In an age of twenty-four hour a day news networks that constantly reflect  that we are in the midst of a major environmental disaster, multiple ongoing wars, and the worst economic crisis of our time, it is hard not to become a little paranoid or to begin thinking that the end of the world near. With this in mind it is no wonder that artists have begun to address these issues in increasingly direct ways.

Artist Chad Person is presenting an exhibition titled, Surviving the End of Your World, currently on view at Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. For the exhibition, the artist is presenting works from his RECESS series (Resource.Exhaustion.Crisis.Evacuation.Safety.Shelter), which is essentially the remodeling of the artist’s home into conceptually sound environment that revolves entirely around survival.  Items in RECESS include a converted pool that now acts an operating bunker, a makeshift Double Barrel Shotgun, Modular Rain Barrels, Recycled Solar Oven, Golf Ball Cannon, and Signal Flags among several other objects. Within the context of the gallery these items become art objects loaded with cultural meaning.

The artist has also completed a series of collages which feature war related objects used by the US military, such as planes, helicopters, tanks and ships. These flat works are created through the meticulous deconstruction of US currency. Person actually deducts the money used to create the works from his taxes, potentially refusing to contribute to the war efforts through paying additional taxes. This is a logic that is essentially flawed, but which does make a potent statement.

In the main section of the gallery, the artist presents two large inflatables, which dominate the space. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer comes across a large inflatable of the Mobil Oil Pegasus, lying on its side in a shallow pool of oil. This creature is followed by another large inflatable sculpture, this time of the McDonald’s character Mayor McCheese, who has lost his political stature and is now slumped into a corner. The figure dissolves into a metaphor for all political leaders who have failed in their vain attempt to better the world.

Chad Person lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The artist is a graduate of the University of New Mexico and has exhibited extensively in Southwest. Surviving the End of Your World marks his first solo exhibition with Mark Moore Gallery, and will be on view through August 14th, 2010.

John Baldessari, Pure Beauty 1966-68, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Baldessari Studio and Glenstone

1. It’s all relative, especially Beauty

I can’t imagine a more fitting title for Baldessari’s current retrospective (on view at LACMA through 12 September 2010) than Pure Beauty. The exhibition title references an early Baldessari work of the same name from 1966-68, an off-white canvas with the phrase literally painted in black, capital letters, and was explicitly selected by the artist himself. From the dawning of Greek Classicism to well beyond the Italian Renaissance, artists learned to faithfully master contrapposto, linear perspective, and the like in order to achieve the great, mythic aspiration of beauty. Room after room in the exhibition reminds the viewer of the ubiquitous, albeit trite, truth that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For example, in Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Carrots (1972), Baldessari asks two participants to impose their own aesthetic criteria upon a grouping of carrots (or green beans in the case of Choosing: Green Beans, 1971). As participants select the carrot that appeals most to them, said carrot is advanced to the next round and compared against two new carrots, and so on, and so forth. Ultimately this “faux exercise of taste,” as David Salle calls it, communicates the message that if there isn’t even consistency in scrutinizing a vegetable, how could we possibly impose a universal definition of beauty? Long-coveted, it continues to elude us.

2. The Rightness of Wrong

In 1996 art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau penned the essay “The Rightness of Wrong” (1996) which praised Baldessari’s now infamous hybrid painting/photograph Wrong (1966-68) showing the artist purposefully disregarding the “rules” of photography and positioning himself in the shadow of a giant palm tree, that seems to emanate from his head, as he stands directly facing the camera in front of an ordinary tract home. Embracing “the wrong” extends well beyond this singular work and infiltrates Baldessari’s entire oeuvre, whether it’s circumventing the essence of a portrait by obliterating the face of the sitter (Portrait: Artist’s Identity Hidden with Various Hats, 1974) or using subliminal seduction – a la the panned low-art of advertising – to sell himself in his works (Embed Series: Ice Cubes: U-BUY BAL DES SSARI, 1974). Baldessari proves time and again that it’s right to be wrong.

3. Clement Greenberg doesn’t know it all

Baldessari’s Clement Greenberg (1966-68) quotes the critic’s canonical text: “ESTHETIC JUDGMENTS ARE GIVEN AND CONTAINED IN THE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE OF ART. THEY COINCIDE WITH IT; THEY ARE NOT ARRIVED AT AFTERWARDS THROUGH REFLECTION OR THOUGHT.” I couldn’t disagree more. What sets a work apart for me is not necessarily my initial reaction or experience – though I’m not discounting works who do pack an immediate punch, as they say – but that which infiltrates the subconscious and, in the words of Baldessari, “lingers in one’s mind.” One might liken it to the fleeting passion of puppy love, often brought on in an instant, versus the staying power of a genuine friendship, earned through time and manifestation.

John Baldessari, Heel (1986). Courtesy of Museum Associates/ LACMA

4. Banal ≠ boring

Whether arranging mundane objects in his studio according to their actual height (Alignment Series: Things in My Studio (by Height), 1975), throwing a ball in the air repeatedly to try and photograph the object in the center of the frame (Aligning: balls, 1972), methodically scribbling on a sheet of paper (I will not make any more boring art, 1971), or juxtaposing a vase of flowers with the apocalyptical text “There isn’t time” (Goya Series: There isn’t Time (1997), the ordinary becomes extraordinary when manipulated by the hands (or more accurately, the mind) of Baldessari. According to John, Sol Lewitt once told him that boredom is interesting when you work through it, and Baldessari has consistently proven this to be the case during his forty-plus year career.

5. Question what is not there with as much tenacity as you question what is there

Nam June Paik once explicated to Baldessari one of the most profound, and idiosyncratic, aspects of his work, saying that what he liked best about John’s work was what he left out. For example, in his Extended Corner series, Baldessari reproduces the exact measurements of famous canvases by Parmigianino, Bruegel, and other masters, but literally whites out the entire image, save a small rectangle in the corner. All that’s left of an epic battle scene or archetypal allegory is a small foot or corner of a building or table. Why does he negate all but the most, seemingly, trivial piece of visual information? In providing his viewer with only small, carefully selected pieces of information, Baldessari creates a conundrum for which there is no solution and allows the viewer the freedom to connect the dots and draw their own conclusions.

6. Always Rise from the Ashes

Baldessari’s work is infused with the notion that art comes out of failure and destroying things. He even describes his practice as reductive – “removing things until the work is nearly dead.” There’s no greater example than his landmark performative piece Cremation Project (1970), in which he formally ended his career as a painter. First, he gathered all the paintings he’d created prior to his photo-and-text compositions (meaning everything done before 1966) – save four he’d forgotten were in his sister’s garage -and had them cremated. In an affidavit published in the San Diego Union, Baldessari formally and publicly renounced painting in favor of a hands-off, post-studio approach. The ashes of the paintings were permanently immortalized in a book-shaped urn and a memorial plaque was commissioned declaring:

JOHN ANTHONY BALDESSARI
MAY 1953 MARCH 1966

John Baldessari (centre) overseeing Cremation Project 1970, from "Somebody to Talk To," by Jessica Morgan and John Baldessari, Tate Etc., Issue 17 / Autumn 2009.

7. Reject the stranglehold of the L.A. aesthetic, and all prevailing aesthetic authorities for that matter

The only thing consistent about Baldessari’s style is his inconsistency. He perpetually oscillates between color and black-and-white, large and small scale, text and image, etc. Beyond that, he defies simplistic categorizations. Is he a photographer or a painter? A performance or video artist? An installation or land artist? Yes, yes, and yes. Baldessari systematically rejected the pervasive L.A. style, oft called “the cool school,” and likewise rejected the philosophies of New York conceptualists Joseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt, opting instead for his own unique visual language that defies categorization, but is irrefutably John Baldessari.

8. Viewership is active, not passive

Baldessari reminds the viewer of their importance in so many subtle ways throughout the exhibition, but most notably in A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation (1966-68), whereby the canvas is transformed into a work of art simply because it has been displayed and seen. For Baldessari, a viewer has a responsibility, not to consume images passively, but really look. In one of his iconic photo-and-text pieces, he reproduces the revered artforum (an issue with a painting by Frank Stella on the cover) and juxtaposes the magazine with a confusing edict that This is not to be looked at (1968). Baldessari, ever the contrarian, spins a tangled web with this diktat. Whether it’s a play on the meaning of image vs. object (a la Magritte), a call to “read” rather than simply look, or an autobiographical reference to his own isolation from the New York art world, the diversity of meanings and narratives derived from this “simple” juxtaposition have kept critics opining for years.

9. Irreverence is always in good order, even in regards to high art

“In the beginning, I asked myself ‘What would happen if I did this?’ and the work proceeded from there,” (Baldessari in conversation with Matthew Higgs at Frieze, 2009). This statement underscores the artist’s belief that the reason kids often make the best art is because it is made without the pretension that they’re doing “art.” Perhaps that is Baldessari’s greatest talent, humility in the face of fame and success, always making art that stems from a question rather than art for art’s sake. Indeed, Baldessari’s irreverence for the sanctity of art permeates his oeuvre, whether it be negating all but a corner of a Parmigianino masterpiece, mocking the great art critic Clement Greenberg with his own words, parodying the color-field painters by “floating” large rectangular blocks of color outside the second-story window of his home (Floating: Color, 1972), or pairing Goya’s catastrophic texts from his Disasters of War series with everyday objects like a paper clip.

10. The best way to teach art is to live art

Baldessari’s roster of former students reads like a who’s who of important artists from the past 40 years: Barbara Bloom, Liz Craft, Meg Cranston, Jack Goldstein, Karl Haendel, Skylar Haskard, Elliott Hundley, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Liz Larner, Matt Mullican, Analia Saban, David Salle, and James Welling, to name a few. Stories of Baldessari’s post-studio classes, a term he first heard from Carl Andre and employed thereafter, are the stuff of legends in Los Angeles. The most often repeated description of John’s teaching style was that he treated them with respects, always thinking of them as artists, not students, and allowing them to find their own voice. Baldessari himself has said, “You can’t teach art but it might help to have really good artists around.”

Using Pablo Picasso’s famed 1938 painting titled Portrait de femme (Dora Maar), 1938, as a framework for a new series for formal paintings, both large and small, Los Angeles-based abstract painter John Millei embarked on a series of paintings titled Woman In A Chair. The exhibition, which is on view through July 2010 at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, featured a room full of towering paintings, each reaching over eight feet tall, tightly packed along the gallery walls. While the paintings borrow the form of Picasso’s famed painting, they are not specifically concerned with either the subject of Dora Maar, nor Picasso himself. Instead, the image of the woman in a chair serves as a simple armature for the artist to revisit certain stylistic periods of his own career.  As the paintings align the wall in close proximity, the viewer can easily compare the seemingly endless variations of a single subject. Lush and voluminous bands of paint sit next to flat graphic spans of color on certain paintings, while others contain tightly woven bands that are placed beside areas of raw canvas. The handling of the paint seems effortless and almost instantaneous, however it is evident that every mark and color combination is careful considered. While the paintings obviously explore Millei’s art historical predecessor in repetition, the work remains playful while carrying the weight of this lineage.

On view concurrent with Woman In A Chair at Ace Gallery’s Wilshire gallery is another major exhibition of paintings by the artist titled, Maritime. Millei has an extensive resume of international exhibitions dating back to 1981, and has produced eight solo exhibitions with Ace Gallery over the past 10 years. Reviews and overviews Woman In A Chair have appeared in the LA Weekly, Beautiful/Decay, and countless online publications such as ArtDaily.

Opening tonight in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station, Luis de Jesus Gallery is presenting new paintings by Karen Ann Myers in an exhibition titled Thinking Of You. In a series of mid-sized fleshy paintings of hyper sexualized young women, the work seamlessly combines heavy flat patterns with figuration. Patterns slide in and out of abstraction, only grounded by the figures in the image. Based in self portraiture and personal narrative, Myers work both questions and confirms the objectification and idolization of youth and sexuality in American culture. The fleshy flatness of pattern and color reflect the soft, subtle handling of the figures, and when the figures are absent, the color and line mimic the curves of the forms.

Along with the paintings, Myers is presenting several new screen-printed patterns that integrate decorative form with image. Hidden within the maze of pattern, one will find reductive Kama Sutra poses embedded in the sea of color and line.

Myers’ paintings and prints have been exhibited at the Robert Steele Gallery in New York, the Commonwealth Gallery in Boston, the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC and Scoop Contemporary in Charleston, SC. Her exhibition at Luis de Jesus will be on view until August 7th, 2010. In 2009, DailyServing did a visit with the artist in her studio to discuss the work in relation to her experiences in love and eroticism, her childhood memories, and herself as a young woman in a contemporary culture that places high value on glamor and sex appeal.

Thinking Of You will be on view through August 7th, 2010.

Annelle's Cornbread (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

I’m a sucker for a storyline involving a protagonist’s search for identity across generations and distant lands. More often than not this fascination is satisfied by reading a novel or watching a film, maybe listening to a three-verse country song. It’s not often that such a sprawling narrative emerges from within a work of art, but such is the case with the series of photographs by San Francisco-based artist Danielle Nelson Mourning in her debut solo exhibition at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Culver City.

Homecoming presents large-scale ink jet prints of the artist’s pilgrimage across the country and the Atlantic to understand herself and her ancestry. This is no documentary, though; Mourning has visited old family homes in Marks, Mississippi and Niagara Falls, New York to make self-portraits in which the self is more fictional than real. She assumes the dress and style of domestic women from decades past, recalling in part Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills, though in a decidedly less aggressive way. Mourning goes to Ireland as well to recreate haunting scenes of life during the potato famine of 1845. The work is endearing in its earnest investigation of family history and self, and in its multidimensional presentation of women of certain eras and of domestic life. It seems to be an intensely personal practice, as if the project would mean as much to the artist regardless of whether it had an audience. Sometimes work comes across as so prepared for an audience that there is a paucity of the artist’s own identity, but there’s none of that here.

Rhubarb (Cavan County, Ireland), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The most affecting work in the show is the 8mm film, Memories from a Pleasant Visit, which mimics vintage 8mm home movies authentically with its camera shake, jumpy scene cuts and film noise. In it, the characters from Mourning’s Mississippi and Niagara Falls photo narratives are brought to life, though there is still a sense of disconnect between the intent of the characters as they move about, and any narrative that the viewer should draw from the quick scenes. Perhaps the film is the least narrative piece in the show because its presentation of ideas is so hectic, like scraps from the reel of life lying in disjointed piles on the cutting room floor of one’s mind. I actually wonder if I’ve ever been more taken with a work of video art, however. Maybe I relate to each of these divergent female characters, respond to grandma’s chatter as she flips through old photo albums, and possibly—most of all—enjoy the private thrill of being frightened by the subtle Hitchcockian tones of the film. The dull tapping of ivory keys, the lone voice of a choir girl singing, the black-and-white footage capturing the manic twirling of a woman in a gown—it’s chilling. But more so, it’s entrancing.

Paten Circle II (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

Danielle Nelson Mourning lives in San Francisco, CA. She earned her MFA at Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Hoopers Gallery, London; and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Prague. Homecoming closes today, June 26. The film Memories from a Pleasant Visit can also be viewed at this link.

See Line Gallery’s main showroom currently hosts Room Mobile, a display of star-themed mobiles curated by the gallery’s director, Janet Levy. In addition to the eighteen artists who created mobiles, Levy also invited Mileece, a sonic artist, to transform the gallery’s project room into Soniferous Eden.  Mileece’s installation encompasses both terrestrial and astral elements, highlighting the inherent interconnectedness using what she describes as “Aesthetic Sonification.”

Soniferous Eden invites audiences to fully employ their senses, requiring one to be attuned to the aural, the tactile and the visual. A central orb of leafy plants are encircled by a dampened soil path that is best explored with bare feet.  As the eyes become adjusted to the dim light, one can more comfortably move around and observe the plants, which are barely lit by the reflective black-light paint speckled onto the installation’s surrounding walls.  The paint flecks give the ambiance of a star-studded galaxy, referencing the celestial theme of the mobiles in the main gallery.

The sounds that land on the participants’ eardrums are a result of the artist’s engagement with the electro-magnetic emissions of plants.  Mileece has gently adhered electrodes to plant leaves in order to capture their GSR and EEG signals.  The signals are then channeled through an interactive plant software, written by Mileece with Super Collider, an audio programming language.  The software allows the plant bio-emissions to generate quirky noises, such as ethereal bells, low hums, and other harmonic synthesized sounds.  The sounds ebb and flow throughout the exhibit, indicating both plant/plant and plant/man interaction.  As the participants spend time with the plants, brushing by them and touching their leaves, more noises are generated.  The overall experience is a total immersion in the slice of Eden that Mileece has created.

Mileece is originally from England and studied Sonic Art at Middlesex University and Sound Engineering at the School of Audio Engineering in London.  Her work is on permanent display at the Centre for Innovation at the London School of Economics.  She has also exhibited at such venues as the Migros Museum in Zurich, the Hayward Gallery, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Thames Festival in London, and the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk.  Soniferous Eden will be on display at See Line Gallery at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles until June 29th, 2010.

Installation view: Regen Projects, Los Angeles 2009 Photography by Brian Forrest

Sometimes simplicity can be stunningly difficult. Doug Aitken’s film Migration has an apparent enough premise: migrating animals occupy hotel rooms, bringing together the instinctive and unfamiliar aspects of travel. And Aitken uses pristine, focused images to realize this premise. Yet the effect is something more nuanced and confusing: migration becomes precariously noble, the virtual and the actual slip in and out of each other, and bittersweet anticipation pervades each scene.

Aitken, the SoCal native who is now as much an East Coast as West Coast artist, long ago dismissed the fugitive, homegrown approach of many video artists. He’s an expert audio-visual craftsman. His work reminds me of those feature filmmakers, Jane Campion or Ang Lee for instance, who gravitate toward provocative subject matter yet also toward sublime cinematography, dragging their viewers into a weird, subconscious battle between the need to understand and the desire to bask in beauty.

Aitken filmed Migration on location, in motels across the country. The film made its New York debut a year ago exactly, appearing on three industrial-sized screens at 303 Gallery, and then on the face of a building at the 55th Carnegie International. It took a year to travel – migrate – to Los Angeles. Now it’s projected in two places: on a screen inside Regen Projects‘ Almont Street gallery and, when the sun sets, as a two channel installation on two exterior walls of Regen’s Santa Monica Blvd building.

Installation view: Regen Projects II, Los Angeles Photography by Brian Forrest

I watched Migration inside first. Alone in the space, I felt like a solitary witness to everything on screen. When I first walked in, the camera was lingering on a motel bed with a pink spread and an aura of oldness – this motel probably didn’t belong to a national chain. The first creature on screen, a horse, couldn’t be recognized at first because rays of sunlight turned its profile into a shadowy structure. Then, once the shadow turns into a body, the film really began: animals waiting in empty, clean, but rudimentary rooms, sometimes watching themselves on television – a meta-narrative that, given the context, seems more factual than profound (watching one’s own species on TV is intricate to the traveling ritual). Every movement that happens in these rooms is restrained, like the horse hoof that beats against the carpet, or the mountain lion that wrestling a pillow but never puncturing its cotton skin. Running water, a motif in journey narratives, enters Aitken’s film only in spirit. The faucet filling bath, coffee dripping into pots, pool surfaces vacillates slightly – no rushing rivers puncture the stillness.

The creatures in Migration are going somewhere, there’s no doubt, but their destination must be unknown or foreboding because the hotel rooms they occupy seem more like psychological respites than physical resting points.

When I came back at night to view the outdoor incarnation of Migration, I was alone again. A steady stream of cars drove by, but only about six people walked in front of the gallery and fewer really looked at the dual projections playing on Regen’s walls. This inattentiveness surprised me at first, but, actually, outside, that line between provocation and beauty that Aitken straddles so nicely, fuzzed in favor of beauty. And pretty things on walls are second nature to the West Hollywood-Beverly Hills neighborhood Regen occupies.

Installation view: Regen Projects, Los Angeles 2009 Photography by Brian Forrest

Seen inside the gallery, the best moments of Migration had to do with the strangeness of being alone, and watching creatures, also alone, use man-made conventions of comfort to satiate some some mysterious anxiety. Outside, the best moments had to do with distortion – like when a close-up of a door latch took over, when striped carpet looked like a candy-colored corn-field, or when a buffalo‚Äôs eye filled the walls so abstractly that it wasn’t clear what it was. These moments, I hoped, could interrupt passers-by, showing them that they didn’t intuitively understand what they saw.

Migration focuses on something that is intuitive, but isn’t understood, and that’s what makes it difficult. The urge to journey certainly may be familiar – most of us, if we haven’t felt it, know it exists – and yet, the tendency to view everything through a familiar lens is even stronger than the tendency to venture out. The animals in Aitken’s hotel rooms seem to willingly, maybe even sacrificially, accept a lifestyle that doesn’t belong to them, and the unfamiliar consequences of this makes Migration unsettling but also hopeful.

Los Angeles based artist Chris Beas is currently presenting a new exhibition titled Tamburello at Martha Otero Gallery in L.A. Similar to previous exhibitions by the Beas, Tamburello consists of several flat works which are bridged by a larger freestanding sculptural installation in the center of the gallery. The exhibition focuses acutely on the events of May 1st 1994 when Formula One driver Ayrton Senna crashed his vehicle and died taking a sharp turn during the San Marino Grand Prix. Driving at nearly 200 miles per hour at the time of the crash, the Tamburello corner marked the last site of the driver’s spectacular career.

For the exhibition, Beas has created ten new paintings that feature die cast metal replicas of race cars driven during Senna’s first ten years of F1 driving. The paintings simulate the affect of driving a vehicle at such high speeds. In the center of the gallery, a 1/32 scale model replica of the F1 circuit rack at Imola serves as the site of the San Marino Slot Car Grand Prix for which the driver had his last race.

Chris Beas was born in Sierra Modre, California and received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego. The artist has previously exhibited at the Prague Biennale 3, Parc Saint Leger Centre D’Art Contemporain in Pougues-les-Eaux, France, and Casey Kaplan, New York, NY.

All images Evan Holloway Project Series 35, 2008, Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Polka dots aren’t typically transcendental. They aren’t autonomous and they aren’t monumental. Yet in Evan Holloway’s current exhibition, Project Series 35 at the Pomona College Museum of Art, polka dots take on some serious questions.

Holloway’s installation seems like the perfect place to listen to Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or Lou Reed’s “Heroin” – it’s portentous and lulling, just like 70s rock at its best. But Holloway’s work also has the calculated restraint associated with minimalism. Pages of black dots cover nearly every inch of the gallery walls and a lightly gridded metal screen, installed to hang a few inches from the wall, adds a layer of empty holes. The holes and dots move in and out of each other, turning the exhibition into a brain tease that reconfigures itself every time you turn your head. The room only stops moving if you stand still and pick a spot of wall to stare at. At first, the installation seems like a lighthearted foray into the haphazard vernaculars of classic rock and youth culture. But an undercurrent of indecision and mistrust tampers with the fun.

Pomona College’s Museum of Art devoted its 2007-2008 season to James Turrell, an artist who took the Light and Space movement to an extreme by constructing craters and natural light observatories. Turrell openly traffics in the language of spirituality and sensory experience. His sculptural spaces exist to illicit a sensory experience that transcends our typical perceptions of light. He does this expertly, with well-crafted, big-budget projects. On one hand, Turrell’s work has a compelling serenity that can fascinate any audience with five senses. On the other hand, Turrell’s transcendental aesthetic can be alienating and insincere, too much about the illusion of spirituality and not enough about the world and the way people live. This is where Holloway enters the picture.

Holloway’s installation currently lives across the hall from Turrell’s End Around, a work that relies on neon lights and pristinely painted surfaces to create the illusion of endless space. To enter “End Around,” viewers must wear little blue slippers over their shoes and be accompanied by a gallery attendant. Still, the transition from Turrell’s work to Holloway’s is agreeable enough. Project Series 35 engages our sensory perception, even if the installation has more to do with the here and now than celestial light.

In a pseudo-catalogue that accompanies Holloway’s installation – it’s a newspaper-like pamphlet with sixteen pages of dots and two pages of text – Holloway and writer Bruce Hainly engage in an email dialogue about Turrell, baby boomers, contemporary poetry and gay porn. The emails have a biting earnestness, perhaps because Holloway and Hainly are as opinionated as they are uncertain. They have plenty to say about Gertrude Stein and pop music, but neither knows exactly how to respond to the monumental, poignant quality of Turrell’s work or to the contrived “poignancy” of art in general.

Near the end of the dialogue, Holloway explains his own use of perceptual phenomena, saying that he finds the mistrust of perception and illusion more interesting than revelation. He comments, “It was quite irritating to me that Turrell is often framed within a soft-core, new-age belief system. I always present my work in a context of skepticism.” Holloway prefers to pose question: why should art aim for poignancy and transcendence when perception is already rife with inconsistencies?

Holloway’s response to Turrell does something uncanny. The room of dots achieves the scale and experiential potency of monumental art without seeming epic. Like Turrell, Holloway holds viewer’s attention by engaging them in a large-scale sensory experience. But while Holloway does not require his viewers to put in time, Turrell’s work requires a commitment. It seems to say, “I can offer you a new perception of the physical world if you sacrifice your time to my work.” Viewers who spend an hour or two in Turrell’s skyspaces experience an ever-transitioning vision of light that they couldn’t have seen with their naked eyes.

Holloway’s installation is more immediate. He engulfs his audience in an experience but he doesn’t require anything of us, nor does his work offer us anything that we don’t already have. He essentially says, “Here, look at how this familiar vocabulary of dots and holes can conjure up an experience.” Just one look around the gallery leads to a trippy sensation. The installation begs for free-association – it’s pixels gone gaga, a psychedelic trip in monochrome, or your favorite polka dot t-shirt stretched across the length of a room.

By the end of their email correspondence, Hainly and Holloway haven’t really reached any definitive conclusion. Sure, Turrell makes mesmerizing, epic work that relies on illusions of authenticity and revelation. But does this mean that his work needs to be challenged? What Holloway ends up doing is proposing an alternative. His installation gives us a foray into what perception-bending work can look like when it takes a straightforward, immediate route: a head-spinning but somehow uplifting sea of polka dots that broaches what’s going on in our heads and leaves the celestial realm to its own devices.

Closing next weekend at Regen Projects II in Los Angeles is new work by Catherine Opie. These photographs titled Twelve Miles to the Horizon document Opie’s trip on a container ship from Korea to Long Beach, capturing the sunrise and sunset across the ten days of the trip. Each image is composed with equal amount of water and sky, deliberately placing the viewer in the time and place documented in the image, allowing for both consistency in relation to the experience and variation in color and texture within the image. What remains is a sensation of solitude within this documented time and place, allowing the viewer to sense the duration of the work through these highly seductive and reductive photographs.

Although compositionally this body of work reflects her Icehouses (2001) and Surfer (2003) series, conceptually, these horizon photographs move in a different direction.  Although the series maintains both aesthetic consistency and variation as these earlier series did, what strikes more is the repetition of the action — a sensation of documenting time rather than just the beauty and stillness present in the earlier series. What remains in the viewer’s mind is the constraint embedded in the image, reaching more to the limitations present in her self portraits than to her more aesthetic and experiential photographs. These photographs allow the viewer to witness her self-imposed restrictions, revealing the decisions that created the series of images rather than just a documented experience. What remains are sensations of time and place, bound in a beautifully seductive series of photographs.
Catherine Opie received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and her MFA from CalArts in 1988. She is currently a tenured professor at UCLA, and her work has been exhibited internationally. In 2008, she had a mid-career survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York — and the New York Times has a feature corresponding to the show. She has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis; Photographers’ Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. An exhibition of Opie’s football, surfer, and landscape photographs will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July 2010.

Long May You Run, 2010 synthetic polymer on canvas 64 x 64 inches

Mark Moore Gallery’s current exhibition, Decade, signifies Tim Bavington’s tenth year of representation by the gallery, as well as the fifth solo presentation of his work at the gallery.  Bavington synthesizes aural and visual stimuli, organizing chromatic variations of both worlds onto the picture plane.  The artist pays homage to his favorite musicians, often by selecting one of their songs to interpret. In the work, Long May You Run, two rows of vertical stripes represent separate elements of Neil Young’s musical composition. The lower half of the painting denotes the bass line while the upper portion shows the guitar solo.  Another way the artist references music is by choosing album covers and mirroring their compositions.  Paintings like Blue Monday and Give ‘Em Enough Rope are Bavington’s interpretations of New Order and Clash album covers, respectively.  In addition, Bavington includes art historical references by emulating Kenneth Noland and Mark Rothko, tying the concentric circles of Noland to the New Order cover and Rothko-like horizons to the Clash album.

Bold As Love, 2010 synthetic polymer on canvas 72 x 72 inches

When discussing his conceptual process, Bavington stated “I generally read sheet music and start with that as a sketch.  Then, I go from there.  The color palette is pretty subjective, it’s not scientific or mathematical. You can’t imagine what sounds will come out when you look at a score.  Basically I do the same thing as a musician (when reading music), except I interpret the score with color instead of sound.  I’m not trying to capture sound– the nature of sound waves and light waves are completely different.”

Installation View

Bavington received his M.F.A. from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1999.  His work is represented in prominent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Portland Art Museum.  Decade will be on view through May 29th, 2010.

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 2009. Drape-formed plastic with acrylic lacquer & glitter.

Craig Kauffman has a shoe fetish. He’s had it since he was a child. “My mom wore high heels,” Kauffman explained in a 2008 interview, the same interview in which he talked about the affect campy lingerie ads from Frederick’s of Hollywood had on his adolescent mind. (“Blow up bras, stuffed padded bras, rear ends,” Kauffman recalled. “[Frederick] was a genius.”) The work that stems directly from Kauffman’s fetish—dumb-fisted, transparent paintings that L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight recently referred to as “rather tepid”—is far from compelling. But the fact that the artist known for sleek, vacuum formed abstractions lusts after stilettos and patent leather pumps? That is compelling, especially since freshly lacquered custom car parts are more often assumed to be Kauffman’s main muse.

New Work, Kauffman’s soon-to-close exhibition at Frank Lloyd Gallery, features two paintings of shoes, but these hang on an unobtrusive side wall. The central attraction, a series of delicate, drape-formed plastic shells that look like glitter-filled candy dishes, hang in the main gallery. The glitter is real and, like the acrylic wall reliefs Kauffman began making back in the 1960s, each shell has a perfectly smooth surface. The hot pink, aqua, Astroturf green, and lavender that color these sculptures have the manicured gloss suited to a Prada showroom.

Liz Craft, "Candy Colored Clown," 2010. Metal, bronze and yarn.

Similar colors characterize Liz Craft’s current exhibition Death of a Clown, on view four doors down from Kauffman’s in Patrick Painter Inc. Caft’s show includes imposing metal screens on which clown faces have been created out of bronze vases, ceramic dishes and thick colored yarn; two clowns, one laughing and one crying, impressionistically sculpted with Giacometti-like license; a tiered table; a witch face; and an orange-haired girl who looks like Milais’s Ophelia might have had she died a hippie on a grandmotherly pink couch. Bruce Hainley once wrote, “Craft is never not crafty in her deployment of materials,” the double negative mimicking the way Craft’s aggressive material choices negate her domestic, decorative subjects. Loopy and comedic though her subjects are, Craft’s perversion of bronze, steel and fiberglass is dead serious and it’s also part of the reason Death of a Clown speaks to Kauffman’s New Work.

While Kauffman’s sculptures are ethereal, Craft’s are industrial and opaque; while Kauffman’s are abstract, Craft’s are representational. While Kauffman belonged to The Cool School, the group of ‘60s artists who equated artmaking with machismo and made Los Angeles a scene, Liz Craft was Too Cool for School, according to a catchy Spin Magazine article Dennis Cooper wrote about her and her UCLA cohorts. Yet both sculptors fixate on material objects, both have a notoriously Californian obsession with commercial material and fetish-finishes, and both work in the realm of warped whimsy (though I’m not sure if Kauffman means to be as warped as Craft does).

Craig Kauffman, "Untitled," 2009. Drape-formed plastic with acrylic lacquer & glitter.

When I imagine Kauffman and Craft’s exhibitions merging–and I often do, even though I know the two wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t ever come together–it’s a deliciously disjointing opus in which Kauffman’s dishes protrude from Craft’s clown faces, or sit on top of her fiberglass furniture. The work of Kauffman, once associated with machismo, plays the stereotypically delicate, feminine role. The work of Craft, always prodding the domestic, plays the more heavy-handed stereotypically masculine role. This inversion is satisfying.

On the edge of Culver City’s industrial area sits Scion Installation L.A. Space, currently hosting a group exhibition of artists whose mission was to transform the gallery into eight individual rooms.  Each room is indicative of a theme set forth by the artist or team of artists who designed and built it.   Artists and their rooms show an appetite for the urban, likely due to the exhibition curator’s own passion for street art.  The artists were chosen by Roger Gastman, best known for his assistance in bringing graffiti art into the limelight of the contemporary art world.   Gastman’s many art publications, like Swindle Magazine and his latest book, Freight Train Graffiti, often highlight street art as a prized aspect of pop culture.  Gastman also served as executive producer of the recent graffiti documentary, Infamy.

Within Chris Stain’s installation, the viewer briefly navigates the nooks and crannies of a constricted space between two buildings. His corridor-like construction embodies subculture with multiple depictions of bricks, graffiti, and graphic renderings of telephone poles and electrical wires. Stain thinks of the space as “…a 3-D representation of the smaller paintings I make on metal, which capture the story of the struggling American.”

Similarly, Dan Monick and Caitlin Reilly collaborated to make their room into a bus stop with a partially enclosed waiting area and bench.  The team installed lighting meant to mimic the overhead illumination of a street lamp.  In addition, photographic images are installed on light boxes that surround the perimeter of the room.  These images, which are approximately the same size as bus windows, are portraits of passengers and their surroundings.

In contrast, some of Rooms’ artists indulged in investigating their own style as opposed to recreating a specific urban-inspired space.  Adam Wallacavage’s installation is saturated with curving tendrils and undulating arms, both signatory elements of his personal aesthetic.  Four of his plaster cast octopus arm chandeliers are suspended from the ceiling.   Custom sconces, furniture, wallpaper, and candelabras function to unify Wallacavage’s eccentric room.

In addition to the aforementioned artists, works by Bill Daniel, Dueling VHS, Justin Van Hoy, Kime Buzzelli, and Rocky Grimes are also exhibited.  Rooms will be on display through May 15th, 2010.

Grayson is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist serves as the director of Deitch Projects in NYC and works as an independent curator, essayist and book editor. Recent exhibitions include works at Park Life in San Francisco and D’Amelio Terras in NYC.