Suda House, “Defleurir de chemise cagoule,” color Xerox on chiffon and satin with applied stitching/stuffing, 14 x 8 1/2”.

”Then and Now” presents examples of the work of eight Southern California artists who pioneered photo-based media art in the late 1960s and ‘70s. The angle of the show is to contrast what they were making then to what they are doing now. The eight artists: Darryl J. Curran, Robert Fichter, Robbert Flick, Suda House, Patrick Nagatani, Jane O’Neal, Susan Rankaitis and Robert von Sternberg. All were pushing the boundaries of photograph at the time in distinctive ways, experimenting with alternative processes, image text juxtapositions and serial imagery. The sampling here suggests that all have continued to develop and refine their practices over time, and some have begun to embrace and exploit digital technologies in ways similar to their manipulation of film-based photography. Pacific Standard Time has given numerous artists who were under the radar in recent years a change to shine and has open up an important dialogue between past and present, of which this show is a fine example (dnj Gallery, Santa Monica).
Jody Zellen

Julian Wasser, “Sea Witch nightclub, Sunset Strip,” 1966, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24”.

This is an excellent trifecta, bringing together the works of Julian Wasser, George Hermes and Edmund Teske, all artists who considered Los Angeles their home. Wasser’s images of artists and musicians bring back memories of a time and place that has long since become part of the city’s history. Seeing stretches of the city shot from hilltops and rooftops presents a Los Angeles that is less cluttered than today’s congested version. Wasser photographed Marcel Duchamp, a young David Bowie as well as many other celebrities. His images are intimate not invasive, always showing the stars in their best light. While Wasser photographed the scene, Teske turned inward to make enigmatic and evocative soft focus images of non-public people he knew. His black and white photographs are dream-like and meditative. Hermes’ photographs and well as early collages and assemblages date back to the Beat era of the 1950s. The images on view here are modest sized collages in which torn fragments from magazines and newspapers are combined in aesthetically pleasing and poetically rich combinations (Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica).
JZ

Imogen Cunningham, “Unmade Bed,” 1957, photograph, 12 1/2 x 10 5/8”.

An engrossing interview with the still feisty, then nearly ninety year-old Imogen Cunningham plays on a flat screen in the gallery, bringing to life this diverse selection of vintage and signed photographs by the renown pioneer of modernism’s straight photography. Cunningham explains her versatility, saying that she photographs anything that can be exposed to light. The plant forms from the 1920’s were captured when she was “cooped up” with three children, but had a garden within reach. Cunningham befriended Edward Weston and opened her own portrait studio in Seattle. Among her widely known images of celebrities on view here are a depiction of Weston and her iconic image of Martha Graham, published in Vanity Fair in 1932. Cunningham’s “Unmade Bed,” in which she tossed pointed hairpins on rumpled sheets, was a response to her colleague Dorothea Lange’s directive to students at the San Francisco Art Institute to make a self-portrait by photographing their surroundings. Cunningham’s ability to infuse her bed with emotional impact contributes a thought provoking spin to a subject taken up years later in Karen Carson’s “Offence Spread,” currently on view at the ”Doin’ It In Public” show at Otis College (Frank Pictures Gallery, Santa Monica).
Diane Calder

Elger Esser, “Gebel el-Silsila, Egypt,” 2011, color photograph.

Stand before “Nil I, Egypt 2001” (54.5” x 78”), the largest of a dozen serene depictions by German photographer Elger Esser of landscapes captured during his recent voyage from Luxor to Aswan, and the softly rippling surface of the Nile River draws you in with all of the allure of a James Turrell light and space construction. Minute details of a boat’s emerald green and ruby red trim stand out against a vast, muted synchronicity of light on dulled expanses of sky and water. The wind fills the sails of the old vessel, a dahabiya on which Esser anchored the 8 X 10 land camera he employed to capture Egypt’s lifeline, carefully framed as it threads its way through each UltraChrome print in this romantic series. The pictures are hauntingly monochromatic and infused with glowing gold and yellow hues. While the river occupies the bottom portion of most images and the sky the top, what happens in the center changes as Esser moves from place to place. The beauty and the vastness of the landscape comes across in these almost people-less compositions. Smaller works, such as “Salwa Bahry lll,” have a painterly, abstract quality that is quite compelling. Rather than seducing audiences with iconic architectural elements, or the drama of recent political uprisings, this former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher systematically animates sublime expanses with that diffused light and color and intriguing areas of precisely detailed landscape elements (Rose Gallery, Santa Monica).
DC/JZ

David Amico, installation view at Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills, 2011-12.

The “Factory/Park” series is a collection of two separate bodies of work that explore, abstract, and blur our orientation to discarded objects from the street. Whether it’s a piece of paper or an orange peel, David Amico reinvents these items through increased scale and his painterly language. The final images appear deconstructed, as if layers were stripped from the surface of the canvas to reveal the subject of study. The mostly abstract imagery is bombastic and quite overpowering at first sight, yet with a softness that is present in the contours and the surfaces of the gestural sweeps of paint. Unfortunately, the smaller galleries don’t permit you to back up far enough to properly view the paintings iin the manner they’ve been installed. By contrast, the main gallery allows these large paintings the space that they deserve. Their power is evident in “Enter,” which uses a brilliant red to stencil a rough outline of the partially spelled word of the title, “nter.” The unusual placement of text and bright colors make one feel as though you are only seeing a portion of a sign up close. Yet the texture and ridges of paint evoke a sensibility within this initial impression. The non-serial approach to painting remains Amico’s greatest strength and weakness. It facilitates imagery that mostly sings but also falls flat. It’s unconvincing that some of the Amico’s visual language comes from the Abstract Expressionist graveyard. His approach to expressionism is much more disengaged than his forefathers, and combined these contradictions in the artist’s application of paint and visual language provide a conceptually rich push and pull both physically and historically (Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills).
G. James Daichendt

Sandra de la Loza, “Mural Remix:  Unknown, Believed to be by José A. Gallegos,” 2010, Duratrans in lightbox, 48 x 48”.

Sandra de la Loza’s project “Mural Remix” is a multimedia exploration using the rich history of Latin American Murals in L.A. as its content. De la Loza began from an archive of images of the many murals that formerly covered and continue to cover buildings and walls in L.A. She uses elements of those works to create her compelling light box and video images. The exhibition features three light boxes and three video projections. The light boxes are large-scale square images that create mandala-like forms by flipping fragments from the original murals on their vertical and horizontal axes to create geometric shapes. These static works are juxtaposed with video portraits in which young Latin American men and women paint their bodies with an assist from blue-screen technology. The act of brushing digitally reveals animations of the murals that fill the space of their bodies. Watching the figures paint over tattoos to reveal a different kind of mark-making suggests that both (mural painting and body painting) are political and social statements. “Mural Remix” provokes a reflection on art and history that feels like only a part of a larger investigation to come (Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA], Miracle Mile).
JZ

John Divola, from the “Vandalism Series,” 1974-75, gelatin silver print, 14 x 14”.

In the 1970’s John Divola entered abandoned houses equipped with silver spray paint and added his own marks to the already vandalized interiors. Divola would paint grids of dots, lines and other stray marks on the walls and floors and then photograph his interventions with a square format camera. Sixty-seven images from his “Vandalism Series” comprise this exhibition. While some of the images have been shown previously this is the first time the entire body of work has been publicly presented together. The black and white images focus on the details of both the dilapidated structures and the artistry of Divola’s mark making. When torn wallpaper is juxtaposed with a grid of spray painted dots and illuminated by the light coming through the window the planes of the image collapse into abstract space. Divola was interested in the dimensionality of the picture plane and how the three dimensions became two. These works are gritty and grainy studies of time and space and then highly original visual possibilities specific to the photographic medium (LAXART, Culver City).
JZ

Terry O’Shea, “Untitled,” ca. 1974-78, cast resin with phosphorescent pigment, 27 1/2 x 27 1/2”.

You may have never heard of the late Terry O’Shea, but his work will feel familiar and surprisingly contemporary for having originated around forty years ago. Familiar, because the slick black “paintings” really are not. The brushwork is actually a range of chips, spills, and pours of colored resin – glow-in-the-dark no less! - on a resin surface. The cast resin “pills” and the layered clear slabs all reflect and combine a myriad of tropes from the art world of the sixties and seventies: hippy handwork, glossy surfaces, pill-popping fun, and psychedelic colors. Yet they feel somehow ‘now’ perhaps for those same reasons, and because plastic and pills and glossy never seem to out of style. The clear slabs on the plinths are often twenty something layers thick, sandwiching smears and stains and the occasional bug. The result is a fascinating palimpsest of mark-making and the passage of time in the studio. The highly buffed pills are only two or three inches long and yet every bright stripe in the capsule is hand-poured, providing intrigue to the examining eye with tiny imperfections and uneven layering (Cardwell Jimmerson Gallery, Culver City).
Jeannie R. Lee

Christine Rebet, “The Black Cabinet,” 2011, video.

“Tender is the Night” introduces several new names to the local conversation, with a quiet presence that tends toward the visually austere, as well as an almost subliminally dark undercurrent. The highlight, which meets you straight away near the entrance, is Christine Rebet’s “The Black Cabinet,” an animated video composed from a sequence of watercolors. In it two men in Morse code booths introduce an odd sequence of characters, from a foursome at a roulette table who vacillate from celebration to séance, to a totalitarian-like military leader whose eventual contribution to the party is grenades that double as roulette balls. Frank Zadlo’s iPad video within a frame, which features a still photo bust of a man whose head comes in the form of a disconcertingly moving rock head – not very subtle, but really creepy at first look – anchors the other end of the space. The other gestures maintain certain levels of aesthetic restraint, but in the best cases, such as Allie Pohl’s floor-standing porcelain sculptures, they pack just enough whimsical punch (Marine Contemporary, Venice).
Michael Shaw

Anyone who associates James Hayward with the thickly slathered monochromes he has produced over the last couple of decades is likely to find this modestly sized retrospective of his work from the 1970s instructive. Back then, he was engaged on his “Automatic” monochromes and given the seeming thinness of their surfaces in contrast with the heavy impasto of the later works, a superficial viewing might suggest that he applied oil painting’s time-worn principle of laying down lean paint before fat to the successive phases of his career. Nonetheless, the “Automatics” were the product of an intense process of mark making that could extend for as long as three years, only to be sealed under a topmost coat of paint that obliterated all but the subtlest indications of the chaos underneath. This final gesture of obliteration or repression can be interpreted in multiple ways, as a sacrifice to the god of “opticality” (the only illusionistic quality that Greenbergian dogma permitted in painting). Or, read in reverse, it served as the guarantee of discretion that enabled the outpouring that preceded it. Certainly, Hayward’s invocation of Zen (the exhibition’s title is “Satori”) suggests that for him the paintings were a means rather than an end, which undercuts any strictly formalist reading of them and even hints that their opticality might be incidental. (As Mike Kelley once noted, the negated gesturalism of the “Automatics” might pass for a Duchampian jeste.) In the gallery adjacent to the main one, a suite of whiplash-line drawings teeming with phalli and vulvas bring to the surface some of the libidinal energy kept under wraps in the monochromes. They point, indirectly, to what was to come later, when brush marks resurfaced in Hayward’s work and monochromaticism amplified rather than suppressed their presence, allowing the erotic suggestiveness of his paint handling to fuse with the voluptuousness of his expanded palette (Richard Telles Fine Art, Miracle Mile).
Mario Cutajar

Lisa Adams, “Made in the USA,” 2010, oil on panel, 48 x 40”.

Lisa Adams portrays a compromised paradise: a quiet world inhabited by birds that wait and die in surreal realms of paint-strewn air and eerie plants. Power lines cross patchwork skies, with serpentine tendrils holding them in floral bondage. Translucent red-capped structures tower above spindly grass, their smoky interiors suggesting alien atmospheres. Luscious layers of cumulous clouds float across skies bifurcated by rain and darkness. Tree trunks are defaced by harshly carved initials. Clumps of soil are marked by dripping circles of sprayed paint. There is a longing here, perhaps a melancholy, alongside the sheer beauty of the images and the impressive painterly verve of the technique. But there is neither narrative nor containment. Unlike many painters of nature, Adams refuses to dictate or describe in a constricting, preachy fashion. Instead, she asks viewers to assemble the scattered signs in order to construct meaning. Such meaning, even if grasped in a moment of poetic insight, remains fluid and elusive. In short, Adams’ works skillfully engage the “ellipses” that require audience participation — the ellipses that, as Arthur C. Danto wrote, are requisite for the existence of art (CB1 Gallery, Downtown).
Betty Ann Brown

China Adams, “Sweet Little Typhoon,” 2011, laminated scratch, waste paper.

“The Loop Show” is the first contemporary art exhibit I’ve seen that’s dedicated, for all intents and purposes, to work made from recycled materials. To what extent those materials are literally found and recycled allows some room for flexibility, to be sure. Witness John Luckett’s large color photos of cast-off, curbside chairs; and William Ransom’s long, arc-bent fir strips in vices, which seem to be of too high-quality condition to simply be reclaimed finds. But the spirit of the gesture remains, and there’s ultimately at least something of a leap of faith involved. Artist and curator China Adams makes a particularly impressive find in Robert Larson, a Santa Cruz-based artist (and non-smoker) who collects discarded Marlboro packs, fashioning large, patterned collage-paintings out of them; they epitomize the transformative potential of scavenging. Nuttaphol Ma’s multi-sourced corner installation includes a baseball backstop made of plastic bags that are stretched vertically taut in such a way as to make them turn to cotton. Tom Deininger’s “Headhunter” transforms found toys into an over-the-top sculptural collage by turning chaos into order back into chaos again through a slow-recognition perceptual focus. Adams makes a pretty strong case for a more engaged commitment to working with materials bound for landfills (Beacon Arts Building, South Los Angeles).
Michael Shaw

Nancy Macko, “Disintegrating Memory #1,” 2010, archival digital print, 43 1/4 X 32 1/4".

An intimate series of digital prints by Nancy Macko chronicles her mother’s decline in memory due to dementia. The multicolored photographs depict vintage snapshots, handwriting, religious symbols, and floral imagery that often repeats itself to varying degrees through the series titled “Hope and Dreams: A Visual Memoir.” The levels of abstraction are due to the layering of realistic images that appear and disappear. Two prints titled “At The Beginning” and “Open Arms” display a washed out, simple, and full figured snapshot of Macko’s mother. These soft-spoken and ghost-like images are then manipulated in subsequent pieces until there is little or no evidence of the original photographs. In “Disintegrating Memory #1” the colors don’t correspond with reality. All we can see are a few symbols that were introduced in earlier photographs. A maddening image from which to find one’s bearings, it’s both disturbing and sad as the artist fragments what appears to be several memories that come and go over time until they are eventually lost (Andi Campognone Projects, Pomona).
GJD

Groundbreaking art movements aren’t always ignited by social politics.  Sometimes the economic landscape can create the spark, especially when that economy is in crisis. Such is the case with the innovative dinnerware and ceramic tiles from Interpace, a company that grew out of an industrial materials corporation that turned toward artistic pursuits after the stock market crash of 1929 when construction in the U.S. became practically defunct. The comprehensive exhibit “Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California 1945-1975,” which falls under the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, offers an array of artifacts from the creators at Interpace, headed by lead designer Millard Sheets in the 1960s. Lending depth and context are extensive examples from other influential ceramicists who changed the way ceramics were made and appreciated during the post- war years. Standouts from Interpace are Dora De Larios’ striking orange and brown abstract wall tiles, as well as subtler and somber creations from Harrison McIntosh. Outside of the Interpace collective, notable pieces include Helen Watson’s posh black and white striped lidded vessel with its narrow pedestal base and Martian-esque top; Myrton Purkiss’ superb plates covered in geometric modernist 1950’s designs; and Mineo Mizuno’s pop art “Brown Screw and Yellow Screw,” which are depictions of precisely that. The exhibit includes over 50 artists and a staggering 300 pieces of unusual, inspiring and visionary craftsmanship, all of which remind us that while our modern world mostly eschews transcendent functional art for affordable commercial mimicry, the past is filled with handmade artifacts that evidence our ability to be neither mechanistic nor humdrum (American Museum of Ceramic Art [AMoCA], Pomona).
Stacy Davies

Sarah Cain, “Untitled (Zurich),” 2008, mixed media.

“Two Schools of Cool” addresses the work of important Pacific Standard Time artists (exhibiting 1945-1980) alongside younger ones, the latter emerging in L.A. since 2000. In five installations, the synergy between an older with a younger artist as well as their differences is explored. Ed Moses who exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in the sixties, is paired with Robert Williams, the original lowbrow artist and some 20 years Moses’ junior. Moses’work is primarily abstract, while Williams’ pieces are decidedly figurative, each telling a story. Williams’ “Swap Meet Sally” is a narrative of a macho female hawking numerous knick-knacks, its detail demanding time and attention from the viewer. Contrasting the works of Moses and Williams demonstrates seeming aesthetic opposites, but descriptions accompanying the works explain the artists’ mutual admiration. The nearby George Herms / Sarah Cain pairing combines the work of the older Herms, a quintessential assemblage artist, with Cain’s large collage works of sand, acrylic, gold, silver and bronze leaf, thread, beva and holifax. Similarities and differences demonstrate how the younger Cain is inspired by Herms, while following her own path. A mixed media installation created jointly by John Baldessari and Shana Lutker is made up of two white tables with several movable objects, including a plastic duck, water bottle, hats, rolling pin, vases, one man’s shoe, a paintbrush and more. Visitors are invited to move and re-arrange these pieces while TV monitors display the constantly changing installation. The exhibition includes contrasting videos of older technology (from the senior Allen Ruppersberg) and newer technology (from the younger Amanda Ross-Ho), shown on opposing sides of an enormous binder. For humor mixed with horror and an amalgam of an older and younger perspective, check out the video by Llyn Foulkes and Stanya Kahn (Orange County Museum of Art [OCMA], Orange County).
LG

“Warriors, Tombs and Temples,” installation view at the Bowers Museum, 2011.

The stars of “Warriors, Tombs and Temples: China’s Enduring Legacy” are four life-size Terra Cotta Warriors, newly conserved with clear paint on their faces, set on a stage at the entrance to the exhibition galleries. These recall this museum’s monumental 2008 show of dozens of these figures, unearthed from the 2,300-year-old Chinese tombs of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. This is a broader, more magnanimous exhibition, with many relics shown here for the first time outside of China. Included are artifacts from tombs of the Qin, Han and Tang dynasties, 221 BCE to 907 CE. In this period, China experienced unification, military might, territorial expansion (due largely to success of the Silk Road), extensive building and achievements in the arts, crafts and technology. Less dramatic, but equally impressive are the smaller (1/3 original size) terra cotta warriors from the imperial tomb of the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE). These also have naturalistic features but exhibit more peaceful facial expressions than their earlier counterparts. Male and female attendants, animals, including a dog, horse and pig, as well as eating and drinking utensils (necessary for a comfortable afterlife) hint at the range of objects stored away with the royal remains. There is also a set of ornate stone tomb doors. From the more prosperous Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 CE), there are gold dragons, ornaments, a tomb guardian, a painting of a polo game between royals and precious stone and metal reliquary boxes. With the now widespread interest in ancient Chinese relics, this exhibition stands out, not only for the objects on display, but for the theatrically lit installation and clean, easy to view displays (Bowers Museum, Orange County).
LG

Nancy Buchanan, “Twin Corners,” 1975, metal shavings and photograph, 5 x 10 x 5 feet.

For Southern California, the art game is played on the fields of the schools - Cal Arts, UCLA, Art Center, Otis, Claremont and UCI. On the brand new campus in Irvine, in 1964 there was very little distance between the young faculty, most of whom were still building their careers, and the gifted students. Everyone, from Robert Irwin to Chris Burden and from Vija Celmins to Alexis Smith, got famous together. UC Irvine in the late sixties and early seventies was a raw campus, and the art program had no shape beyond “conceptual.” It was possible in 1971 for then student Burden to lock himself into his own locker for five days and earn his MFA degree. What is interesting about the students is precisely how much they differed from their mentors. Because of the sheer numbers of artists who visited the campus, taught for a bit, and then moved one, the cross fertilization at UCI was intellectual rather than morphological. In contrast to the object makers on the faculty, such as Ron Davis and Larry Bell, Burden’s early career was largely performance work. Included in “Best Kept Secret:  UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 19674-1971” is Smith’s small collage “Flatlands” (1972), a preview of her career for the next two decades that remains free of the methodology of the exquisite “Ocean” drawings of her teacher, Celmins. The ground floor is dominated by Nancy Buchanan’s “Some Hair,” made from human and poodle hair. This work is wholly unrelated to that of her professor, Robert Irwin, other than as a rejection of painting. The distinguishing character of these relationships is they do not resemble the ordinary student/teacher dichotomy so much as artist-to-artist mentorships (Laguna Art Museum, Orange County).
Jeanne Willette

Phil Joanou, “Vesti La Giubba,” 2006, oil on linen, 64 x 54”.

If Phil Joanou had a male muse, it might have been Henri Matisse. This exhibition is the first since the artist passed away last year, and the works on view demonstrate Matisse-like mastery of line drawing, fascination with women as subjects and penchant for combining colorful, exotic patterns. But the themes are contemporary. “Umbrella” depicts a woman lying languorously on a bed of patterned materials, alongside a large genre painting (or view through a window) of a local beach scene. In “Woman II” a nearly nude woman seated on a patterned couch dominates the work; her large eyes and defiantly closed lips confront more than seduce the viewer. Less apparent, but crucially important is the small naked man in her palm. One of her eyes is focused on the man, the other out into the viewer’s space. A strong psychological premise is informs “Cooped,” a chicken coop filled with meticulously drawn nude men and women, each straining to get out. In “Vesti La Giubba” a carefully drawn naked man stands in front of a mirror, while his reflection is of a clothed man knotting his tie. A self-absorbed woman seated beside him is oblivious to his quandary as she applies her lipstick. This psychologically charged domestic scene conveys feelings of alienation, egoism and confusion about gender roles (Joanne Artman Gallery, Laguna Beach).
LG