CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS

October, 2007


Imagine a DJ Hall in the Bay Area.  Imagine the same remarkable ability to take paint and make a canvas look like a lush color photo, bathed in old flash camera gradients of light and shadow. Stanley Goldstein is a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute and a pretty astute realist who like Hall favors scenes from the good life. We glimpse very intimate family moments as if we were voyeurs, through windows or shuttered doors that toss intense illumination across surfaces and space. The artist's family and friends gather around a pool, children scurry, people relax in comfortable upper middle class environs. His paint application can be broad and flat, as well as stippled and pointillist. In Goldstein's capturing the effects of changing light and time, in his calling up the undeniable lure of that fading ideal of the content bourgeoisie family--he aligns himself with the tradition of Impressionism (George Billis Gallery, Culver City).


Stanley Goldstein, "Girl Party,"
2007, oil on linen, 59 x 45".


Flower paintings are not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of cutting edge art, but Charlene Liu’s detailed mixed media paintings of flora and fauna--with just a bit of fairy-tale mixed in--strike a chord. She employs a rich palette, displays masterful technique, and each work becomes a mini-universe of rich possibility. Clean botanical sketches and realistic renderings of birds merge seamlessly with images of fanciful blossoms and, yes, surreal bunnies (Taylor de Cordoba, Culver City).



Charlene Liu, "Mad Bloom," 2007, 30 x 30".


Teo Gonzalez shows paintings large and small, some on paper, others on clay board. The Spanish artist repeats the pattern built from loose ovals containing an orb inside. In large deep blue expanses, this shape becomes a million stars in space; in smaller works, the transparent shapes lined in loose clusters of aquamarine become a mass of teeny sea life or cells and their nuclei seen under a microscope (d.e.n. Contemporary art, Culver City).



Teo Gonzalez, "Untitled #465" (detail), 2007.




Lana Shuttleworth, "Where will they go?," 2007, plasticized polyvinyl chloride, 4 x 8'.
Even viewers who realize that Lana Shuttleworth uses recycled safety cones in the construction of her work experience an “ah ha” moment when they come face to face with the artist’s 4’ x 8’ polyvinyl redo of an autumn landscape, “Where Will They Go?” Not only has Shttleworth chosen the perfect material to underlay her concerns for the environment,
but the young L. A. artist has also magically transformed scuffs and blemishes worn into the materials she recycles to simulate objects and places far afield from their origin. Shuttleworth’s larger bas reliefs, including the scruffy, haunting “Will They Encounter Others of Their Kind?” add a layer of complexity missing in the more obvious, three dimensional sculptures including the “tire” in “How will They Get There?” Still, it is wittily reconstituted, as it after all the tire that is the perpetrator of cone damage and destruction (Bandini Art, Culver City).


You’ve probably stumbled across them: the buffed up roots of non-native Ficus trees buckling the sidewalk in their tenacious search for nourishment. They fight for space in a hostile environment, pushing up concrete curbs and sidewalks in the four large C prints by Ruben Ochoa that frame the outer lower corners of his installation "A Recurring Amalgamation," They allude to the size and the positions of the trees. Sculpted tree stumps are interspersed with a cockeyed lineup of nearly a dozen cement covered wood palettes and exposed rebar, making reference to the urban environment and the actual relationship of the trees to the sidewalks.


Ruben Ochoa, "Infracted Expansion," 2007,
eight wood pallets, bonding cement, wire
mesh, burlap, rebar, dimensions variable.
The project room nearby has been impregnated by a modular lacing of rebar, tied to form linear patterns stacked floor to ceiling and wall to wall, suggesting an architectural substructure that references laborers, unseen and unsung by those who will dance on the polished floors that will inevitably rise above them (Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City).




William Pope.L, "APHOV," still, 2006-2007, digital video; TRT: 15:36.
William Pope.L's disturbing installation is made up of three separate but related works. In the center of the darkened space is "The Grove," a garden of potted palm trees that have been painted white. The trees do not stand tall and feel as though they have weathered some kind of disaster. Furthermore, because they are presented in the dark and because their bark has been painted, the trees will gradually begin to die. Along the perimeter of the Grove Pope.L has installed a corridor with three doors through which viewers can look but not enter. There is a collection of files and a floor covered with what appears to be blood. Toward the back of the gallery a living room has been set up--a couch, some chairs, and a rug are situated in front of a projection screen where a man wearing a Donald Rumsfeld mask begins to weep.
As he does so, tears of blood pour down his face and onto his shirt and the table below. The artificial setting of this video is exploited by Pope.L., and its explicitly political tone adds to the show’s decidedly pessimistic world view (Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica).


What might be called the "Patchett Papers," the "Smart Art Press" constitutes the transgressive and intelligent discourse/distribution mill that has operated almost since Track 16 launched with the opening of Bergamot Station. The archival memorabila--objects, books, multiples, drawings--form the crux of a "looking back through time" show called Middle School. This is a chance to see seminal in- and out-of-print books, and to be reminded of Smart Art Press projects like the sponsoring of Jim Shaw's "Dreams," a monumental collection of pencil doodles chronicling the artist's unfolding, unedited, innermost fears and festishes. Also on view will be recaps of related video/film works such as the Manuel Ocampo biopic "God is My Co-Pilot," and the tongue in cheek war farce "In Smog and Thunder" by Sandow Birk. This is a great overview of dominant conceptual voices in L.A. art over the last dozen years (Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica).


Jim Shaw, cover detail "Everything Must Go," 1999.




Brian Mains, "Music of Life," 2005-06,
acrylic on canvas, 66 x 66".
New paintings by Brian Mains that are no less than Baroque for their almost religious themes, metaphors, and in the intensity of the visuals so perfectly painted. The show is  called "Purification and Renewal," and one typical work shows, coiled inside a bramble of arrows, hands cropped at their limp wrists, and feet shown only to the ankle (fragments  straight out of 15th century crucifixion scenes). The crown of thorns motifs and the perfect barren landscapes receding in the distance are all done with the skill of a Renaissance panel painter. However, you definitely get that this is not about religious  redemption in the hereafter, but instead makes use of the classical format to make us think about salvation in the here and now, thus giving the work a political rather than religious tone (Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica).