Edens Edge

The current exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum is an interesting one. Curator Gary Garrels presents 15 artists, all native to Los Angeles, as a broad foundation made of individuals whose works reflect living in Los Angeles. The result is a piece-mealing of styles and methods, yet Mr. Garrels does succeed in finding common threads–themes perhaps not obvious when viewing each of the artist’s works alone. The exhibit is divided into 15 small rooms, each artist occupying “his or her own discreet space.”

On entering, the visitor first encounters sculptural work by Ken Price. Fluid, organic shapes sit atop pedestals, frozen mid-motion. The treatment of the surface is reminiscent of lichen-covered stones or the darting glow of a dying ember. They are round and sensual, heavy and almost wet looking. Price has said of his own work, “My current vocabluary of form means always making references to sex, whether intended or not. People find images in my work that I don’t even see.” That is likely, as these forms could reference almost anything organic or plastic.

Lari Pittman, one of the exhibit’s well-known artists, occupies the second room. Mr. Pittman is one of the most flexible of artists, with a range of styles graphically and classically matched to a bottomless pit of visual vocabulary; his work is compositionally complex and rich in content. In one painting, (they are all untitled), an acrobat hangs in front of piles of televison screens depicting scenes of a small town set between tall mountains and the sea, beset with warships and submarines. From his mouth hangs an ornament with the image of a blindfolded man on it. In another painting, a net of lines anchored to screws in wooden stakes breaks the visual space in which the front yards of suburban homes, plastic lawnchairs, boxy interiors and wireless phones are placed to serve as a backdrop for the natives–two billboard men with perfect hair and chiseled jaws adorned with warpaint. On closer inspection, the paint on their faces creates small scenes of dried up, deserted yards.

Jim Shaw, the next artist, has been using his dreams as a source for his work. A series of gouache paintings depict images realistically–improbable yet metaphorically probable. One is titled “God Selling Cigarettes in a Nightclub,” another “A Group of Penitents in a Suburban Parking Lot.” Many are subtitled “paperback cover,” which, for me, brought the subject matter back to the idea of pulp: I imagine the artist’s head so full of bits and pieces from past and current culture, television, comic books and magazines–everything stirred together in the soup of the unconcious to be recombined in his work. Perfect example: A large sculpture sits in the back of the room. What seems to be a large, airbrushed image of Richard Simmons’s head sits atop a foam form body of the Hindu God Ganesh, slime (phallic drips) pouring from the breast and head.

In the next room, 15 small watercolors and four large, almost full-size depictions of a man in a rubber suit circle the walls. In the small works, the man seems to be in the proccess of dressing or undressing and reaching down to fondle his genitalia. The treatment Monica Majoli has given the works give them an almost amorphous quality, sometimes it seems another upper half of a man’s body hangs from his waist, other times parts of the mans body become puckered and distorted. The four large works are much more specific in detail. A man in different phases of encasement in a rubber suit is suspended by chains and harnesses against a background of skies, or submerged in a sunny lake. He is half bondage participant, half coccoon. I almost felt like waiting to see what will emerge from the chrysalis.

Around the corner, the crisp, flat alkyd paintings of Sharon Ellis are almost hypnotic with color. Decorative elements glow in idyllic landscapes where clouds, sunsets, fire and stars play between magical and toxic. Dawns and twilights are colored both very hot and very cool, and trees far too dark silhouette against impossibly bright skies that somehow remain subtle in their intense saturation. Of all the artists in the exhibition, I felt Ellis’s work is the most literal in representing Los Angeles–a place with perfect weather, yet air so bad you shouldn’t go outside.

One thinks of coral, bacteria, amoebas, landscapes, geographical maps, or any multitude of things seen very close up or very far away when looking at Ginny Bishtons collages. They are made from thin strips or tiny round pieces cut from photographs of plant life taken on daily walks. Upon closer inspection, you can make out images of dry brown leaves, grass, and twigs to brightly colored flowers in the middle of blooming. I couldn’t help but reflect on the ratio of small to large and how, on standing back, these immensely concentrated collages resemble the most tiny biological parts of the subjects used to create them, collected together to form a whole–a universe under a microscope.

Liz Craft’s bronze works bring to mind record covers from the ’60s and ’70s, R. Crumb illustrations, and the American Nouvelle Vague era in film. On the floor, brown conical lumps of clay are arranged like mountains. As you walk closer, you realize they are in the shape of a very heavy woman, flesh sagging to settle on the floor around her like a colony of simplified Venuses of Willendorf–ancient earth mother hills. Across the room, a skinny man sits crosslegged playing the guitar as a long plume of smoke from a rolled “cigarette” turns into driftwood, twisting above his head. In the center of the room is one of Craft’s more well known works: A couple rides a Harley Davidson motorcycle made entirely out of wood and pine cones, leaving toadstools for tracks behind them. A skeleton drives this machine, wearing nothing but a bandana on his head and an iron cross around his neck. Behind him rides an invisible woman, visible only by the filled-out blue jean cut-offs and t-shirt which says “Virgo.” I wonder about Liz Craft being someone who identifies more with the counter-culture of another time. She seems to take popular themes and integrates them with myth–Easy Rider and Death and the Maiden, a bearded hippie and the Celtic tree of life. Ephemeral ideals become bronzed into legend, perserved like the images of old gods for future generations.

Mark Bradford’s larger works look a lot like aerial views of a city. Collages of found advertising posters, paper, foil and paint have been cut into strips and pieces and worked over with paint washes and bleach, then sanded and ironed, creating textures one would associate more with weathered leather than with paper. Bradford collects what he calls “merchant posters”–advertisements found on posts, fences, abandoned buildings–advertisements for the working poor. These are hung on one wall of his gallery, manipulated, but text left intact. Bradford says he wants “to make the viewer feel the presence of global ‘ghost economies,’ cities covered with rectangles of paper.”

In the next room, I immediately gravitate to the corner, where the wall erodes, liquid streaming from the breach like a mineral spring–mold, moss and lichens erupting verdant, inhabited by shiny slugs. Rebecca Morales’s work is astonishing in its realism. The rest of the works in the room are gouache and watercolor on vellum, the trompe l’oiel effect enhanced by the shadow of the warped, transluscent surface. Grasses, clovers and small flowers spring from the mouths of strange knit objects. It is dificult to tell where the weave of the fabric stops and the tendrils of the plant life begins. A balancing act between the creativity of man and the degeneration and regeneration of nature’s process of decay and rebirth, Morales depicts equilibrium between the two forces.

Matthew Monahan’s installation consists of two sculptures surrounded by a frieze of large transfer drawings made with carbon paper. The sculptures seem like statues of gods, one classically-faced deity rising from or falling into building materials encased in glass–an asiatic warrior in gold armor sitting crosslegged on top of the case, sheathed in a tunic of architectural plans. The drawings that cover the wall read almost like Escher’s tessellations–figures of idols, figures engaged in ceremony, island temples, ladders to secret rooms made of bricks, men hammering down the bricks and rebuilding structures of wood–all flowing into each other. I think of cities built on cities, like Mexico City upon Tenochtitlan, Paris built upon the foundations of Lutece–layers of myth, history of birth, and demise of civilizations–cultures engulfing each other and re-realized as something else on the foundations of something older.

I will admit that I am a bit confused at the work of Ann Sew Hoy. Her works, mostly of clay, are pretty ambiguous. They could reference molecules, balls of netting, or tangled rope. There is a consistent soft-boxy shape that is repeated to create the larger works or left as one unit in the smaller pieces. It seems the artist has attempted to place her works into cultural context by assembling them with items collected from thrift stores (beads, fabrics, feathers) as “dream-catchers,” or naming the larger ones on pedestals “scholars’ rocks.” The majority of her works sit on a giant square “coffee table” on one side of the room. Here they are used as paper weights or pencil jars. I get the feeling of self-conciousness about the artwork, that perhaps she feels that her work will one day wind up in thrift stores; or maybe she’s trying to express that, in this age of nightime craft classes and TV shows which teach landscape painting, there is an absence of distinction between high art and the rest of modern day cultural artifacts.

Many of Matt Greene’s paintings depict naked women laying among toadstools engaged in orgy. They appear to be images traced from old books, pornographic rags and fashion magazines. For Greene, painting is “an old clumsy physical form on which to project our fantasies.” Along that line of thinking, the old masters fantasized about a 14-year-old virgin suckling a babe that will one day grow up to die for all of our sins. Greene notes that he radically questions the “Western/industrial notion of progress, rooted as it is in a linear conception of time… a construct devised to support belief in the concept of centralized power, power based on subjugation.” He believes we have to take into account “magical beliefs and ecologically derived philosophies of so-called primitive cultures.” Could one say, then, that contemporary fantasy consists of uninhibited female sexuality on a psychedelic stage?

Elliot Hundley’s wall works are made up of thousands of pieces, some collaged into the surface, most are suspended on pins. Images include photos of nude and clothed male forms, silk flower petals, paper, wood, string, wire, sequins–seemingly haphazardly assembed, but on stepping back, the compositons are balanced. I am reminded of milagros–the tiny charms that Catholics placed next to the Virgin Mary in hopes of the represented body part being healed. These assemblages are so delicately attatched, I imagine Hundley in his studio, the door opening, and a strong wind gusting in to blow hundreds of pieces around the room, the artist collecting them and reassembling them according to his own, innate sense of order.

Two videos made by Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge are presented. They are both around 30 minutes long and quite different from each other. The first seems to be documentation of a family with bags made of pink sports fabric for heads, changing features indicated by crude black marker scribbling. This “documentary” follows the family through various rituals of playing Charades, eating through watching television, baking, death and burial rites. It is at most times gruesome and seems to be a characterization of the modern family as gluttonous, superstitious and unable to communicate. The second video follows a woman in a viking helmet around random places in Los Angeles. You get the feeling that she has just stepped out of some mental ward and has become your tour guide of “places not often noticed or considered,” falling often into self-analyzation, then turning to interrogate the cameraman. The conversation is one-sided and interspersed with her singing heavy metal song lyrics while playing air guitar on a piece of foam cheese. To draw a comparison, Kahn and Dodge seem to investigate group mentality in one piece, and the path of the wandering individual in the other, raising social questions about safety, fear, comfort and sense of place.

Last but not least is a single work by the late Jason Rhoades. Wooden wagon wheels hang from the ceiling, each supporting multiple glowing neon words suspended by their own electrical cords. The words are all slang for female genitalia (“mouth taco,” “bedfellow,” “haddock,” “little pet,” “hatchet wound,” “mailbox”). It is a like a huge chandelier dripping with the fruit of knowledge, wagon wheels hearkening when settlers came west in hopes of finding a new Eden–modern society catching up to remind them of man’s spoiling. Hopes and dreams may start out pure but are sullied and corrupted in the end.

I would say that this curatorial endeavor is a success, the works complementing and counterpointing each other in conversations on many levels of sexuality, self-worth, sense of place and cultural identity, and a pervading voyeurism and sensitive self-awareness. Collectively, the work touches upon something hard to express–perhaps a certain brand of cynicism that I feel many an Angeleno shares. I would be interested in hearing the point of view of my fellow citizens regarding this, so go out and see the show.