CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS

May, 2005


Gunther Domenig, the Stone House.
“Structures that Fit My Nature” presents drawings, models, and documentation of two significant projects by Austrian architect Gunther Domenig: the Steinhaus (Stone House), which is the architect’s own home; and a more problematic structure, the Nuremberg Documentation Center, designed as a historical archive to transform our memory of the Albert Speer’s Nazi coliseum into a war memorial (a difficult task given the horror of that regime).
Domenig’s Stone House has the reflective surfaces, asymmetry and peaking roof lines of Frank Gehry mixed with the clean expressionism of Frank Israel’s structures. It is a highly individual and inventive language of personal expression and space enclosure. The architecture is itself a marvel of lines, angles, surface and engineering, and the documentary photographs of the projects by Gerald Zugmann and Joachim Brohm are dramatic aesthetic statements in their own right (MAK Center, West Hollywood).




Hanna Greely, "Muddle," 2004,
coconut fiber/silicone glue.
Photo: Joshua White


Matt Johnson, "Breadface," 2004,
cast plastic with oil paint.
Photo: Joshua White

For years, the objective nature of art has been under attack. Installation and performance art, video and conceptual art have challenged the integrity of the art object. A show of sculpture from twenty young Los Angeles artists is titled simply Thing. As this gruff title implies, it reaffirms art-as-object, but does it in a way that slyly incorporates the conceptual art lessons of recent history. Whether displayed on the wall or floor, the works invite a new consideration of beauty. Hanna Greely’s “Muddle,” a coconut fiber doormat replete with a sleeping dog disinvites the viewer from stepping on it, and so thwarts the functionality of a very common object. Equally tongue-in-cheek is Matt Johnson’s “Breadface,” cast plastic with oil paint made to look like a real slice of bread--with eyes and mouth holes torn or chewed out, just as we probably did when we were kids. These works force a rethinking of banal objects. They also invoke the straightforward desire to make something well with one’s hands. Particularly ambitious in thisrespect is Kristen Morgin’s monumental full size car, titled “Sweet and Low Down,” which is fashioned painstakingly out of unfired clay, wood, wire, cement and glue. Purely abstract, yet highly evocative works juxtapose materials and form in Michael O’Malley’s “Untitled Object 11.04,” and Joel Morrison’s human-scaled and untitled stainless steel sculpture (UCLA Hammer Museum, West Los Angeles).


“General Idea Editions: 1967 – 1995” is a jam packed exhibition that traces the impact of the Canadian collective. Formed in Toronto in 1969 the trio--Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson--create artworks, magazines and ephemera that fuse artistic and cultural practices. The work of General Idea was always poignant and pointed. Their magazine “FILE” (1972-1989)--a spoof on LIFE--lives on as an example of their appropriationist strategies. Interested from the beginning in how art and popular culture can co-exist, the group created the Miss General Idea Pavilion as well as the well known AIDS posters that used Robert Indiana’s LOVE painting as the point of departure. To see such an extensive range of the works of General Idea gathered together is a timely reminder that art filled with topical relevance can indeed stand the test of time (Cal State L.A., Luckman Gallery, East Los Angeles).


General Idea, "Playing Doctor," 1993.




Einar and Janex de la Torre, "The
Mexican Budah”, 2002,blown glass,
resin and mixed media, 29” x 12” x 14”
Einar and Jamex de la Torre are Mexican American artist-brothers. They understand the complexity of this mixed ethnic positioning that embraces, by definition, such oppositional (or weirdly related) sensibilities as the humorous reconciliation with death that we find in ancient Meso America and in Mexican folk art, the hyper-drama of Catholicism, the rabid consumerism that turns almost anything into mainstream trinkets for purchase in the U.S., and the misogyny that has marked both the West and the Latin. The duo responds to all these strains by making really strange, sensually decorative little objects (sometimes they look like jewels, sometimes like junk totems) from the quasi-precious material of glass. The objects reference liturgical objects and camp kitsch, all with an unapologetic girlie lushness.
These glass oddities--all color and sparkle--spoof the Yankee ability to be seduced by sheer surface, subverting both the American expectation of the marketable trinket, and the Mexican insistence that craft is indeed high art. Super cool and funny stuff (CSU Fullerton Art Gallery, Orange County).


James Leonard’s vibrantly hued paintings contain some of the energy that made abstract expressionism such a uniquely American form of painting. But these highly textured paintings also reveal representational allusions: to the figure in “Movement for You,” and clearly recognizable elements of a landscape in “Before Red.” The works are, at first glance, a sea of red. However, once the eye adjusts, you can discern a supporting cast of other, mostly primary colors that add a sense of movement and musicality to the compositions. Happily, much is left to the imagination (Marion Meyer Contemporary Art, Orange County).


James Leonard, "Can't Tell You Why,"
acrylic on canvas, 54 x 54".




Linda Day, "Pulse #18," 2005, acrylic on panel, 96 x 24".

Titled “Pulse,” Linda Day’s current body of work consists in a series of abstract paintings that stretch out over the gallery walls like some sort of frozen, illuminated streetscape filmed over many nights, then coalesced into a number of discrete images. Reflecting the artist’s interest in technology and how it influences our perception, the works embody light through color, building it up through multiple layers of transparency within a modular geometric structure (another year in LA, Atwater).