Art Rounds

Ellie and I did the art rounds last Thursday, covering at least two of the several gallery clusters in the LA area--Culver City and Chinatown. I have to report that it's a distressingly desultory scene right now, with few visitors in the galleries--at least at the time of our visit--and dealers generally agreeing that things look fairly bleak from the sales point of view right at the moment. But there's always the art...

I won't attempt to cover it all. There's some pretty indifferent stuff out there, and as I have said before I'm happy to have taken off my critic's hat: I can restrict myself to work that had a particular resonance for me. First, though, for anyone in the area who might be wondering what to see, let me quickly point you towards two good shows: a fine collection of "Drawings (Broadly Defined)" at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art--a museum quality show that includes some standout artists; and "I Am a Bird Now", a zappy and intriguing fusion of collage, painting, sculpture and wall work...



... by Antonio Adriano Puleo at Cherry and Martin.

The paintings that spoke to me more personally and directly, though, were those at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Roberts & Tilton. I loved the installation of Whitney Bedford's paintings...

(lower picture: “Frantic / Frantically”, 2009, oil and ink on panel, 22” x 26”. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Joshua White.)

... of underwater volcanic eruptions, which combine the bold application of oil paint with the intervention of intricate moments of fine ink drawing. Set, for the most part, against the horizon that is a conventional element of landscape painting, Bedford's powerful, turbulent "eruptions" of brushy color have all the appeal of drama and the intimacy of narrative. The paintings succeed in borrowing from both the raw emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism and, in her backgrounds, the more neutral power of minimalist abstraction. They are visually exciting, even as they remind us of our planet's vulnerability and its seething, unseen core. She has certainly found a new way to expand one of art's lasting traditions: the engagement with the natural environment.

On to see new work by Andrew Schoultz at Roberts & Tilton. (Ellie and I have an earlier painting of his in our living room, much admired by guests and cherished by ourselves.) Schoultz's highly complex work tells us something about the possibilities of painting beyond its traditional value of providing visual pleasure. He engages us in an extraordinary spectrum of experience, involving myth and archetype along with contemporary economics and environmental issues. In these latest paintings...



... aside from his familiar blend of intricate line drawing and explosive field of proliferating image, he brings in a collage element of finely shredded currency bills and, if I'm not mistaken, other financial documents to engage the eye and tease the observing mind with oblique thematic references to the power structures of this world we have created. Elsewhere, ubiquitous architectural references evoke those structures themselves, whilst pathetically degraded natural elements like blasted trees (the paper fragments, I observed in this context, are cut out in the shape of thousands of tiny leaves) suggest to this observer the damage wrought upon the planet by the human addiction to commerce and economic gain. Schoultz clearly offers no answers in his paintings, but he asks us to engage in the complex philosophical narratives of a world on the brink of madness, and hanging on by a mere thread to intelligent control.

Chinatown, then. Here's a photographic diptych from the series "Room" by Carrie Yury at Sam Lee Gallery...



Yury's split portraits of near-nudes bring to mind, in part, the grisly 1947 Black Dahlia murder (the victim's body was cut in half,) as well as those many erotic nudes that populate the pages of art history books (the Rokeby Venus, the Ingres Odalisque, Manet's Olympia...), that on the one hand celebrate the female body and objectify it. Playing on that theme--with a (literal) twist--Yury confronts us with the disturbing proximity of erotica and pornography, healthy sexuality and exploitation. Her naked figures turn away even as they offer themselves to us; they are personalized by the detail of objects that surround them, yet distanced by the camera's voyeuristic lens. I found the pictures provocative and uncomfortably beautiful at once.

Right next door to Sam Lee's, at Solway Jones, you'll find an enchanting collection of hand-made musical instruments, ranging from the Zen-like simplicity of Robert Wilhite's gongs...


... to the practical whimsy of William T Wiley's "Debilslide" guitar ...


... to the primitive/high-tech combo of William Leavitt's "Analog Synth" synthesizer...


... and the technological sophistication of Reed Ghazala's "Species Device"...
A number of these instrument makers are artists of established reputation in other media--Bill Wiley as a Northern California-based painter, sculptor, printmaker and installation artist; and Bob Wilhite, based here in Southern California, as an artist, designer and performance artist of many years standing. Aside from the purely visual aesthetic pleasure of looking at these strange and beautiful objects, the visitor can enjoy the eerie quality of their strange sounds--the single note of Wilhite's beautifully crafted one-key piano, for example, or the clunk-clunk of musical clock whose two "hands" strike the sides of the glasses in which they're placed. One of Ghazala's pieces collects energetic forces from remotely ambient movements--a passing truck or bus, an airplane overhead--and converts it into other-wordly sound.

Michael Solway himself delighted us with an informed tour of the entire installation. It was with particular pleasure that he reminded us of the article in the previous day's New York Times about the 9,000 year-old flute. It seemed like a great context for a show exploring both the primitive and the most recent and sophisticated of humanity's ways of making sound.