CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS

July/August, 2007


The color and glow that emanates through the rooms of Dan Flavin, “A Retrospective” confirms that he was a master at transforming spaces and creating rich environments with minimal materials. Flavin works with light, specifically commercial florescent tubes that he had fabricated in subtle as well as vibrant colors. Many of the rooms in the exhibition juxtapose one or two works, allowing the subtle shifts in color to create similar but distinct impressions. The focal point however is the recreation of an installation done in the corridors of the Pacific Design center in 1982. The grids of pink and yellow tubes placed at the ends of the hallways fill the empty space with light that changes depending on where you are in relation to the fixtures. This is a magnificent work that highlights an elegant as well as thought provoking exhibition that reminds us how far modest means can be taken (LACMA, West Hollywood).


Dan Flavin, "Untitled (in honor of Leo on the 30th anniversary
of his gallery)," 1987, fluorescent light fixtures with red,
pink, yellow, blue, and green lamps, 96 x 96 x 9 1/4"




David Drebin, "Untitled (Carnival Kiss)," n.d., Digital C Print.
Basically David Drebin is a masterful color photographer who understands the basics of voyeurism. In his own words: “The most gripping photographs are either funny and sexy, sexy and sad, or sexy and funny--without being sad.” Note the common denominator is "sexy." He gives us intimate moments between people embracing, kissing, otherwise connecting in quasi public places where we as the viewer see things we feel we ought not be watching. In one of the most striking images a tall blond girl bends slightly to make out with a comically shorter guy, while an odd little kid looks back at the duo as if to say, "are you done yet?" To the technical charm of the works, Drebin adds this element of both sensuality and silliness, mystery and utter banality--these scenes take place in the oddest locales--that you cannot help but be pulled in (Fahey/Klein Gallery, West Hollywood).


This may be the older and tamer Chris Burden now dealing with issues in a less head-on (no pun intended) fashion. Here he uses the allegory of the machine on four wheels. Smugly invoking an Asian and now clichéd term for the show's title ("Ying Yang"), Burden calls up die-hard oppositions that are tucked deep in myths of gender and machismo, power, wealth and work. He does so, as is his way, using material culture and the body. Burden shows a flat footed bulldozer that says "mechanical power" better than any painting by Thomas Hart Benton or a treatise on economic hegemony. Four Polaroid photos of the same vehicle are mounted on the wall like high art and snap-shot portraits of things beloved. The bulldozer shares the space with a 1973 Lotus accompanied by its own adjacent set of six original Polaroids. Burden eschews the pyrotechnics of his notorious early work to say similar things less obviously. The boundaries of high culture and real life, and the role of bodily experience in constructing perceptions and realities (like class and aesthetics) that are quite often as arbitrary as an old tractor in a blue chip gallery (Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills).


Chris Burden, "Yin and Yang".




Exene Cervenka, “Back to His Dear Loving
Arms,” 2006, mixed media, 14 x 11 inches.
Exene Cervenka's exhibition "A Fifth of Tomorrow” is comprised of new collages together with artist journals that she has been keeping for over three decades. They document her travels and her life in the world of contemporary art and music. Cervenka’s main focus is her celebration of the American bandwidth, with all its quirks and idiosyncrasies. Using the classic collage technique of cobbling together layers of images and text from disparate sources, Cervenka integrates color and paint to structure a world of sentiment and populist beauty that is poised between critique and romanticism. True believers will be heartened at the overtly celebratory nature of her America, while cynics will turn up the sounds of X to drown out this other side of her vision (Western Project, Culver City).


Connie Arismendi has made provocative assemblage art using nailed metals, lamps and velvet pillows to aptly suggest the fragility of life and desire. These wall works are manufactured with precision-cut and remarkably delicate tendrils of hard metal fashioning flora shapes that bring to mind colonial embroidery, wrought iron and urban industry. Many see in the works references to papel picad, that Mexican folk tradition of cut paper decorations, and it is this rich complex of allusions to culture, identity, beauty, labor and borders that makes them more than just charming. The radical switch accomplished with a good deal of maturity bodes well for this newcomer (Patricia Correia Gallery, Santa Monica).


Connie Arismendi, “Stag Beetle,” 2007, acrylic
on panel, pencil on mylar, 24 x 24 x 1 3/4 inches.


David Bailin is an Arkansas-based artist whose large charcoal on paper drawings most resemble the works of William Kentridge. As in Kentridge's work, the gestural hand moves swiftly across the page, creating narrative scenarios in which a man struggles against his environment. In these evocative and well drawn works, Bailin's figure performs the tasks of a teacher or office worker, cleaning, filing or simply waiting, isolated in a corner of the work. Often surreal or at least surprising elements share the space, yet the protagonist never seems aware of the intrusions. The images are purposely claustrophobic, which serves to identify you with the characters’ plight (Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver City).


David Bailin, "Map," 2006,
charcoal on paper, 54" x 53 1/2".


A Southern California expatriate now living in Italy, Caridad Barragan creates what the gallery refers to as a tower of feelings.  It is comprised of boxed assemblage works that represent a re-collection of things that function as a metaphorical portrait. The gallery space is mostly bare, with the exception of this agglomeration of collected boxes stacked like a ziggurat, as if a life lived ends up being just small experiences compartmentalized into smelly brown instances best kept under lock and key.  We probably have all felt that way at some point, that our feelings might better be left in a box, unsaid.  The tower exists in the round, so the viewer is forced to walk around and around, alternately focusing in on the small stuff then the "big picture."  If this was intentional, it works admirably (Avenue 50 Studio, Northeast Los Angeles).


Caridad Barragan, one box from “In a Box,” mixed media installation, 2007.


A late addition to the illuminated manuscript tradition and very popular in England, the bestiary was an illuminated text depicting an encyclopedic array of the earth's creatures--real and imagined.  These are typically captured in parables and narratives seeming folkish or zoological but which in fact held religious lessons--with the animals as archetypes. This type of illumination came later in the history of the painted manuscript, and because of this showed a very advanced sense of color, draftsmanship, and execution. Medieval Beasts presents a newly acquired bestiary from the 13th century, and is highlighted with a page open to display the most delightful flying fish. Flying fish were said to follow ships leaping out of the waves for miles until they became exhausted and then descended again into the deep. A gorgeously drawn flying fish is seen leaping high and it represents the soul of the faithful, which try and try to reach goodness but in the end give up to the temptation of sin (Getty Center, West Los Angeles).




Samta Benyahia, “La Vie en Paillettes,” 2003.
Artist Samta Benyahia plays on the idea of the veil and veiling both as cover and as structural motif in this museum-wide installation work called “Architecture of the Veil.” The latticed open work screen called a moucharabieh used in Islamic architecture becomes a complex symbol and tangible reality as the artist covers windows, doors and the Fowler courtyard with printed films holding a blue tinted moucharabieh pattern. These screens were intended for those inside to look out without being; those outside to have no view in. Beyond the obvious gender politics and cross references to the veiling of women's bodies (most always women were behind the covers on windows and balconies), there is a sense here of the fragile, poetic, real and pernicious barriers that separate cultures and people (Fowler Museum at UCLA, West Los Angeles).