Ann Preston

ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY
Bergamot Station B4, 2525 Michigan Avenue
February 12–March 13

View of “Ann Preston,” 2010.

In this exhibition, Ann Preston joins a long and esteemed lineage of artists, architects, scientists, and mathematicians devoted to an investigation of phi—the irrational golden ratio said to be the most pleasing of proportions, at once found in nature, attributed to the divine, and expressed in the sober forms of geometry. Preston’s forms, however, disrupt this aura of austerity by invoking the messy operations of desire. Her steel sculptures, which recall gems turned inside out, convey the sense of a repressed unconscious bubbling just under the surface that disturbs their rigid structure. Undulating swells warp the flat triangular planes and tarnish their golden character, transforming the pure language of math into an unstable field of psychological and visual perception.

The most impressive acts of destabilization occur in Preston’s acrylic panel paintings, which are filled with deceptively simple reiterations of the golden triangle. The colors are muted and creamy, the palette limited to carefully graded values of sea green, rose, cerulean, and goldenrod yellow that lure the viewer into a pleasurable state of appreciation for the beauty of the work. Yet as the seconds pass, the picture plane slowly begins to shift. The shaded triangles morph into illusionistic pyramids that oscillate between receding into depth and protruding into space, confusing the eye and jarring the brain. It appears as though Preston has created two-dimensional paintings that persist strangely in the mind’s eye as three-dimensional wall reliefs, until one comes across a barely perceptible carved depression in one triangle of Schematic Colors, 2009. This shallow indentation thwarts the illusion entirely and may create a state of perceptual anxiety in the viewer. The effect, or perhaps the reward, is a slightly queasy hallucinatory sensation that is inexplicably pleasurable, begging to be repeated.

— Cassie Wu

Darren Bader

EIGHTH VEIL
7174 Sunset Blvd
February 12–March 19

View of “Darren Bader,” 2010.

A row of vinyl numbers runs clockwise around the gallery from 2 to 3,266, demarcating a conceptual baseline from which Darren Bader’s exhibition “Number[s]” departs. Throughout the installation, the artist interrupts the linear numerical progression (which is reminiscent of Mel Bochner’s early architectural/arithmetic installation Continuous/Dis/Continuous, 1971–72) by substituting objects for sections of numerals, ostensibly proposing some absurd equivalence between, for example, a blade of plastic sushi grass and the set of numbers between 866 and 1,035, or a container of sugared fruit jellies and the numbers between 1,194 and 1,214. A few substitutions are sonic: A pair of speakers on the floor periodically pumps out some electro-pop remix, while headphones dangling from a hole in the wall play the Alicia Keys song “Love Is My Disease.”

In addition to the diverse and disjunctive range of the mundane and the domestic—a tote bag with bottles of olive oil, an unopened carton of Epsom salt, two boxer briefs, a potted plant, a flat-screen TV playing the movie Hero (2002)—that Bader positions as sculptural stand-ins within the numerical sequence, he also includes several artworks by friends in his mystifying replacement scheme. There are two photographs by Matthew Spiegelman, a perfectly suggestive and cryptic wall projection by John Williams, and a lifelike potato made out of plaster by Margaret Lee, as well as other intriguing works by Mateo Tannatt, Lisa Lapinski, Ara Dymond, Dash Snow, and Carter Mull.

Decontextualized from any preexisting system of value or bookkeeping, the exhibition’s stream of numbers is an empty abstraction, a self-contained coordination of fluid variables in which objects are arbitrarily ascribed meaning in relation to a larger encompassing notational structure. It is a comic leveling gesture—each component is just another unit, a placeholder interchangeable with its numeric counterpart. Emancipated from normative logic by absurdist humor, Bader converts the rational order of numbers into an irrational codex freely mixing universal signs and private symbols. “Number[s]” pushes the viewer’s narrative impulse to its limits, defying mostly futile efforts to concoct a scenario or connective thread, which, ultimately, is beside the point.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Kamrooz Aram

LAXART
2640 S. La Cienega
January 30–March 20

View of “Kamrooz Aram,” 2010.

In Kamrooz Aram’s latest exhibition, “Generation After Generation; Revolution After Revelation,” the deft control of the cosmically inflected paintings for which he is known gives way to an explosive, nearly violent abstraction. From the endlessly entertaining configurations of Persian imagery that populate Aram’s vibrant earlier works, only simple decorative motifs are retained here—and these are alternately veiled by layers of monochromatic pigment and disrupted by energetic gestural marks.

Propped on curious wooden blocks, the ten canvases that compose the series are arranged five on a wall and face one another in a narrow room in what could be seen as either confrontation or communion. Viewers find themselves engulfed by Aram’s opposing aesthetic tendencies: to gently work over a floral motif with white paint that comes to resemble frosted glass or heavy snow or to attack the motif before it’s dry, obliterating its perfect contours and spreading its very material every which way. Whether subdued or volatile in affect, all of the panels share a double indexical quality, bearing the traces of two seemingly separable events that the title of the show so evocatively identifies.

Aram’s dominant palette—crimson reds, deep purples, and rich blues—points obliquely to the corporeal, exacerbating the aggression of his brushstrokes. Bursts of paint that look like fireworks appear on several panels, simultaneously redolent of state-sanctioned celebration and, as Aram has indicated, blood spatters from gunshot wounds. In the context of his larger body of work, the tensions in these paintings are as politically charged as they are formally sophisticated—and, one must admit, unnervingly beautiful.

— Andrea Gyorody

Robert Rauschenberg

ARMORY CENTER FOR THE ARTS
145 N. Raymond Ave.
January 17–March 21

Robert Rauschenberg, Samarkand Stitches #IV, 1988, assemblage with ikat silk, domestic fabrics, and screenprinting, 61 x 40". From the series “Samarkand Stitches,” 1988.

Art history is rife with instances in which limitations—financial, material, spatial—sparked inspiration, but for thirty-five years, Gemini G.E.L. provided Robert Rauschenberg with the exact opposite of restriction. The results of the long and overwhelmingly positive relationship between the artist and print studio reflect Rauschenberg’s exuberance and the unique environment provided by Gemini. Founded in 1966 and still run by two of its founders, Sidney Felsen and Stanley Grinstein, Gemini offers its invited artists free rein and seemingly unlimited resources to make prints and multiples. Rauschenberg, one of the earliest and longest-lasting participants, took the process further, transforming the idea of what a print could be.

This exhibition includes numerous examples of Rauschenberg’s work with Gemini over the years, providing a vibrant view of their unique process and, tangentially, of the artist’s development from the 1960s through the latter part of his life. The selection, curated by Jay Belloli, represents a lively mix of lesser-known works—lovely gold-leaf-edged collages made as a result of Rauschenberg’s journey with Gemini staff to the world’s first paper mill in China during the early 1980s; subtly varied fabric prints from the series “Samarkand Stitches,” 1988, inspired by a trip to Uzbekistan later that decade—alongside numerous silk-screen prints and some quirky multiples, notably the altarlike “Publicons” from the late ’70s.

The range of materials—mud, steel, wood, Mylar, string, cardboard—points to an ongoing dialogue between Rauschenberg’s prints and his celebrated Combines, while editions produced as a result of travels suggest the impetus for his work with cultural exchange and ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange) later in life. Playful in the best sense of the word, the exhibition is grounded in what reads as a firm commitment on behalf of the artist to take advantage of the possibilities afforded by Gemini, drawing on an array of media and processes while gradually but doggedly pushing the definition of printmaking.

— Annie Buckley

James Krone

COUNTRY CLUB PROJECTS
805 South Genesee Avenue, at the Rudolf Schindler Buck House,
February 13–April 3

View of “James Krone,” 2010.

Walking into James Krone’s latest exhibition, “The Wilderness Is the Witches Leash,” is like stepping onto a lovingly crafted and sincere movie set, however paradoxical that may sound. Much of the feeling derives initially from the domestic architecture of Country Club Projects, which operates out of Rudolf Schindler’s 1934 Buck House. Krone’s paintings hang throughout the furnished home and propel viewers to meander through the space––from living room to dining room to bedroom and back––while inviting fantasies of dinner parties and backyard soirees, cigarette and highball in hand. Krone riffs on this dream by placing his Ashtray Watchtowers, 2010––vertical limblike sculptures formed from the branches of a birch tree––in front of his not-quite-monochrome paintings on the wall. Filled with sand at top, the Ashtray Watchtowers are functional ashtrays, and viewers are invited to light their own smoke, contemplate the canvases between drags, and extinguish the butt in one of the sculptures.

At once props and actors, Krone’s works force the smoker’s disinterested gaze onto the legacies of modernist art history. In his paintings, Krone is neither antagonistic nor dismissive toward the monochrome, yet he challenges Greenbergian flatness by painting thin, rectangular layers of deep shades of violet and indigo directly on unprimed canvas sized with rabbit-skin glue. The result is a surface that appears contradictory: Certain areas are soaked with pigment and threaten to collapse into a black hole, while other sections are hard and reflective, refusing access to the canvas beneath. As a result, Krone’s investigation of modernist strategies is less concerned with finding new solutions to old dilemmas than it is about exploring the hidden possibilities of previously solved problems, thus setting the stage for a novel adaptation of a midcentury classic.

— Cassie Wu

Rachel Whiteread

HAMMER MUSEUM
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
January 31–April 25

Rachel Whiteread, Study for Village—1st, 2004, ink, pencil, collage on paper, 11 13/16 x 16 3/16".

The stated purpose of “Drawing,” Rachel Whiteread’s latest exhibition, is to illuminate the relationship between her rarely shown two-dimensional works and her sculptures that, through the casting process, transform domestic objects into uncanny things. However, a larger schism also runs through this intriguing show––between the lightness of the paper drawings arranged on the walls and the gravitational pull of the plaster, rubber, and resin sculptures in the center of the room. By glancing back and forth, Whiteread’s process is revealed as one that falls in between media.

Whiteread uses varnish as mark, a liquid amber applied in lovely strokes with a sure hand; here the cheapness of varnish overwrites the avarice of gold. Silver leaf on cardboard also comes off as a poor man’s Baroque––evoking the underclass’s adaptation of the mouth grill, yet with none of its bite or beauty. Nonetheless, Whiteread’s use of these materials adroitly communicates the decadence and decay wrought in the wake of empire, in this case Great Britain’s. Meanwhile, the correction fluid, applied to her imagery of domestic scenes, yields both additive and reductive rewards.

Study for Village—1st, 2004, the last image encountered by viewers, depicts a dwelling cut out of its context: A collage of a dollhouse is balanced on the page by the dripping ink edifice that threatens it. In the corner of the work, a stranded lightbulb speaks of crap in the village—the global one, that is. So as much as the rubber and foam Untitled: Double Amber Bed, 1991, seems to offer tactile pleasure—its dimpled, grotesque surface blazing the color of empire at sunset—this last drawing promises an unexpected trajectory: a path where Whiteread backs away from the object as body. Will she become less of a documentarian and more of a seer?

— Mary Walling Blackburn