CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS

December, 2007


The small plaster models of empty architectural spaces that James Turrell designs as proposed sites for viewing of his light projects are part ancient temple, part planetarium, and a playful mix of reverence and movie-based architectural imagineering. They form an insightful approach to the cloistered quiet of the museum’s three installation rooms. In the two “End Around” rooms his carefully calibrated LED light effects behind plexiglas beg us to slow down and immerse ourselves in noticing gradual change of colors that feel like the shifting of the seasons more than hours of the day.


James Turrell, Ganzfeld, “End Around”.
But in the edge-eroded Ganzfeld room he purposefully knocks us off kilter as empty space becomes a radiant, near tangible substance. We hesitantly walk into the light and expect to breathe it in (Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona).




Gordon Matta Clark, installation view, “You Are the Measure,”
at MOCA Grand Avenue, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest.
While most art aficionados are aware of the late Gordon Matta Clark’s famous split buildings, the history behind his work, including one wildly creative and tirelessly productive decade in which the artist completed most of his works, are less widely known. Matta Clark’s fusion of art and social commentary went so far as to include a communal restaurant for artists and numerous works documenting the destruction of homes and other buildings. With a laborer’s skill and a poet’s sensibility, Matta Clark rendered demolition a powerful visual metaphor for social change armed with camera, chainsaw, and vision.
“You are the Measure” spans many works in which Matta Clark presciently addressed an increasingly relevant relationship between the built environment and social/political structures with both candor and artistry (The Museum of Contemporary Art [MOCA], Downtown).


Felicity Powell, Ansel Krut, and Saskia and Hannah Krut-Powell are members of a family of artists who live and work in London. For "Crystal Ship: A Family of Artists Looking For Arcadia," the multi-generational group has installed video projections, sculpture, wax relief on black glass and paintings in the Farmlab galleries. Connected by a sense of playfulness and of exploration, the works vary in focus and in sensibility, although a somewhat surreal atmosphere abounds in it all. Particularly beautiful are the small, haunting wax medallions of heads sculpted by Felicity Powell on the backs of mirrors.


Felicity Powell, ”Crystal Ship”, 2007, film still.
The installation of Saskia and Hannah Krut-Powell's small-scale figurative sculptures in a cardboard box castle is also enchanting and direct. This family of art makers, ranging in age from ten to forty-eight, set out on their metaphorical crystal ship and return with works that, beyond any other consideration, are of an unexpected and delicate magic (Farmlab, Downtown).




Erica Lee Wheelock, “Slime In The Ice
Machine," 2007 ink on paper, 18 x 24".
Erica Lee Wheelock’s swirling, isolated landscapes are composed of traditional elements--mountains and fields, buildings and roads, rivers and lakes--but combined with a dizzy, Escher-like logic and studded with curious additions, such as a mushroom pizza or a Christmas tree. They add up to self-contained fantasy-scapes that seem to float on the page under their own uncertain terms. Rendered in intricate ink lines on white paper, the drawings resemble doodles taken to the extreme, in which an unnamed anxiety about the state of the world melds with the incessant need to put pen to paper. It all adds up to a unique portrayal of the imaginary places of the mind haunted by reality (Sam Lee Gallery, Downtown).


Appealing cookie cutter malls and housing developments of cute identical homes sprawling like Monopoly game boards retain a cheerful presence in Mildred Kouzel’s latest collage paintings. Always interested in critique and the social fracturing of the urban landscape, these new works present their point with a sense of wry humor that somehow elicits both smiles and shakes of the head over the stiff regimentation of clean cut, SoCal architecture and the ubiquitously sterile landscape of cement and asphalt that surrounds it (57 Underground, Pomona).

Mildred Kouzel, "Globe V",
mixed media on wood, 18" x 24".




John Humble, "View South, 1300 Block of Channing Street,"
October 30, 2005, Chromogenic Dye Coupler Print, 48 x 60".
John Humble has been around for a long time chronicling Los Angeles through its high points and low points. Some of the best images on view capture his iconic vision in intensely colored C-Prints of the Santa Monica Freeway after the Northridge earthquake. He manages to make everything he shoots--aging facades, gnarled concrete, electrical poles over traffic--look beautiful. Here he presents more shots of that Los Angeles we love to hate. Old train cars downtown look like colorful wood toys, and the Los Angeles River, blanketed in what looks like fog (or more characteristically smog!), recedes into the background like a flat triangle of abstract shape (Rose Gallery, Santa Monica).


Traveler and photographer Ann Summa traversed the globe taking photographs until she landed in L.A. in the late ‘70s to discover the budding punk band scene. Wilder than the bush of Africa where she had been the previous decades, this sub-culture of ‘80s music and transgression became the subject of  a suite of photos shown here and curated by Kristine McKenna (who may be reliving her own pre-hip journalist youth with this endeavor). Shot in monochrome tones and often with a kind of long exposure that makes images hazy and active, the format replicates as much as records the vibration, high energy angst, spikey haired, pierced and anarchistic world. As our youth today can barely muster a trip to the voting booth, these teeth-gnashing rockers caught back in the day as they belt it out, strum, drum, and rage against the machine seem warmly nostalgic, oddly alive (Track 16, Santa Monica).


Ann Summa, photograph.




Wendy Richmond, "Public Space, Work,"
2007, cellphone video loop still image.
Cell phones are relatively new on the timeline of human history, yet the idea of creating artwork by shooting cell phone video footage in public spaces already seems clichéd. Wendy Richmond rises above this stigma to create a compelling set of images in “Public Privacy.”  Surreptitiously capturing images of strangers in airports, malls, on the subway, and at the beach, Richmond draws on our natural voyeuristic tendencies to initially attract us. But it is more than voyeurism that on which further engagement depends as we examine these small moving images. The division into grids, the overlapping of time sequences in the juxtaposed grids, the choice of scenes--from the minimalist imagery in “Museum” to the dynamic scenes in “Street”--and the interaction of the subjects and their environment, work together to elicit a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer about how we as individuals go about inhabiting the space we share (Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego).