“Stand Close”

ONE NATIONAL GAY & LESBIAN ARCHIVES
909 West Adams Boulevard
April 20–July 28

boychild, instagram.com/p/QATD02PD2o/, 2012.

Perched on the second-floor balcony overlooking the large square expanse that houses ONE’s library, “Stand Close, It’s Shorter Than You Think: A show on feminist rage,” presented by Artist Curated Projects, places works by artists boychild, RJ Messineo, MPA, and Guadalupe Rosales along the building’s interior perimeter. Together, in this setting, they stress that feminist rage is in fact a collective feeling and one not without its own history.

MPA’s performance documentation fluently demonstrates the many ways an event can be framed and reframed. In “Polaroid Series,” 2010, Schneemann-esque polaroids taken by Katherine Hubbard capture MPA posed in collage-like contraptions with pieces of plywood bending in tension with the artist’s body parts. The images exude an intense intimacy that pierces through the past time of the photo shoot into a voyeur’s condensed and electric present. In another example, nine black-and-white ink-jet prints from a video by Sadie Benning of MPA’s performance Directing Light onto Fist of Father, Part I: Initiation and Part II: The Act, 2011, lyrically depict the artist self-possessed and holding a plaster fist. Included with the prints are several loose sheets of paper on which the audience typed descriptions of MPA’s more turbulent Part III: Revolution, Two Marks in Rotation, 2011. Details of material and bodily injury—broken glass, the clamor of a metal pole, a bite of flesh—infuse the dreamy video stills with an eerie calm.

Guadalupe Rosales’s abstract works freeze the archive’s ephemeral offerings in an elegant geometry. A steel restraint from ONE’s collection hovers above Equilibrium, 2012, a colored pencil on Mylar drawing. Echoing the curved and hard-edged contours of the stiff neck and wrist collar, the drawing’s clear lines and light color blocks render both objects with a shared and quiet formalism. It is in these ways that “Stand Close” becomes a tactile and sensuous exploration of the urge to document. It points to the many ways emotion is manifested in objects, even if in the process of making those objects they no longer express their primal representative form.

— Samara Davis

Dashiell Manley

REDLING FINE ART
6757 Santa Monica Blvd
May 7–June 29

View of “The Great Train Robbery (Scene 3 version C),” 2013, Redling Fine Art storage.

Upon entering Dashiell Manley’s installation, The Great Train Robbery (Scene 3 version B), 2013, the viewer is immediately confronted with a large steel wall frame and, leaning against it, a glossy Plexiglas surface. Beneath the acrylic plane is a pastiche of ink spatters, pencil-drawn notes and storyboards, and brightly colored lighting gels. This flat surface’s opposing side, of gouache on linen, showcases painted geometric forms (checkers, arcs, rectangles) overlaid by dripping turn of the century shorthand symbols. Five iterations of these two-part structures are dispersed throughout the gallery.

Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, known for its innovative use of camera angles, transitions, and composite editing to convey climactic narrative, inspired Manley’s eponymous series. The artist initially constructed the panels and frames to serve as a reconfigurable set for a film of the same name, currently on view at LAXART, Los Angeles. The two-channel video work is a stop-motion sequence of JPEG files that show the artist performing a series of actions (dictated by the leaning panels’ shorthand inscriptions) through and around the vertical structures.

Following filmmaking’s extensive production process, Manley produced three different versions of these five structures for his scene takes: A (also on view at LAXART), B, and C. (The latter configuration is mounted in an offsite storage unit, accessible with the gallery’s assistance.) This stored third set of structures is more tightly arranged than those found within the gallery, as their steel frames intersect with the wooden frames of the rented space and match the building’s foot-long distance between studs. The accord in proportions may be due to both coincidence and artistic intent. Regardless of their fate on or off the market, these works, like most art, will live in storage. Here, situated three blocks from Redling’s gallery walls, one can wonder—Is this still Manley’s film set or is it art’s cutting-room floor?

This exhibition is also on view at LAXART, 2640 South La Cienega, until June 22.

— Nicolas Linnert

The Otolith Group

GALLERY AT REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
April 21–June 16

The Otolith Group, Medium Earth, 2013, HD video with sound, 41 minutes.

“What do faults promise?” asks a soft-spoken voice in the Otolith Group’s latest film Medium Earth, 2013. “What assurances do they give when they seek the line of least resistance?” The sole work on display in the London-based group’s first exhibition on the West Coast is a meditation on such faults, which is to say, on both seismic power and ecological culpability. Over forty-one minutes, during which a restless camera pans across freeways, follows the irregular forms of a desiccated desert landscape, and methodically inspects the cracks of underground parking garages, the film develops a dialogic encounter with fleeting notions of earth—“the shifting face of the earth,” we are told.

The film provides a rare encounter within the history of Land art in that it realizes a patchwork conception of the planet’s ecology, privileging neither a single voice nor a particular tradition, but instead working through a concatenation of limited views and concepts as a necessary condition of ecological knowledge. Here, Medium Earth addresses our restricted understanding of both seismic activity and, more profoundly, the “mediums”—material channels, traces, images, and sounds—through which the earth communicates. The idea of patch dynamics in ecology was first articulated in the 1980s in response to the inadequacy of systems as an all-encompassing heuristic for explaining (and, even more problematically, predicting) ecological activity. The faults in Medium Earth are similarly unsteady as nodes of communication within the earth’s systems of plate tectonics and energy circulation. The film addresses these faults as bodies inflicted by sudden bursts of pain and human bodies, in turn, as continuous with the atmospheric turbulence of the earth. “We are gases,” a voice utters, and the earth is desert, is paved, is burrowed, is active. This film leaves us less resolute about earthquakes but more thoroughly attentive to the consequences of fracture and relentless vibration within our common ground.

— James Nisbet

Channa Horwitz

FRANCOIS GHEBALY GALLERY
2600 South La Cienega Boulevard
April 13–June 22

View of “Orange Grid,” 2013.

Writing in 1976 about drawings from Channa Horwitz’s series “Variations and Inventions on a Rhythm,” Lucy Lippard observed: “Logically they are flat and anchored to the grid, but their transformations implies freedom, the third dimension—space in which to act.” Horwitz herself was anchored to the grid, devoting decades to explorations of that form. In an exhibition suddenly rendered a valediction—opening just two weeks before the artist’s death on April 29—we find brought to the fore that third dimension and space in which to act that Lippard discerned in those early rule-driven, modulating sequential drawings.

Three framed gouaches from Horwitz’s “Language Series,” 1966, greet the visitor. Orange grids on white paper, they hang on the wall of the gallery’s narrow first floor, which serves as an interior mezzanine, overlooking a cube-shaped space below. A set of stairs leads down to the sunken room, whose floor and walls are covered in the same orange-on-white grid. Each of the works on paper contains differently positioned vertical and horizontal axes, suggesting segments of a greater whole. Though owing in some measure to the logic of Euclidean space, this partially glimpsed totality might just as well serve as an image of Horwitz’s career, singular in obsession and long obscured by critical and institutional neglect.

Descending into the midst of the enveloping mesh of painted lines, one feels the work is a culmination rather than a restatement, as if, of course, the “Language Series” had been a blueprint. On the floor sits a set of black fiberboard cubes that one can array, recreating in three dimensions the black squares and rectangles plotted in the paintings. Here Horwitz—and not for the first time—brought out the playfulness hidden in the often pseudo-rationalism of the grid.

— Eli Diner