Brian Bress

CHERRY AND MARTIN
2712 S. La Cienega Boulevard
September 12–October 24

Brian Bress, Status Report, 2009, still from a color video, 18 minutes 40 seconds.

What is the logic of Sesame Street? The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with is that it just might be an educational commercial. Although there are no direct references to Sesame Street or advertising per se in Brian Bress’s latest exhibition, his new work shares the discursive story lines, imaginative nonsense, and bright, snappy colors found in the show’s poppy vignettes. The main video on view, a single-channel projection titled Status Report, 2009, involves six characters, including an “underminer” performing in front of a handmade backdrop of his “mine,” an impressively schnozzed boxer dancing around a bedroom, and an astronaut in a tiny capsule going where no unshaven man has gone before. Breaking up the character sketches are various disorienting tableaux, one of which shows three people, all wearing costumes made from collaged thrift-store books and standing before a background made of the same pattern. This camouflage and the set, like many of the patterned backgrounds that Bress uses, are as visually stunning as they are diabolically bewildering.

The exhibition continues past Status Report into another gallery filled with photographs of the sets and sculptures from them, as well as a second video, It’s Been a Long Day, 2009, that plays on a flat screen. (While much shorter than the first, this video is no less troubling.) Here a mop-topped man in his pajamas with a bullet hole in his head whimpers with a high, pathetic voice into a mirror as he paints his face with the blood from the wound. “Let’s make a painting. It’s been a long day,” he says. As if to channel the perennial fluffy-cloud painter Bob Ross, Bress seems neither critical of nor fawning toward television, but instead rather happily uses its tactics for his own ambiguous, aesthetic ends. Though Bress doesn’t vivisect mythologies in quite the same messy ways as Paul McCarthy, a similarly vibrant and disturbing spirit is at work, in an art filtered through a life informed by Jim Henson rather than Uncle Walt.

— Andrew Berardini

Rachel Khedoori

THE BOX
977 Chung King Road
September 11–October 24

Rachel Khedoori, Iraq Book Project, 2009, sixty-six books, nine wooden tables, computer, dimensions variable.

In Rachel Khedoori’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, the iconic installation Iraq Book Project (all works 2009) explores what we know and record about the Iraq war, which is now in its seventh year and counting. Sixty-six massive books are laid open on nine long wooden tables. The tomes contain a chronological compilation of English-language international news articles, found by Khedoori on the Internet, that include the word Iraq, Iraqi, or Baghdad in their titles. The articles date from the war’s inception in March 2003 through the end of 2008. But as combat continues, the gallery functions as a research lab where assistants compile articles to be added to the annals for the duration of the exhibition.

Visually arresting and conceptually impressive, the neatly ordered books are poetic analogues for the weight and burden of information, as well as the impossibility of recording and accessing all necessary data, about the war, and for the act of acknowledging a course of events by committing it to print. Khedoori poignantly highlights the challenge of documenting an event that is interminable and undefined.

In the basement of the gallery, viewers find Khedoori’s sculpture cave model. Like Iraq Book Project, this work is a structural metaphor for an amorphous entity that cannot be visually perceived in its entirety. The model is a manifestation of an underground dwelling comprising a tangle of plaster half-pipes that twist, turn, and overlap. This rhizomatous form alludes to neural networks, intestines, and, in the context of this show, the caves in which we imagine evildoers to reside.

— Micol Hebron

Sonja Vordermaier

DE SOTO GALLERY
2635 Fairfax Avenue
September 12–October 24

Sonja Vordermaier, Schatten 28 (Shadow 28), 2009, Basotect, dimensions variable.

The sculpture Schatten 28 (Shadow 28), 2009, which Sonja Vordermaier has installed for “Dämmerzunder” (Twilight-Cinder), her first solo show in the United States, is reminiscent of an enormous, dark crystal. This abstract form, seemingly a mineral, is crossed by layered fissures. Some areas have expansive surfaces, while others are composed of diminutive, staggered edges. The work erupts from the wall near the floor; its offshoots reach far into the gallery space and continue on the other side of the wall. On entering the gallery, viewers are brought face-to-face with its long, pointed extensions. The material––which at first appears to be dense and solid––is actually Basotect, a flexible, lightweight foam made from melamine resin.

Over a period of many weeks, Vordermaier carved the complex structure by using a samurai sword, the only instrument she deemed able to make sufficiently long and fluid incisions. Highly sensitive, the material documents every turn of the blade, every change of speed: Any excess cuts would be impossible to conceal. Vordermaier’s direct, virtuosic process here is perhaps most comparable to gestural painting. Despite their imposing physical presence, Vordermaier’s “Schatten” sculptures are, as their titles make clear, also objects of the imagination. If viewed as superimposed shadows translated into a sculptural form, the work becomes a sort of paradoxical representation: a reversal of the projection process, by which three-dimensional objects are represented as two-dimensional surfaces—as silhouettes. In this work, Vordermaier imagines the immaterial in three dimensions.

Vordermaier further explores the central theme of fleeting incarnation in five photos from the 2008 “Volatiles” series. In these works, a bush sprouts far-reaching, shadowy arms; twirling leaves give substance to a gust of wind; and light shining through cracks, from behind a closed garage door, becomes an independent form. These photos are pedestrian snapshots in which negative forms take on a sculptural nature.

Translated from German by Jane Brodie

— Jens Asthoff

Francesca Gabbiani

PATRICK PAINTER, INC
2525 Michigan Avenue, Unit A8 & B2
September 12–October 24

Francesca Gabbiani, Faces, 2009, colored paper and gouache on paper, 22 3/4 x 32 3/4".

The intricately hand-cut paper collages in Francesca Gabbiani’s latest exhibition offer such a profusion of excess that one may long for meaning, for some purpose to validate or justify the artist’s wildly obsessive effort. As if in response to this desire, the center of the majority of the works reflects the viewer’s own gaze through a dark field of rich color: inky black or watery blue. It’s a bit of a trick and subtle at best (you’re just as likely to miss it), but in the right light, the wreathlike imagery wraps around a central space that functions as a kind of mirror.

Around these voids climbs and crawls an array of flora and fauna—snakes and rodents, poppies and crystals, bugs and alligators, and more than a few mushrooms—with the aplomb of Disney characters and the detail of Tiffany glass. If the work weren’t so unabashedly pretty, it might provide a critique of the presumption that art must be smart or historic or important. But Gabbiani’s paper play is more crafty than that; its layered cutouts resemble an exalted scrapbook, low art reified as high art, a surfeit echoed by lack. Each leaf and scale (or, in the case of one work, stair and banister) is made with the care and precision of an engineer. The specificity of this construction belies a nihilistic resistance to meaning but reinforces a more metaphysical acceptance of the lack of any real purpose beyond inherent presence, of art, of nature, or of a conflation of the two.

— Annie Buckley

Neïl Beloufa

CHUNG KING PROJECT / FRANCOIS GHEBALY
510 Bernard Street
September 9–October 24

Neïl Beloufa, Kempinski, 2007, still from a color video, 15 minutes.

Language has the capacity to root or to displace; degrees of understanding can make the difference between profound ease and deep anxiety. In Kempinski, 2007, the video at the center of Neïl Beloufa’s second solo exhibition, the artist’s strikingly simple linguistic twist—the future in present tense—sets into motion a stream of lyric, mysterious, obscure, and beautiful texts. The French-Algerian artist made the work in Mali, asking people to speak about the future as if it were occurring now. If one is to take him at his word, a slippery proposition given Beloufa’s penchant for fusing fact and fiction, he did not script nor direct the video but let it flow freely from the premise, Imaginer le future au present.

In the work, several Malians stand in the dark night, often holding a bright white neon light, speaking with equal parts grace and gravity of fantastic visions—bovine orchestras, talking cars, thoughts that transport us from one place to another—as if they constituted the current state of things; their dreams of the future craft a rare and exciting present. Surrounding the video are a series of cobbled-together objects—a bench for viewing, a plastic palm tree sheltered from a blowing fan by a Plexiglas sheet, a mechanical sculpture in which a panel of fake grass rises to a peak and then falls with a crushing bang—that together evince a survivor’s optimism and know-how in the face of great tragedy.

That the artist, who lives in Paris and was educated in Europe and the US, organized this exhibition around thoughts of the San Andreas Fault adds another, more incidental layer to the complexities of language and culture folded into his work. From this vantage point, the disquieting threat of California’s cracking earth seems to hold romantic promise.

— Annie Buckley

Travis Somerville

BEN MALTZ GALLERY AT THE OTIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
9045 Lincoln Boulevard
October 3–December 12

Travis Somerville, The New Land of Lincoln, 2009, oil, oil stick, and mixed media on paper on canvas, 80 x 96".

Travis Somerville’s work addresses the tangled knot of issues surrounding the history of race in America. Using such loaded images as a noose, hooded clansmen, and the Confederate flag in a self-consciously liberal way is laced with difficulties, yet Somerville takes such challenges on with gusto in a new exhibition, “Dedicated to the Proposition.” Conceptualized as a contemporary response to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address, the exhibition is fraught with aggressive images, including a sculpture of Lincoln’s head on a ball and chain, and assorted representations of people in blackface.

Several large paintings and collages are composed on canvases layered with song sheets, newspaper clippings, and advertisements from the 1960s, the tumultuous decade in which Somerville came of age in a white liberal household in Georgia. Filled with powerful imagery, these works are laden with historical and allegorical narratives that together form a thought-provoking visual inquiry. Three large installations, including a series of water fountains with labels inspired by US census categories and corresponding imagery based on stereotypes, are more heavy-handed and leave less room for interpretation.

The detail and care with which Somerville constructs each work, alongside the artist’s insistence that viewers consider complex and unresolved issues—including prejudice, post-Katrina New Orleans, urban blight, the conditions of migrant workers, and the treatment of Muslims in America after 9/11—create a charged and vital body of work.

— Annie Buckley

Josephine Pryde

RICHARD TELLES FINE ART
7380 Beverly Blvd
October 31–December 19

Josephine Pryde, Adoption (13), 2009, color photograph, 39 1/2 x 29 1/2".

Building off last year’s body of photographs that depicted three young women posed in totemic attitudes of motherhood, Josephine Pryde turns her lens to images of infancy in her latest exhibition (and first in Los Angeles), “La Vie d’artiste” (Life of the Artist). Fourteen large photographs from this year capture often awkward and close-up views of a towheaded toddler adrift in a studio setup. All but one are in color and titled Adoption, thereby casting the otherwise nonnarrative scenario as a kind of parodic audition for the role of child to an unseen mother or, perhaps, a reverse adoption conducted by the unwitting child in search of a suitable parent.

Given the frequently sentimental and cloying associations of child portraiture, the unflattering character of these shots is something of a relief, but that alone isn’t much to be thankful for. Rather, we can be exuberantly thankful for the resonance of the show’s title, taken from French songwriter Leo Ferré’s achingly sad yet rousing poem “La Vie d’artiste,” which Pryde performed with piano accompaniment on the exhibition’s opening night. It is a devastating, Leonard Cohen–esque ode to loss and disillusionment, culminating with a conflicted affirmation of artistic will and perseverance: “I’ll go on with my artist’s life.”

Pryde’s very need to voice such a declaration implies a serious consideration of its opposite, a deep questioning of purpose and practice. Paired with the photographs, Ferré’s confessional song (transcribed on cards at the gallery) transforms Pryde’s potentially conservative series of images into a poignant, quasi-allegorical gesture that suggests aspects of subjecthood, linking reproduction and artistic practice: the artist as whining infant, the artist as absent mother. Pryde somehow demystifies the romance of “the artist’s life” while invoking its chilling poetry.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

William Powhida

CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY
975 Chung King Road
October 24–December 23

William Powhida, The Lost Night, 2009, graphite, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper, 30 x 22".

Insider art-world jokes—as caricature, if not a kind of portraiture—speak volumes about the “contemporary” moment and often end up serving as important social and historical documents as they age. Consider the rich anthology of nineteenth-century Parisian satiric cartoons (those of Honoré Daumier, Henri Meyer, or Paul Iribe), which mock the Salon scene and its establishment. The New York–based artist William Powhida might well be considered today’s Daumier, and this exhibition proves that the art of art-world satire (as a genre? A tradition?) remains a witty and biting form of discourse.

Like many of his past projects, Powhida’s newest works revolve around the fictional character “William Powhida,” a successful enfant terrible artist/idol. Narrated through hand-drawn, trompe l’oeil printed matter—lists seemingly torn from a spiral-bound notebook, glossy magazine spreads seemingly taped to the wall, the six-page layout of an LA Weekly exposé—this show relates the newest chapter in the career of “Powhida”; the artist, having burned his bridges in New York, descends on Los Angeles, getting tangled up with the city’s B-list celebrities, egomaniac art patrons, burger joints, strippers, booze, and materialism. To Powhida, the city and its industries are raw material. His short video Powhida (Trailer), 2009, for example, draws on LA’s cache of professional actors, voice talents, commercial editors, and production studios to plug a fabricated biopic fictionally directed by Steven Soderbergh and produced by “Peres/Saatchi/Boone Pictures.”

While Powhida’s art-world critique is revealing and amusing, what is more noteworthy is the way in which the artist connects that commentary to place. As a site-specific practice, Powhida’s artwork lampoons not only Los Angeles (as it has done with New York, Seattle, and Aspen, Colorado, in the past) but also the position of celebrity, the location of persona, the site of invention, and the gray area of authenticity. And it is through this scrutiny that the artist’s own identity and role within the art world become as much targets as everything else.

— Catherine Taft