Moris

THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY (MOCA)
152 North Central Avenue,
January 30–May 1

Moris, Mi casa es tu casa (My house is your house, detail), 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

For a new installation commissioned by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), the Mexico City–based artist Moris inscribed the contents of a letter from the United States government—denying his application for a work visa—on an exterior wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In a deft use of appropriated text and site-specificity, oversize letters make the ubiquitous, even rote, into a monumental force. Despite the large population of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, it’s likely that many Angelenos rarely consider the impact of such a letter on individual lives and families, a narrative writ large on the imagination in view of the magnified text.

Near the missive are short phrases in Spanish rendered on the steel poles supporting the outside patio. These range from the pithy COMER O SER COMIDO? (Eat or be eaten?) to the mysterious EL PAJARO VA A SU JAULA (The bird goes to his cage) and include enough references to travel and danger to indicate the passage north made by many Mexicans, with or without a visa. On the floor of the museum entryway are a series of portraits. Initially invisible, these images are designed to collect dirt from the shoes of passersby, and faces have begun to emerge, peering up from the ground in smoky gray and white. Notably, all aspects of this installation can be viewed before paying and entering the museum, so the work is essentially free, fluidly continuing the artist’s insightful questioning of the literal and figurative parameters of inside and outside.

— Annie Buckley

Dennis Oppenheim

THOMAS SOLOMON GALLERY
427 Bernard Street
March 20–May 1

Dennis Oppenheim, Stills from Gingerbread Man (detail), 1970–71, black-and-white and color photographs, collage, text, 60 x 40".

In the summer of 1969, Dennis Oppenheim debuted new work at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Milan; included in this exhibition was a sound track of his footsteps made while walking through the city. This piece inspired Oppenheim to shift focus from Land art to the more intimate site of his own body. What followed, including the seminal Reading Position for Second-Degree Burn, 1970, in which Oppenheim’s skin was “painted” red by absorbing rays of sunlight, was a series of works probing relationships between the body and its surroundings, between art and life. These approaches resonate through contemporary art—perhaps now more than ever, given the looming environmental disaster on the one hand, and the multiplying selves of new-media culture on the other. Oppenheim has since moved on (since the early 1980s he has been incorporating architecture and design in large-scale sculptures and installations), but these early works remain pivotal and—despite the grainy quality of video from the era—often fresher and more topical than much video work being done today.

One finds a transcendent poetry in Oppenheim’s simple actions—such as covering his hand with piles of rocks or leaves or glass—and a profundity in his childlike inquisitiveness about the confines of the body—as in Stills from Gingerbread Man, 1970–71, for which the artist ate three gingerbread men and recorded the consumption and digestion of the cookies via photographs of his body and insides. This exhibition of works from the early ’70s, in particular a new compilation of videos made between 1970 and 1974, titled Tooth and Nail, frames questions about the boundaries and finitude of the self that, far from being resolved, have only been amplified in intervening decades.

— Annie Buckley

Macha Suzuki

SAM LEE GALLERY
990 N. Hill Street #190,
April 3–May 16

Macha Suzuki, Permission to Fail, 2010, mixed media, 90 x 116 x 20”.

With “Permission to Fail,” Macha Suzuki takes his idiosyncratic blend of craft and dreamlike imagery to new levels. The introduction of figurative sculptures accentuates the surreal and contemplative sensibility that was hinted at in his earlier work but subordinated by slick surfaces and formal beauty. In Just a Tree (all works 2010), a character based on the artist stands near the gallery entrance; ordinary save a modeled tree trunk for a head, he offers an oversize handmade gem with outstretched hands. Constructed, like all of Suzuki’s work, from simple materials including wire, medium density fiberboard, pipe cleaners, and pebbles, the sculpture stands on a base that seems to float slightly above ground, emanating a yellow-orange light.

On its own, Just a Tree, or any of the figurative pieces, would be strange and beguiling, but within the context of this exhibition, the laid-back aesthetic of these clothed sculptures reframes the cool distance of refined works like Blessings in the Skies, a pair of luminescent white birds, each with only one wing, hanging from the ceiling as if flying in tandem, and Nice Try, which comprises two targets, one black and one white, painted with neon-bright concentric rings and flocked by arrows piercing the rim from all sides. The title piece, Permission to Fail, comes close to providing a singular narrative by which to read the exhibition but, as if heeding its own advice, wisely stops short of that.

Rather than supplying answers, this exceptional body of work posits the possibilities of process and even failure as alternatives to ambitions for the hyperreal success idolized by capitalism. One can easily surmise that even without the recent collapse of global financial markets, Suzuki’s point of view would still appear more humane, more layered, and more fun.

— Annie Buckley

Chris Martin

DANIEL WEINBERG GALLERY
6150 Wilshire Blvd.#8
May 1–May 29

Chris Martin, Sweet Dreams (2nd Pillow Painting), 2008–2009, oil, spray paint, collage on burlap and canvas, 52 x 43 x 10”.

In Sweet Dreams (2nd Pillow Painting), 2008–2009, Chris Martin has puffed out the picture plane, creating a grid of six rectangular pillows crammed together in two rows and fastened to a burlap and canvas ground. Half are spray-painted tranquil white or blue while the other three flash highlighter hues of yellow and pink, signaling a transition into the buzz of a dream state. Minimalism’s grid inflates into a squishy pop romance, and Martin’s combine seems to sing that Morrissey line: “Send me the pillow, the one that you dream on.” Most of this show hinges on an enthusiast’s private relationship (his, mine) to music, reaffirming the affinity between Martin and Mary Heilmann, who shares his sense of playful, loose, unstable, and lively abstraction tuned to a rock wavelength. One painting of a seven-pointed star in a bright Africanized palette of red, yellow, and green is dedicated to the deceased soul singer Isaac Hayes. Complementing the aforementioned pillows is a pair of maroon leather Brooks Brothers slippers stitched with Bob Dylan’s youthful image fittingly snipped from the cover photo of Bringing It All Back Home—domestic accessories for listening to a homecoming record. And, though chromatically sedate in pale beige, The Last Optical Illusion of 2009, 2006–2009, may have the strongest presence: Two rings of slash marks orbit a central black dot, while a caption along the bottom directs CYCLOPS: STARE AT THE BLACK DOT WHILE MOVING BACK AND FORTH; the rings begin to rotate around each other as the viewer steps to and fro. Closer inspection reveals two vinyl records collaged onto the surface, suggesting that the painting’s concentric configuration and its illusory movement simulate the afterimage of a record player’s hypnotic spinning. At its best, Martin’s work makes you dance and puts you in a momentary trance, like a catchy hit single.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Cayetano Ferrer

WORKS SITED
Los Angeles Central Library, 630 West Fifth Street
April 1–May 31

Cayetano Ferrer, FIESTA / LA ANONIMA (PARTY / THE ANONYMOUS), 2010, carpet fragments, wood blocks, book, 72 x 29”.

As part of “Works Sited,” a series of intriguing exhibitions mounted in display cases at Los Angeles’s Central Library, Cayetano Ferrer plays the role of postmodern design savant, linking the building’s interior architecture with that of casinos. A takeaway brochure details how motifs from the library’s 1926 rotunda ceiling were incorporated into a 1980s carpet renovation; conversely, by placing found casino carpet in the case, Ferrer elevates floor covering to a readerly field of contemplation. Fragments of Fiesta Casino’s flooring, salvaged from a Dumpster in Las Vegas, have been pieced together to the vitrine’s dimensions, with black wood shapes filling irresolvable gaps. Fiesta Carpet Study, 2010, a book documenting Ferrer’s reconstructive process, lies camouflaged among the allover pattern of jewel-toned, geometric flora and fauna.

Pairing library and casino suggests some obvious contrasts: order versus chance, intellection versus hedonism, and public good versus private gain. In light of recent cuts to library hours, the gesture also links the downfall of an overly speculative economy with wrecked city finances and, ultimately, a disinvestment in deep thought. While Ferrer associates the recombinant, almost randomized approach of postmodern design with the chance processes of gambling, he also takes the casino textile seriously as an object of design. This is most apparent in Fiesta Carpet Study, in which figures from the carpet pattern are analyzed as if pictograms in a meaningful sign system. Given that casino floor patterns are designed to keep gamblers energized—an instance of abstraction’s capitalization and instrumentalization—Ferrer provocatively reads an aesthetic system into a form of abstraction which has no logic—only an instrumentalized betting logic, which is no logic at all.

— Natilee Harren

Michael Dopp

KINKEAD CONTEMPORARY
6029 Washington Blvd.
May 8–June 5

Michael Dopp, Untitled, 2010, acrylic, oil, and graphite on canvas, 64 x 48”. From the series “Variations on a Room.”

The thirteen monochromatic paintings in Michael Dopp’s first solo exhibition, “Dilate,” form an intelligent and poetic meditation on archetypal dialogues of abstraction, with a self-conscious playfulness that inserts elements of language and corporeality within retinal formalism. The works recall psychologist George Henry Lewes’s definition of emergence, wherein “every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces.” Here, Dopp frames his “forces” in categories that correspond to four deliberate series––“Kites,” “Vanishing Points,” “Anemic Paintings,” and “Variations on a Room.”

Taking cues from Duchamp’s 1926 film Anemic Cinema, these paintings are visually anagrammatic, engaging a deceptively simple formalism that pushes and pulls between states of generality (the universal, fundamental elements of painting) and intimate specificity (the indexical, the somatic, the imperfect). Elements from each piece are carried into the others, akin to a perpetually looping, psychedelic cross-dissolve. The painted “walls” within the “Variations on a Room” works morph into trapezoidal forms in the “Kite” paintings, and the receding loci of the “Vanishing Point” series move forward in the pictorial plane to become the oculi of the “Anemic” paintings, which in turn mimic the chromatic circles in the “Vanishing Point” pieces, and so on.

In the process of dilation, the eye and mind take in increasing amounts of information until the aperture is too great––overexposure obscures the image and a silhouetted afterimage echoes in the mind’s eye. Dopp elicits the same effect with this body of work. Through meticulous arrangement of complementary and antagonistic elements, he activates the pictorial space of the picture plane and cites both body and architecture as core elements of the exploration of abstraction.

— Micol Hebron

Robin Rhode

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
March 11–June 6

Robin Rhode, Promenade, 2008, still from a digital animation, 5 minutes.

The South African–born, Berlin-based artist Robin Rhode is best known for performances in which he interacts with hand-drawn street art, but his first exhibition in Los Angeles places a stronger emphasis on exploring the regimes of photographic vision. In this spare but evocative show, drawings and bodies occupy the same flat optical space in photos that are at once sites of control and possibility.

A sequence of fifteen black-and-white images titled Pan’s Opticon, 2008, depicts a dark-skinned man, anachronistically dressed in pin-striped suit and boater hat, facing away from the viewer. Extending from his eyes, the arms of a drawing compass seem to trace a proliferation of black, bubblelike arcs onto a white wall. In the final image, they stop dead, affixed at their tips to two solid, ominously dripping stains. With a nod to the stuttering frames of early cinema, the work suggests that mechanically enhanced vision is a means of both whimsical creation and violent restriction, delimiting what is seen and how.

Promenade, 2008, is more hopeful. In this digital animation of stills, a man strides along a wall that is quickly covered in a mysterious hailstorm of hand-drawn white diamonds. The shapes turn sinister, hemming him in on all sides. Pressing and pulling, he eventually reduces the mass to a single diamond held gingerly between thumb and forefinger. With a haunting piano sound track by Arenor Meyer, the work is a poignant encouragement to take matters into one’s own hands. By uniting imagined and corporeal realities in the liminal space of photography, Rhode suggests a fluidity between the two that is not only generative but potentially liberating.

— Sharon Mizota

“Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown”

PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER (MOCA)
8687 Melrose Avenue
March 21–June 20

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates Inc., Stardust Hotel and Casino Neon Sign, Las Vegas, 1968, lightjet color print, 23 x 16 1/2”. Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates Inc., Philadelphia.

Above the Stardust Resort and Casino, a towering neon orb competes with the desert sunset. As the sky later fades to black, the lambent globe will glitter victorious, but in this moment, nature and man-made signifier are equals in Las Vegas. In 1968, American architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour made the city their classroom and, together with students from Yale University, photographed this scene as they documented the archetypal commercial strip at its most heroic and ordinary. Their research would lead to the 1972 theoretical text Learning from Las Vegas and would ultimately redefine these two colloquial distinctions—heroic and ordinary, along with their respective attendants original and ugly—in the language of architecture.

Culled from the archives of Venturi and Scott Brown, the films and photographs now on view—some of which have never been published—outline the liberal parameters of their study of Sin City as a model of architectural communication focused on a populist aesthetic. Cataloguing building parts, analyzing illumination levels, and dissecting the flow of traffic in parking lots, among other techniques, Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, and their pupils came to understand the supposed chaos of urban sprawl as a pattern of intertwined activities. What appears on the gallery walls is largely the raw data that fueled their conclusions—the architectural landscape’s bright lights and bold forms vying for the attention of zooming cars and ambling tourists, the dueling billboards and signs that, as the writers noted, have a rate of obsolescence more akin to that of automobiles than of buildings.

— Cameron Shaw

Alice Neel

LA LOUVER GALLERY
45 North Venice Boulevard
May 20–June 26

Alice Neel, Frank Gentile, 1965, oil on canvas, 48 x 32 1/8”. Courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel.

Art history’s view of women artists, on the one hand, and the more recent phenomenon of digital technology, on the other, have proven to be double-edged swords for Alice Neel. As the well-worn story goes, she was a figurative painter and a woman at a time when neither was fashionable for an artist; but today, for the most part, the fact of an artist’s gender (or ethnicity) no longer defines her work in critical dialogue and reception.

This intimate exhibition, running concurrently with a traveling retrospective that opens this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, offers the chance to see sixteen of Neel’s paintings in person, rather than shrunk to fit a book or screen, and the results are wittier and more vibrant than digital reproductions—or her famously anxiety-ridden biography—would suggest. Though Neel achieved success later in life, it was small relative to her peers; this show is only her second exhibition on the West Coast.

In this contemporary context, Neel’s work stands out as brash, alive, and refreshingly blunt. Powerful brushstrokes animate sinuous lines that in turn define posture and personality. The sense that the internal states of both sitter and artist merge into a kind of hybrid persona jumps from each canvas. Backgrounds blur casually into obscurity, as if afterthoughts, and color leaps and seeps in paintings suffused with equal parts humor, anxiety, and a love of the whole process—sitting and talking and painting.

— Annie Buckley

“Support Group”

THOMAS SOLOMON GALLERY AT COTTAGE HOME
410 Cottage Home Street
May 29–June 26

Kathryn Andrews,
Gaylen Gerber, 
2010,
 paint on billboards, dimensions variable.

In the two years of rotating exhibitions at Cottage Home, a converted movie theater shared by three nearby Chinatown galleries, there has been little to no effort made to deal with the location’s peculiar qualities. “Support Group,” curated by Michael Ned Holte, is surely one of the most ambitious attempts to engage the architecture’s particularly daunting scale and its expansive, uninterrupted gallery space. The understated interrelationships among the show’s components—the exhibition-within-an-exhibition Pauline (organized by Mateo Tannatt) and works by Kathryn Andrews and Gaylen Gerber—suggest that subtlety may well be the most effective means of articulating the ideas of support and context on which this show is premised.

Any group exhibition makes its visual arguments in spatial terms; this much is true. It provides viewers with a discernible frame of reference, which promises that the artworks on view influence and shape the presence of one another. Gerber’s recent practice has literalized this phenomenon. His installation here recedes into the background and alters the existing gallery conditions: Three painted gray walls and slightly muted fluorescent lights form the context, or the support, for the other works on display. Despite this pervasiveness, Gerber’s overall presence in the exhibition is marked by a tendency to disappear.

Disappearance is also crucial for Tannatt, who participates as Pauline—the name of both his alter ego and his Hollywood apartment–turned–makeshift gallery. For the duration of this exhibition, Tannatt will work in Cottage Home’s upstairs storage room, writing and developing an upcoming film or video project. The artist’s presence, however, does not suggest an element of performance; most often he is there when the gallery is closed, and he has simply repurposed the space as a private office and casting studio. Such acts of disappearance illustrate the very nature of support, in contrast to Andrews, whose gestures in the exhibition are so overwrought and triumphal that they make little critical impact.

— Aram Moshayedi

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez

LTD LOS ANGELES
7561 W. Sunset Blvd #103,
May 21–July 1

View of “Memory Objects,” 2010.

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “Memory Objects,” functions as a Minimalist playground in which discrete objects and subtle images invite connections, interactions, and reflection—not least on remembrance, as the title suggests. Inspired, like many artists and thinkers, by formless in-between states, the Bay Area–based artist’s works are distinguished by their aptitude at carving out and activating space in quiet but definitive ways.

Anchor, 2010, a hulking, matte black structure that recalls Robert Morris’s L Beams of 1965, looms near the entrance of the gallery like a shadowy construction relic offering entry to the lyrical works beyond. Just inside, Here, 2009–10, consists of three parts: A thin, wooden structure, one side covered in dark glitter, reaches up and arcs into the room while a round, lichen-covered rock sits at its base, texturally rhyming with the sparkling wood. Across the room, a mirror that echoes the space framed by the wood is propped in a corner. Throughout, objects seem to indicate the intangible—fleeting reflections and lingering scents—with memorable appearances by mirrors, light boxes, lavender-infused string, and a pile of dried mint leaves.

Sister/Sister, 2010, a photograph in a light box, depicts a woman gazing at a meandering road. Nearby, a pale blue zigzag of wood evokes both road and sky. Wolfe-Suarez’s strength lies in just this sort of visual poem, and in the repeated, silent invitations to interact—to climb over, under, and around porous surfaces and to gaze into light-filled veneers—the cerebral incidental to the sensory.

— Annie Buckley

Shana Lutker

SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS
6006 Washington Boulevard
June 19–July 31

Shana Lutker, H., 2010, leather, wood, steel, 22 x 38 x 36” (with platform 3 x 76 x 36”).

In her second solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter, “H. Y. S. T. et al.,” Shana Lutker has transformed the gallery into a twenty-first-century dream space. The forms of her sculptures derive from instruments used by Jean-Martin Charcot, the infamous French psychologist who attempted to induce various states of hysteria in his female patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Immortalized in early photographs, Charcot’s props resemble medieval torture devices or crude surgical tools. Lutker channels this threat of bodily harm in works such as t.t.t.t.t. (all works 2010), in which double-ended steel skewers slice horizontally through two wooden posts, creating a miniature, spiked ladder that provokes irrational fears or sadistic desires, depending on the viewer.

Lutker’s most compelling works are those that inspire an immediate sense of the uncanny: a shiny, oversize tuning fork whose prongs taper together (Y.), a pair of smooth, asymmetric wooden legs that seem stolen from a mannequin (I.I.), and a leather settee so biomorphic that it looks more like a faceless pair of seated Siamese twins than like domestic furniture (H.). In fact, Lutker designed H. by doubling the original form of Freud’s office chair. This rampant twinning reaches a thrilling high in Susanne Vielmetter’s office, where a flat-screen television displays what appears to be surveillance footage of the exhibition space (H. Y. S. T. et al.). Viewers wonder if they have been watched during their visit, until a life-size, upside-down, cardboard tuning fork saunters across the screen, mimicking their very own ambulations. Are they dreaming? Or going mad? Lutker’s title piece offers no answer, posing instead a chilling question: What’s the difference?

— Cassie Wu

Denis Darzacq

KOPEIKIN GALLERY AND DE SOTO GALLERY
8810 Melrose Avenue
June 10–August 21

Denis Darzacq, Hyper No.7, 2007, color photograph, 50 x 40". From the series "Hyper," 2007.

The suspended figures that leap, fall, twist, lean, and float in Denis Darzacq’s photographs were not, as one would suspect in a digital era, created on a blue screen; they were captured en marche the old-fashioned way, on location. Since 2005, Darzacq has invited young dancers from working-class neighborhoods in Paris, the city where he lives and works, to participate in his work; the results of this collaborative, performance-based process are infused with the beauty of dance and sociopolitical subtext.

Included in this exhibition are works from two series: “La Chute,” 2005–2006, shot in and around Paris shortly after the riots of that year, and “Hyper,” 2007, featuring more closely cropped figures eerily floating through the colorful aisles of modern supermarkets. The first series focuses as much on a gritty urban locale as on the lone incongruous figures hovering in its midst; in both content and dystopic sensibility, these images recall Robert Longo’s drawings of falling individuals from the 1980s, cool and controlled evocations of some mysterious menace. The images in “Hyper,” photographed in the massive supermarkets that have replaced quaint shops in Paris—and in cities the world over—glow with the sickly fluorescent glare and synthetic hues of convenience stores everywhere.

Though compositionally elegant, the pictures in “La Chute,” close to the protests in time and space, mirror the anxiety and injustice that lead to civil unrest; it is the candy-colored malaise and disassociated anomie of “Hyper” that get at the demon behind the discontent, shining an antiseptic light on the multiplying tentacles of global capitalism.

— Annie Buckley

Andrew Lord

SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART
Bergamot Station G1, 2525 Michigan Avenue
May 15–August 21

View of “Andrew Lord,” 2010.

Andrew Lord first gained attention in the late 1970s for ceramic vessels that looked like they had been plucked from Cubist still lifes. While he has since moved on to other thematic pursuits, the uncannily rendered household or decorative clay object remains his most common and compelling subject. This exhibition surveys the past two decades of Lord’s work, presenting five series that comprise nearly thirty sculptures on pedestals and one video. For Breathing, biting, swallowing, tasting, smelling, listening, watching, 1994–2000, Lord molded vase-, cup-, and pitcherlike vessels with the parts of his own body that correlate to the title’s actions (ears, mouth, neck, eyelids), leaving behind a rough, lumpy terrain pocked with visible finger and teeth marks. Glazed to a remarkably glossy white crackle with small streaks of gold leaf, these viscerally performative impressions are here paired with two wall-mounted rectangles of plaster and beeswax, titled between my hands and inside my mouth, both 2010, for which the artist’s hands and mouth molded inverse cavities that protrude eerily from the calm white surface.

Such corporeally based interactions conjure Janine Antoni or even Ana Mendieta, but the body as mold or tool is only one aspect of Lord’s focus. Memories and the landscape of his birthplace, Whitworth, in Lancashire, England, are the subject of two other works. For Spodden at Healey Dell, Whitworth, 2009–10, the movement of a local river, shown churning opaquely around rocks in an accompanying video, inspired seven chalky finger-raked sculptures depicting water currents and made from burlap, plaster, and beeswax. In these attempts to conjure and record the mutable—moving water, memory, or an active, aging body—Lord proves his consistent mastery of imbuing rough-hewn forms with ardent human resonance.

— Lyra Kilston