offers viewers of his lenticular works an opportunity to participate in deciding how meaning and significance are to be determined (Edward Cella Art + Architecture, Miracle Mile).
Diane Calder

Claude Monet, “Rouen Cathedral, the portal. Morning Sun, Blue Harmony,” 1893, oil on canvas, 91 x 63 cm.
Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France (Inv. RF2000), Photo courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux by Thierry Le Mage/Art Resource, NY.

Lined up like two sets of quintuplets, the ten paintings in the “Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedrals” exhibition entreat us to ponder their similarities and seek out their differences. Five of Monet’s thirty glorious Impressionistic interpretations of the iconic Gothic cathedral are here. Enshrouded in carved, gilded frames, every diverse pastel brushstroke on their highly textured surface references the hand of the artist. Their aggrandized status is confirmed by the amount of wall space they are afforded and the blaring alarms keeping viewers at a proper distance from the three Monets on loan from Musee d’Orsey. Conversely, Lichtenstein’s serial grouping, “Rouen Cathedral (Seen at 5 Different Times of the Day) Set III,” is clustered together on one wall, its ordinary strip frames simulating comic book panels. The Pop artist’s Ben-Day dot take on Rouen, often cited in connection with the overkill of mass produced representations of Monet’s work on post cards, posters, magazines, books and billboards, resembles a parent’s attempt to tell identical siblings apart by garbing each in a different color. Lichtenstein brought this series to life in 1969, predating the digital era. With a limited palette of red, yellow, blue, black and white, up close they resemble test patterns for camera exposures ranging from luminescent morning fog to nighttime’s mysterious noir. But step back and from the proper perspective, they manage to deliver quite a punch in the midsection (Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA], Miracle Mile).
DC

Martin Soto Climent, “Frenetic Gossamer,” 2011.

Like E.V. Day, Martin Soto Climent’s women’s underthings-inspired installation, “Frenetic Gossamer,” is aggressively taut. But whereas Day’s works confront us obliquely, “Frenetic Gossamer” explodes right out at the viewer. A crisscrossing pattern of pantyhose leggings splay out from the edges of canvases - which are stacked up into its own titled wall - their stretched ends fastened down with heeled-pumps along walls at the sides of the gallery. It’s a disorienting perspective, and its confrontational thrust, if you will, rubs up against cultural signifiers that tell us that we should feel a little bit dirty; but that feeling fades soon enough. Climent has worked with tights before, and his penchant for them as a part of his vocabulary ultimately comes off as sculptural rather than sex/gender-oriented. Whatever perception one comes away with will tend to stem more from one’s own baggage than from the artist’s provocations (Michael Benevento Gallery, West Hollywood).
Michael Shaw

Whitney Bedford, "Untitled Lightning (Inside/Out)", 2011, Ink and oil on panel, 34" x 48".

You have to give Whitney Bedford credit for sticking to her quasi-romantic, sea-faring iconography so faithfully. It’s such a well-trodden, Moby Dick-heavy cliché of a subject that there are all kinds of potential traps and impediments. But Bedford has come to use the motif as something of a virtual found object from which she is able to take painterly journeys. In “Untitled (Crowded/Memory),” a 6’x10’ oil and ink on panel piece, a series of masts become icons of vertical erasure exploding into the near horizon, with the foreground a swirling knot of absence. “Lala Land (Sun stroked)” is a tropical coastline near at hand, with a mysterious protrusion of spidery red lines cascading amid the trees. The largest work, the 8 x 12 foot “Untitled Lightning (Big Trouble),” is unfortunately a clunker, but otherwise Bedford continues to salvage relevancy out of seascapes, and then some (Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City).
MS

Adam McEwen, “Chemnitz,” 2011, acrylic and chewing gum on canvas, 90 x 70”.

Adam McEwen’s decision to name his debut exhibition in Los Angeles “11.11.11” alerts the viewer to the reflexive nature and deeply complex web of representation evident in the body of work. First the title asserts a temporal significance, which places it in a specific moment in the history of modern art. Secondly the symmetry of the numerical sequence is a palindrome and therefore reads the same no matter how the numbers are re-arranged.  Although “11.11.11” references a just recently passed calendar date, McEwen’s version of that moment in time contains objects that are at once familiar and wholly unfamiliar. McEwen created precise representations of everyday objects such as a water cooler, a roll gate, chalkboard and safe and constructed them out of graphite. The dense material absorbs light and makes each object seem monolithic and devoid of any trace of humanity. Accompanying the objects are wall-size grids of black and white photographic wallpaper of repetitive scenes, first of the firebombing of Dresden and second of New York City sidewalks littered with chewing gum. McEwen positioned non-slip metal doors onto the sidewalk scene, adding dimension to an otherwise flat and Minimalist surface. In the world of “11.11.11” street scenes are viewed on the ceiling as though they are the last remaining artifacts of the past (Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills).
A. Moret

Pae White, “Ashen Roses, There,” 2011.

"Here Today" Pae White’s formal explorations of color and shape, as always with a conceptual edge. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a mirrored sculpture, "Ashen Rosen, There," in which hundreds of small hexagonal shaped mirrors are suspended from wire. Each reflects the cut and colored paper glued to the surface below. The sculpture moves with the wind, offering constantly changing reflections, transforming its initial simplicity into a complex web of intertwined compositions. "Ashen Rosen, There" is complemented by a large fabric work suspended across the upstairs gallery space. Works on paper and panel, in which lines have been carved into the surface to create a grid of crisscrossing shapes and colors, round out the show. As she branches out to embrace new materials and combinations of elements her core design sense remains elegant and purposeful. There are notes of humor and irony in White's work that often remains submerged by the presentation (1301PE, Miracle Mile).
JZ

“Announce” installation view at Thomas Solomon Gallery, 2011.

“Announce” is a concept show made up of vintage gallery invitations ranging from roughly the mid-1960s to the late ‘90s (plus a few handmade acrylic-on-paper announcement recreations by Dave Muller from this year). It turns out to be an ingenious contribution to Pacific Standard Time. Both wall and vitrine-based, the show is divided up into the contributors, who include John Baldessari and the collection of his own announcements; the collection of Ed Ruscha; and the quirky collection of Tom Marioni, the artist of the ‘have-a-beer-with-me’ art/performances. Intriguing images include portraits of Ron Davis for his show at Nicholas Wilder Gallery, and Frank Stella at Ferus Gallery (both from the collection of Stanley and Elyse Grinstein), black & white images from back in the day when they were on top of the world, at least in L.A. The most memorable card is a text from the collection of Rosamund Felsen, herself an L.A. art world institution if there ever was one, which reads simply: “Never fear being vulgar … just boring” (Thomas Solomon Gallery, Chinatown).
MS

Richard Hawkins and Aaron Curry, installation view at David Kordansky Gallery, 2011.

“Confabulation” brings together a former teacher-student duo into a collaboration in which the teacher, Richard Hawkins has now nearly been swallowed by his charge, Aaron Curry. Curry continues where he left off from his solo show here about a year and a half ago, transforming the gallery with silkscreened walls (in this case movable and saleable cardboard) that are even more immersive this time around. The gallery is divided into separate rooms, the bright pink, green, and purple-dominated walls with faux wood-grained patterns that bypass texture for something more akin to photographic caricature. Though there’s an evenly distributed demarcation of work that is alternately Curry’s, Hawkins’, or a collaboration, it’s impossible to get past the sense that Curry owns the context, through his well-established vocabulary of brightly-colored graphic blow-ups. The blow-ups extend to both the extra-quirky wall works, as well as directly onto his Picasso-esque, flat silhouette-style sculptures. Hawkins’ signatures include a faux metal pattern of grayish, bolted patches, which become both the backdrop and the object itself for his Asian, ‘teen beat’-flecked collages, as well as providing the form for the quasi-sculptural bases that support the aforementioned Curry sculptures. With Curry’s gestures so rooted in plays of scale, depth, and source, the whole set-up here - as much as Hawkins’ hand is visible – feels like one giant Curry quotation (David Kordansky Gallery, Culver City).
MS

Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor, “Happenstance,” 2011, cardboard, wood, resin, acrylic, paint, bed sheets, blankets, bath rugs, paper, drywall screws, 66 x 48 x 60”.

From the mysteriously twisted and complex images of our dreams comes a suite of sculptures by Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor. The exhibition, titled “Dreadful Sorry Clementine,” presents the characters of our communal childhood psyche, alluded to from the lands of nursery rhymes, singsong fables and fairy tales, where the darkly macabre tends to mingle tenuously with the fantastical. Six to eight feet tall sculptures of crow-beasts, dog-men and multicolored flower-headed foxes stand forebodingly, while simultaneously begging compassion and evoking fragments from our own subconscious that are troubling yet comfortingly familiar. Higgins’ use of cardboard, bed sheets and other domestic materials furthers the viewers’ mixture of pleasure and unease at confronting these visions of a long stored away yesteryear. Her unique style of assemblage, bonded by stiffened fabrics and resin, furthermore conjures a sense of patchwork chaos and altered reality (Charlie James Gallery, Chinatown).
Kimberly Nichols

Erik Frydenborg, “Codec 9 (Interpreted as Opus 2),” 2011, pine, wood stain, medium density fiberboard, linen, polyurethane plastic, pigments, 46 xc 36 x 4”.

Erik Frydenborg makes art with an especially contemporary aesthetic, one in which his mixed-media wall works – neither paintings nor sculptures – maintain an affect of the digital despite being resolutely analog. Using academic illustrations as his source, the resulting body of work includes spare compositions of painted polyurethane plastic forms that feel as though they could have been made using a 3-D printer (though clearly are not; they’re too well-crafted). The wall works, plus one sculpture on a wood base in the center of the gallery, are set in a museum-style, pedagogical installation with light-grey painted walls and floor base-boards, further emphasizing the specimen-heavy orientation of the show, dubbed “Dr. (Illegible).”  “Parens (Life’s Work),” meanwhile, a grouping of found prints and index cards, as well as a lightjet print portrait of a vintage academic with freakily-Photoshopped eyes in the preceding room becomes the cryptic foundation for the installation to follow. The great thing about Frydenborg’s work is that it can take some time to acclimatize to its unique intensity; the institutional quality is more oppressive that you might expect. If you feel the impulse to run away this time, stay just a bit longer than your comfort level allows, and the next time around you’ll be that much closer to speaking the doctor’s language (Cherry and Martin, Culver City).
MS

“Founders:  Arlene Raven, Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville,” ca. 1972, photograph.

At the start of the modern feminist movement was the formation of two Feminist Art Programs at Fresno State (1970) and then CalArts (1971), largely spearheaded by artist and teacher Judy Chicago. Following that, in 1973 Chicago, along with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Arlene Raven, opened the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles as a physical manifestation of an autonomous space that was run, directed, and supported for and by women. It was, by intent, to specifically break with the structures of patriarchal institutions. “Doin’ It In Public,” reaches deep into the archives of art history to pull together a cogent and well-researched show that gives as good as it gets. Not only are there well-edited selections of video and ephemera from that time, the exhibition also includes a website (at which herstories are still being solicited); screenings, readings, and performances; and a two-volume publication. A two-day symposium/convening/reunion recently functioned as its own collaborative art event. This exhibition not only presents a full range of the prominent works (in many genres) produced in affiliation with the Woman’s Building in a no-nonsense way, but there is a clear sense of the time during which the works were created. Especially to be appreciated is the time and attention taken to present and, in some instances, re-stage the performances. Given the well-placed access to wall-mounted monitors and headphones, which sometimes function as in-depth wall text, viewers can spend a great deal of time exploring this exhibit. It’s time well spent (Otis College of Art and Design, West Side).
Jeannie R. Lee

Marta Soul, “Divan” from the “Idilios Series,” 2011, color photograph.

Marta Soul’s “Idillios” is a highly amusing series of photos in which a red-headed woman passionately, if theatrically, kisses a different man in each of a series of clichéd idyllic locales. We move with her from an over-the-top divan in a modern living room, to a sunlit bench at a golf course, to a ridiculous gallery filled with Greek statue casts and a lone smiling bronze figure on the verge of cracking a whip toward the well-attired couple. The settings alone are wry commentaries on taste and the façade of fantasies; coupled with the couples, they become excesses of gaudy passions.  The redhead’s numerous hairstyles and that her body is positioned so that we always view her from behind leave the viewer wondering if these aren’t in fact different women. But exhibition notes inform us that in fact she is all the same one. It all ends up leaving us to wonder, What are we being titillated by - The very soft porn? Perhaps. Or it could simply be the mischievous procuring of all these magical locales by the artist, who makes us quite aware of all the mechanisms involved in these multiple facades, of both subject and object (Kopeikin Gallery, Culver City).  
MS

Untitled objects from “Pearls of Wisdom:  End the Violence,” 2011.

The resilience, beauty and variety of pearl shaped objects, hand made by members of families afflicted by domestic violence, illuminate the public entry halls here. Glowing under gallery lights, individually cushioned on hand-sized pillows and strung together in groups, the 150 “gems” selected for “Pearls of Wisdom: End the Violence” exemplify the goal of artist and activist Kim Abeles to enable survivors of violence to reflect on their experiences and develop the courage to move on. A video and series of still photographs reveal the process followed in 70 workshops held state wide in collaboration with the nonprofit agency, A Window Between Worlds. Metaphorically utilizing victim-participants interpretations of pearls – objects that are described by scientists as the by-product of an adaptive immune system – these women were invited to wrap an object signifying their abuse as the basis for sculpture. They then wrote their personal stories of pain and recovery. Using this paper to envelop the object, participants coated the resulting masses of crumpled paper with layers of luminous glaze. Journal entries including “Help each other, change is possible,” put into words the symbolic meaning of each visual object (Skirball Cultural Center, West Los Angeles).
DC

Allan Sekula, “Untitled Slide Sequence,” 2011, black and white photograph, 16 x 20”.

In 1972 Allan Sekula produced a work entitled "Untitled Slide Sequence" in which he presented 25 black and white slides taken at the General Dynamics Conair Division Aerospace Factory in San Diego documenting factory workers on their way to work. Sekula focused his camera objectively on people who seem unaware and unaffected by the camera. They arrive in groups, some with lunch boxes others with briefcases, etc. Originally the work was shown in a darkened room with one slide being presented after the other. Now with the aid of digital technologies Sekula has transformed the transparencies into black and white prints in order to exhibit them as a sequence of photographs that unfold across the gallery wall. Seeing the images anew and as prints allows one to examine the details and to move back and across the sequence rather than having to wait for the slide show to loop. Like many of Sekula's early pieces, this was also meant to provoke questions about the nature of documentary and photographic veracity. Also included in the exhibition are three works from "California Stories," a body of work from 1973-77 (Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica).
JZ

Paco Pomet, “Affair,” 2011, oil on canvas, 47 x 63”.

Paco Pomet is a Spanish painter who begins with found photographs and uses them as the source material for his impastoed monochromatic paintings. The vintage backgrounds are juxtaposed with images borrowed from popular culture - a reference to Star Wars, like R2D2, or by combining human and animal forms. Sometimes a cartoon figure like Yogi Bear appears. Human faces morph so that mouths become beaks and ears become horns. The paintings are beautifully rendered if tonally minimal. Pomet adds hints of color - like in "Affair," in which a woman dressed in a 19th century costume walks across an orange line that stretches from a boat to the shore - over a school of alligators. While some of Pomet's works read as one liners most resonate beyond the joke. The works are allegorical and existential comments on alienation and inter-human relationships (Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica).
JZ

Matthew Ritchie, sculpture.  Photo:  Joshua White.

“Monstrance” is Matthew Ritchie’s L.A. debut, consisting of a series of paintings, a few sculptures, and floor and wall outlines that serve as elaborate frames for video projections. Ritchie’s systematic, quasi-spiritual oeuvre is ever-present here, and with the low-lighting in the galleries, a heightened ethereal quality makes the viewer nothing if not more ripe for conversion; to what remains a mystery. The paintings describe, more than depict, hybridized winged figures, veiled in their own internal language of abstraction. Glowing lines mark the mapping of constellations. Ritchie has been so committed to his own system(s) of visual language for so long that there’s no way it can’t come off as a convincingly cohesive vision. Just how much one is able to glean, or read, into the iconography depends on how inspired you are to invest in its thoroughly systematic back story (L&M Art, Venice).
MS

Brenna Youngblood, “The Mathematics of Individual Achievement,” 2011, installation view at Honor Fraser Gallery.

Most of the nearly thirty objects that comprise Brenna Youngblood’s expansive “The Mathematics of Individual Achievement” delightfully resist labeling, ranging from larger painted “backdrops” to diminutive linear wood compositions. They engage even if you remain completely ignorant of the conceptual gesture that links the works to her old elementary school math book. A few of the small unpainted wooden wall sculptures – made of sanded and rounded cubes and rectangles glued in a line – are recognizably simple mathematical expressions, but the context complicates the reading. When two small horizontal wood lines are displayed beneath another work, then it might be a reference to the painterly support, to a plinth, to the wooden construction of the other works; all of these besides the mathematical symbol for “equal.” Only the spare painted outline of a cube form, made of “tree,” sits on the floor and might easily be regarded as a sculpture. The surfaces of the wall pieces are such thoughtfully rendered abstract paintings that even the shaped canvases assembled as mounted and stacked stars do not assert themselves entirely as sculptural objects. While there is heavy assemblage and a bold mash-up of conventional categories going on, the colors and shapes here are still playful and light-hearted (Honor Fraser, Culver City).
JRL

Dan Shaw Town, “Untitled,” 2011, graphite and enamel spray paint on paper with metal grommets, 50 x 38”.

While they’re clearly two separate solo shows, the pairing of Dan Shaw Town with Artie Verkant makes for an intriguing dichotomy. In one room the fiercely analog, and in the next the fiercely digital. Shaw Town makes minimal, graphite-dense, spray-painted wall works with a vocabulary limited primarily to squares and triangles. The not-quite drawings and not-quite paintings designation of the wall works then turns to the not-quite drawings, not-quite sculpture floor works. Graphite-laden sheets of paper are folded in various configurations and in various layers onto coffee table-like bases. What they all share is a rich material existence. Verkant’s works, meanwhile, are digitally composed, gradation-based abstractions that are printed directly onto Sintra, making them paintings, at least initially; but that’s just the beginning.  As Verkant is interested in the way that we most frequently consume images, he then takes the installation of these installed paintings, documents it, and alters the ensuing digital image in various ways, including watermarking and digital retouching. It is a process intended to create new iterations for visual dissemination. How should you keep that in mind when looking at the paintings themselves? Use your imagination; or, better yet, look them up online later (China Art Objects, Culver City).
MS

Jon Seeman, “Interactive,” 2011, steel, zinc, acrylic, and polyurethane, 57 x 46”.

Marion Meyer Contemporary Art exhibits this, its final show through the end of the year. This closing exhibition is a stunner, consisting of abstract sculptures by Jon Seeman entitled “Captured Motion.” All six of his five-to-eight-foot high pieces within the gallery, along with three taller ones outside, are made of steel or stainless steel painted in hi tech primary colors or hand polished. Every sculpture, a powerful yet balanced arrangement of geometric and free form shapes, demonstrates Seeman’s ability to seamlessly combine artistic with technical skills. The symmetry and elegance of the individual works, placed so as to also dialogue with each other, creates a free-flowing show. The spirit of Alexander Calder’s mobiles and stabiles is very much present here. Seeman explains, "Painters of the early modern art movement have been the inspiration for my use of bold geometric shapes … in sculpture, the physical dynamics establish a connection and presence with the viewer." One red piece titled “Interactive” features five long, movable steel rods affixed to a tower. At the end of each rod, a large geometrically shaped steel block is balanced which can be easily moved in any direction, while capable of jostling adjacent blocks. Complementing the sculptures are 10 wall pieces, the artist’s newest works. In each 17 x 17 inch work, an abstract arrangement of small stainless steel pieces are affixed to a primary colored steel square that is placed against a black background and surrounded by a broad stainless steel frame. These playful pieces complement and dialogue with the larger ones, while attesting to the artist’s penchant to experiment with his chosen media (Marion Meyer Contemporary Art, Orange County).
Liz Goldner

Norman Mooney, “Wallflower,” 2011.

Eliminating the usual range of vibrant, bright, even subtle colors, “Statements in Black and White” addresses issues of formal tension, uncertainty, confinement, and the ambiguities that emerge when dealing with maximum light or darkness. The last painting created by the late Dennis Ekstrom illuminates his uncanny ability to manipulate the subtlest of paint into a sculptural surface. Its encrusted black surface erupts with minute shadows, ridges, textures and light bouncing off the canvas into sophisticated and primordial shapes. Norman Mooney from Ireland constructs a sun-like sculpture with cast aluminum “spines” standing freely on the ground or protruding from the wall. Because of its circular nature and rod-like linear construction, the reflective sculpture absorbs the surrounding light and shadows so as to harness a sense of boundless white light. James Miller’s work is illusionistic, a semi-realistic, abstract painting, where space is compressed and what is happening in a dim room is deceptive. Phil Kim from Chile constructs four sheer walls of rice paper scrolls on which he draws a narrative of trees, rocks, and ancient Asian people. Placing a chair within the scrolls offers a place for mediation and contemplation. Ambient light suffusing the installation offers privacy and inner peace. John Chang paints in black with white, and white with black, juxtaposing traditional Chinese symbols with free-form modern configurations to convey his feelings of displacement and tension as a Chinese citizen residing in America (S Cube Gallery, Orange County).
Roberta Carasso

Cisco Merel, “fukinagashi,” 2011, acrylic on canvas, 47 1/2 x 39 1/2”.

Panamanian artist Cisco Merel exhibits his acrylic on canvas “Graffiti Nature” paintings, along with collaborative artists, known as W’s (Double You) - a team comprised of Paz Ulloa and Vincente Jimenez - from Costa Rica. Fresh from a residency in Paris and Germany, these artists offer an international perspective on street art and graffiti in general. Merel infuses his art with large, bold, and deliciously colorful views of trees, birds, sky and luxurious natural imagery. His style combines carefully rendered brushstrokes with bold execution. His thick acrylic paint application is highly spirited, playful and well executed. Merel’s use of vibrant colors and down-to-earth subjects are rendered in a joyously spontaneous manner. The W’s work in collaboration. They use all sorts of mixed media and collage, passing each painting to one another to add on the imagery. There is fluidity to the work, conveying a richness of subject that is a product of their collaboration. Offbeat comic characters such as a cat in a shiny suit or a precarious refrigerator infiltrate work that is free-flowing and humorous. Placed together, the two bodies of work, of non-collaboration and collaboration, manage to fit. The artists express the essence of graffiti in different ways: its chaotic, random and spontaneous qualities, together with traditional execution (Salt Fine Art Gallery, Orange County).
RC

Marnie Weber, still from “Eternal Heart,” 2011, film, 16 min..

Eleven darkly themed assemblage pieces by Pat Sparkuhl are strategically placed throughout “Things That Keep Me Up At Night,” an expansive, often foreboding exhibition, jointly curated by a group that includes gallery Director Andrea Harris, Tom Dowling, Mike McGee and Grace Kook-Anderson. Sparkuhl’s “Boy Toy” is a large naked male doll decked out with ammunition, fighter planes, toy soldiers, a skull and other war paraphernalia that references the violence-prone world boys grow up in. Sparkuhl’s intricate, philosophical works, addressing themes of sex, war, health, politics, religion and money, serve as a central metaphor for several dozen other pieces in this haunting show. Harris explains the show’s art is intended is to “... create a dialogue about many topics ... long after they have been seen.” Don Bachardy’s full length, fauve tinted nude portraits, “Untitled Man and Woman,” placed on easels facing each other, express the vulnerability and fear of intimacy. Naida Osline’s three large photographs of men, nude from the chest up (all of them Orange County artists) are portrayed as fierce and tribal, one capped with an animal skin, another with snakes. Marnie Weber’s “Eternal Heart” is an intricate installation consisting of nightmarish life-sized papier-mâché characters, one with a beaked parrot nose, another with appendages growing from its head. These are accompanied by a film featuring the same characters attending a staged funeral of the artist. The most amusing work in this complex exhibition is a small black and white photograph by Weegee of a transvestite’s lower leg, with money stuffed into his stocking (Orange Coast College, Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange County).
LG

Franz A. Bischoff, “Roses,” oil on canvas, 30 x 40”.

“Gardens and Grandeur: Porcelains and Paintings” by Franz A. Bischoff include 55 vividly colored, expressively painted still-lifes, flowers, landscapes, forests and bucolic towns in and around the Pasadena of the early 20th century. The paintings are akin in subject matter and technique to American Impressionism, but often have greater vitality, particularly in their colors. So much so that this specialty museum, devoted to the preservation and display of California Impressionism, is infused with Bischoff’s energy. Here, still-lifes of rare breeds of roses, inspired by the roses that the artist grew in his Pasadena garden a century ago, are painted with brush and palette knife in several layers, with contrasting and fauve-inspired colors. Also rich with texture and detail, these works are influenced by those of Van Gogh. Bischoff’s landscapes and overviews of towns, especially of Cambria (north of Santa Barbara), some with cows, horses, children and graceful female figures draw not only on French Post-Impressionism in their color and technique, but the early modernism of Henri Matisse as well. Bischoff was a porcelain painter before he worked on canvas. Looking at these ten exquisite porcelain pieces, many with flowers and colors that evoke his wall paintings, helps explain how he developed into a painter with a keen eye for detail, as well as a love of painting flowers and other facets of nature (Irvine Museum, Orange County).
LG

Douglas Wheeler, “Untitled,” 1969, acrylic on canvas with neon tubing.

In the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” Mr. McGuire had “Just one word” of advice for Ben: “Plastics.” The timing of the film and the impact of that technology on our home-grown art culture sets a context here. No need to point Southern California artists, including John McCracken, Craig Kauffman, Helen Pashgian and DeWain Valentine, among others, in that direction. Utilizing newly developed industrial technologies as well as surfboard surfacing techniques, they were already casting forms, coating surfaces and vacuum-forming shapes with acrylic, Plexiglas, and polyester resin in the mid-to-late sixties. How these materials interact with light to produce translucence, luster, or luminosity is one of the highlights of “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface.” The lacquer and polyester resin on the surface of McCracken’s “Blue Block in Three Parts” (1966) allows for a smooth, high-sheen finish that results in exceptional reflective properties. For the most part, the shapes are minimal — wedges, balls, slabs, and boxes — yet seductive in their subtle use of color, as in Peter Alexander’s tall, thin, elegant “Orange Wedge” (1970) and Pashgian’s “Untitled” (1968-69) spheres. Three of these cast polyester resin orbs sit in a single row, refracting and reflecting light and movement. In the lobby, Spencer Finch’s giant, yellow, scrim-covered lens, “Rome, Pantheon, Noon, June 14, 2011” contrasts with Robert Venturi’s fanciful fins suspended over viewers’ heads. The Venturi provides an apt entry into the exhibit of works that focus on light, color, form, and surface (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego [MoCA San Diego], La Jolla and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego [MoCA San Diego], San Diego).

Judith Christensen