“In the Good Name of the Company”

FORYOURART
6020 Wilshire Blvd.
February 23–March 23

View of “In the Good Name of the Company,” 2013.

The house style of LA’s Colby Poster Company (1946–2012)—hand-set Times Gothic and Railroad Gothic type on Day-Glo fluorescent backdrops in two standard size sheets—has become a local landscape fixture. The company’s letterpress and silk-screen prints provided (and inspired) ubiquitous outdoor advertising for punk bands and carnivals as well as website designers and Nigerian politicians. Artists, too, regularly employed the iconic signage, perhaps most famously Allen Ruppersberg in his Howl-quoting The Singing Posters, 2003; more recently, the Hammer Museum used it to brand its 2012 “Made in L.A.” biennial. The current exhibition, a greatest-hits collection and de facto memorial, assembles work from both the pragmatic and poetic sides of Colby’s history, just two months after the company shut its doors. Nearly three hundred posters, including selections from the Colby archive and collaborations with twenty-seven named artists, are displayed as a tight, irregular grid of signs hanging from binder clips.

In such a maximalist presentation, several of the text-heavy artists’ posters seem best suited for telephone poles and chain link fences, as isolated interventions asserting their witticisms and literary appropriations to dulled car-seat viewers. The contributions that stand out here intervene in the compositional space of the Colby design, such as Emilie Halpern’s two-sided Valentine, 2012, and the asterisk-like Black Suns/Black Holes from Inner Experience by George Bataille, 2010, by Scott Benzel, who also augments the indoor/outdoor dynamic with an audible street sound composition, Quartet 2, 2011. Peter Coffin’s untitled 2008 series of poster blanks, each a different three-color atmospheric fade, neatly casts the Colby backdrop as a dose of Los Angeles skyspace.

Odd promotional posters declaring “#colbyposter” help emphasize the Colby sign as an outmoded messaging system as well as a protomeme that has inspired not only well-known artists but also unnamed denizens to adapt its form to expressive ends, making for some of the most engaging public signage on view by broadcasting protests (“Gangbangers . . . Please Stop / Killing / Your Own”); personal sentiments (“Happy Birthday / Wendy / Love / Christopher”); or fittingly, enigmatic laments: “Elvis / will not be / here.”

— Kurt Mueller

Slavs & Tatars

GALLERY AT REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
February 10–March 24

View of “Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz,” 2013.

Slavs and Tatars’ “Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz” explores the exchange, similarities, and differences—actual, past, and imagined—between the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Polish Solidarity movement of 1989, and the Iranian Green movement in 2009. Exhibiting Polish-derived work, carpeted reading platforms, and a selection of print material, the collective here furnishes the viewer with an eerie awareness of one’s own place within a gaggle of global conversations—the size and scope of which extend far beyond the Anglo-(Western) European frame.

Slavs and Tatars’ key strength is the diversity of registers in which it operates: The current exhibition presents works that employ lightness and humor while also retaining a willful opacity (unless you speak Persian or Polish); an accompanying publication manages to be both research-heavy and comical; and the group gave a series of lecture-performances leading up to the opening of the show. The series in particular is a generous move that acknowledges the transitory nature of art publics’ attention. It is also especially apt given that Slavs and Tatars originated in 2005 as a publishing and research collective dealing with Eurasian complexity and communication—over borders and mountains, but also through time, well before the group began producing art.

Followers of the group will be both pleased and unsurprised by the work on show at REDCAT. Many pieces have been circulating through exhibitions and publications for years (for example, Resist Resisting God dates from 2009). This repetition and reiteration doesn’t feel tiresome, since novelty isn’t an issue for Slavs and Tatars. The objects point outward to a body of research and reverse ethnography (evidenced by the group’s concurrent Olivian Cha–organized entry in the Works Sited series at Los Angeles’s Central Library) so instead of repetition one gets the sense of a project crawling its way forward into several different pasts.

— Steve Kado

Henry Taylor

BLUM & POE
2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard
February 23–March 30

View of “Henry Taylor,” 2013.

One writer called them “slaves.” They’re not; the subjects of Henry Taylor’s five big portraits in the first gallery of this exhibition are, simply, anonymous black farmworkers from WPA-era photos—displayed around a banquet table spread with white tablecloths on a patch of hoed soil. The opulence here sure seems built on others’ labor. Yet this exhibition’s strength lies not in this anxious use of all that floor space—a garish chandelier blocks your view; the table is weirdly Brutalist—but in the paintings.

Taylor’s caked, smeared, tough-love style renders those farmers no more faceless than many of his other subjects. In a second room, a street scene materializes in the diptych Split (all works 2013), thick and quick, around a pair of bare-gesso hi-tops; scratchy fields pull into peaks of detail: eyes and mouths, bricks, floating signage. Elsewhere, through Taylor’s trashy and significant sculptural wit, a clump of toilet paper tubes flower from a blackened, sugared Kleenex box: From Sugar to Shit. In Stand Tall – Y’all, a “white” hand, black horse, and slumped figure, all flecked with runny guanolike globs, weight the edges of the canvas with a painterly kineticism that doesn’t quite poeticize away race and class. It’s Their world, after all, and we’re just living in it.

Schoolhouse doors installed between the rooms (though decidedly old-school, Taylor is anything but unschooled) evoke the discipline of institutions from public schools to sharecropping to white-walled galleries. The paintings, though, push past bitterness or defeatism with rambling charm. The viewer faces an internal formal tension and outward social provocation—omnivorous desire for people, patterns, objects, histories—borne with raw affection.

— Travis Diehl

Robert Gober

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY | 1062 N ORANGE GROVE
1062 N Orange Grove
January 19–April 6

View of “Robert Gober: Sculpture Drawings Studies,” 2013.

“Follow ev’ry rainbow, till you find your dream!” So goes a line from the refrain of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” a song featured in The Sound of Music and saturated with the—musty but still pervasive—American myths of possibility and self-reliance. Inspirational ardor darkens, and the words take on a bleaker tone when read off a framed lyric sheet in the midst of one of Robert Gober’s current exhibitions, which together span both of Matthew Marks’s LA spaces and extend his ongoing examination of the perversity of everyday objects and the eruptions of the political unconscious in the mundane. Dreams, for Gober, are frequently nightmares, and lines like “A dream that will need all the love you can give/Ev’ry day of your life for as long as you live” here sound like a life sentence.

Though it’s been fifteen years since his last solo show here, Los Angeles seems an ideal setting for Gober’s work: The city’s own mythology depends on the aberrant and sinister lurking beneath monumental banality. But Gober’s is a broadly conceived America. A silk-screened wallpaper at the gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard features a repeating pattern of dislocated, pastel-colored states—California, Florida, New York, Hawaii, and a few others identifiable only with a map—a return to geography class, among other things, which seems fitting since in his work Gober has returned frequently to childhood, the site of trauma and of social and class reproduction. His painstakingly sculpted objects plucked from domestic life—sometimes faithfully reproduced, sometimes slightly or monstrously altered—work to defamiliarize with subtlety or violence. The current shows tend toward the latter. Affixed to the wall of the gallery at North Orange Grove Avenue is a replica of an old-fashioned enameled cast iron sink, rendered by Gober in plaster, epoxy putty, and paint. The top of the sink grows into a small forest of tree trunks—or branches, perhaps—ghostly white and gripping three sickly arms, made of wax and sprouting hair. The arms are handless and contorted, and the flatly rendered trees have the look of a stage set: a Grimm Brothers tableau atop a deadpan basin, there to wash away the real violence of fantasy and the fantastic violence of the real.

This exhibition is also on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, until April 6, 2013.

— Eli Diner

Samira Yamin

SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART
Bergamot Station G1, 2525 Michigan Ave.
January 19–April 20

Samira Yamin, October 1, 2001, 2013, TIME magazine, 10 1/2 x 16”.

For her first solo museum exhibition, Samira Yamin has revisited President Bush’s portentous phrase, “We will not fail,” from his congressional address given in the wake of 9/11. For the past three years, the artist has been working on her “Geometries” series, which for this exhibition includes October 1, 2001, 2013, a piece created with an issue of TIME magazine that dates a few weeks after the attacks, dedicating all of its news coverage to the perpetrator and America's new target, Osama bin Laden. In a similarly devoted study, Yamin has laboriously cut sacred and ornamental Islamic geometries into each page of the magazine, a task that took her six months to complete.

A matrix of interlaced circles, multisided polygons, and stars are incised out of photographs that capture American soldiers patrolling Afghan streets, Arab insurgents peeking through remote windows, and Middle Eastern civilians huddling in their homes. The girih patterning, traditionally used to adorn the tiles and walls of monumental Islamic architecture, is so dense and intricate that at times the photographs beneath it become practically unrecognizable. This is no accident: Yamin’s objects provoke an unresolved mediation between Western and Islamic systems of reason and order by forming literal “gaps” in our visual understanding.

These cogent ideas are abundantly evident in the present work. Yamin was careful not to lacerate the articles’ text, reserving her efforts only for images and headlines, perhaps to contend that photographic journalism is the most potent and easily manipulated tool of warfare reportage. By displaying the piece open at an angle on the gallery’s back wall in a Plexiglas case that is backed by a mirror, Yamin makes her manipulations visible from various vantages, unlike those seen through a single aperture.

— Carmen Winant

Dan Finsel

RICHARD TELLES FINE ART
7380 Beverly Boulevard
March 16–April 20

Dan Finsel, E-thay Inward-yay Ourney-jay: Ecoming-Bay Art-Pay Of-Yay E-Thay Amily-Fay (Our-Fay), 2013, black-and-white photograph and oil paint, 68 x 52".

“Meeting Your Dark Self”; “Meeting the Inner Other in Paint”; “Contacting the Inner Man in Every Woman/the Inner Woman in Every Man”—these chapters of Margaret Frings Keyes’s 1974 self-help primer The Inward Journey: Art as Therapy for You structure and guide Dan Finsel’s trip down the rabbit hole of psychoanalysis. In its immersiveness, the exhibition is an extension of the artist’s already established penchant for method acting and inhabiting psychic roles. In its use of Pig Latin for titles throughout, the show—“E-thay Inward-Yay Ourney-Jay”—characteristically taps Finsel’s deep well of absurdity and parody, recoding self-indulgence as self-effacement.

Applying the book’s Gestalt and Jungian principles, in tandem with its retro graphic design and color palette, Finsel created a symbol system in which each of his family members equals one of five visual variables, sculpted in permanently moist oil-based clay, that together constitute the basis for the works on view. Paintings of grisaille pretzels and plumbing fixtures set against brightly colored backgrounds render the clay symbols into something between a Game of Thrones mandala-sigil and a Billy Al Bengston painting. Three sculptures corresponding to developmental stages in the artist’s life feature blocky familial stand-ins arranged on tables of contrasting style and color. The glassy surface of one he calls Amily-Fay Ulpture-Scay: Adolescence-Yay, 2013, is a perfectly still basin of black ink, reflective like a darkling mirror.

The equivalence posed between pedestals and tables occurs again in Finsel’s amazing self-portrait photographs—large hand-colored prints depicting the artist squatting and kneeling nude on a small wooden folding table in the middle of what must be lewd unrepressing exercises, like being double-penetrated by a serpentine clay pipe. Therapeutic or not, Finsel’s inward journey is gripping psychodrama because it demonstrates in such a visceral yet tasteful, deadpan yet lurid way how art can fuck the artist as much as it can heal him.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Meg Cranston

LAXART
2640 South La Cienega
March 2–April 20

Meg Cranston, “Emerald City,” 2013, oil on canvas, acrylic latex paint. Installation view.

In her latest installation, “Emerald City,” 2013, Meg Cranston has painted two walls of the gallery emerald green. A portrait of Kate Middleton is installed on one of the painted walls facing the entrance. The gallery’s third wall is left white, except for a small monochrome painted the same hue that beams across the room. Here, it’s as if Cranston has taken the color emerald green as a readymade.

While the market economy used to rely on circulating goods through advertising, it is now more preoccupied with choreographing moods, gestures, and, inevitably, color. In December 2012, Pantone held its semiannual secretive two-day conference, which is more akin to a papal conclave, and announced emerald green as the color of 2013. “Appropriate for every occasion,” said the company of the chosen color, citing it as lively and radiant. Yet, Middleton, pictured in Cranston’s portrait, seems to have been the one to set this year’s tone by wearing an emerald pleated gown in November 2011, a year before Pantone determined the latest chromatic zeitgeist. As such, the readymade seems to have expanded from the thing itself to the context within which a product is circulated and interpreted—more specifically, from a royal figurehead to a globalized culture.

As Cranston mentions in an interview, she is not necessarily concerned with a critique of our corporate-curated environment. Rather, it is the symbiotic relationship between individual identity and branding that is her subject matter. In this exhibition, she questions what creative autonomy entails when a choice like an artist’s palette or the color one wears is not as autonomous as it seems.

— Sohrab Mohebbi

Gabrielle Ferrer

STEVE TURNER CONTEMPORARY
6026 Wilshire Blvd
March 15–April 20

Gabrielle Ferrer, Cones (#28), 2013, archival inkjet print mounted on plywood, 8 x 8".

Gabrielle Ferrer’s solo debut, “Transparent Things,” combines three distinct bodies of work interleaved in snaky digressions around the upstairs gallery. Framed pages torn from an exhibition catalogue depicting Navajo weavings—from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1972 show “The Navajo Blanket”—are hung in grids on three of the gallery’s four walls and anchor the exhibition. The artist has applied watercolor over the black-and-white reproductions, partly following the schematic description for each weaving, and a chart listing colors along warp and weft, found in the catalogue. Positioned around these grids are fuzzy pictures of prop closets tinted into states of pastel remoteness and hot, medium-format photos of pyrometric cones (used to time firing in kilns) in which the creamy beige of the disposable measuring instruments sets off backdrops painted in crisp tones from slate to tangerine. The cones’ tips, which are designed to droop to indicate degrees of doneness, are arrested in mid-melt. Frozen in a kind of glass-dripping physicality, they revel at times in the illusion of softness, like an accidental Bernini.

A hovering indeterminacy runs through the works: The blankets’ original colors are abstracted into language and then reinstated; the props diffuse into a middle distance (a photo of pale jugs strongly recalls Morandi); and the cones inexplicably litter brightly lit, unearthly landscapes. The title of the show is taken from a novella by Vladimir Nabokov, in which a ghostly narrator meditates on “objects . . . inert in themselves but much used by careless life.” With its attention devoted to the fine permutations of textiles and primitive forms, the show might have been called “still lifes.” And much like opalescent fruits rendered in oils, the objects are not really still, but rather stirred by the implications of their past and are animated by the optical vibration of their present.

— Zachary Sachs

Marilyn Minter

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard
April 6–May 11

Marilyn Minter, Coral Ridge Towers (Mom in Bed), 1969, black-and-white photograph, 30 x 40".

The five paintings in Marilyn Minter’s current solo exhibition, her second at this gallery, appear to be wet—oozing, drooling, splashing, sweating, cumming, dripping, glistening. Each work is classic Minter: Overly made-up eyes and the backs of heels in stilettos are pictured behind glass marred with radial cracks and obstructed with pastel swirls that look something like the tags of graffiti. Derived from composites of dozens of photographs, these images are placed behind glass, rephotographed, and then transferred to canvas. Though her paintings appear photorealistic from a distance—the artist notably refers to herself as a “photo-replacer” and not a Photorealist—up close they become completely abstract. Painted on aluminum, each glistens and gleams—if these were indeed photographs, it would seem that they were taken through Vaselined lenses, a process used in 1930s glamour photographs.

Aptly emphasizing this hark-back to the past is “Coral Ridge Tower Series,” 1969, nine ghostly black-and-white photographs that Minter shot during college of her mother (who was then addicted to pills, according to interviews with the artist). Pictured in a dark interior of a Florida condo, which is decorated with a shag carpet, lacquer furniture, cocktail trays, and a vanity mirror, she wears a polyester housedress and is shown slumped in bed, gazing into a mirror, and wandering through her home, routinely pensive and withdrawn. An incisively self-aware nod to Minter’s own Freudian, primal scene, the photographs clearly set the stage for her career-long excavation and polemicization.

— Micol Hebron

Alice Könitz, Pamela Jorden, and Jeff Ono

SAMUEL FREEMAN
2639 South La Cienega Blvd.
April 18–May 25

View of “Alice Könitz, Pamela Jorden, and Jeff Ono,” 2013.

Alice Könitz, Pamela Jorden, and Jeff Ono approach the legacy of modernism with an attitude of intimate engagement as much as critique. Alice Könitz’s shimmery wall sculpture, Emblem, 2013, echoes the ziggurat-like form of Dan Flavin’s Monuments to V. Tatlin, 1964–90, albeit in a material that seems to be an ultrareflective gold-tone metal. A closer look reveals it is actually shiny paper, a lightweight, flashy material that causes the work to seem more of a prop than a monument, a made-in-LA revision of the phenomenological concerns and industrial aesthetic that permeate Minimalism.

Jeff Ono’s sculptures display a similar lightness of touch. He forms organic shapes vaguely reminiscent of large-scale outdoor sculpture in materials like cellulose clay, creating a rough surface that seems distinctly handcrafted. These crumpled shapes sit atop quirky geometric bases that are, in the tradition of Constantin Brancusi, part of the complete work. That said, their small scale and jaunty angled legs lends them a distinct domestic look. They almost read as midcentury sofa tables—a playful pun on the high-modernist tradition.

Pamela Jorden’s paintings hark back to abstraction’s earliest pioneers, with saturated color and circle motifs that recall Sonia and Robert Delaunay and jagged forms and short diagonal brushstrokes reminiscent of Fernand Léger. She also draws on the innovations of later abstract painters like Helen Frankenthaler with atmospheric washes and stains that open up pictorial space. Jorden’s relationship with her influences seems the most direct of the three artists in this show. While the sculptors adopt the stance of romantics surveying modernism’s ruins—with interest and affection, but divided by an impassable historical gulf—Jorden picks up the pieces of the past and works with them, creating art that is historically resonant but personal and idiosyncratic, distinctive yet hard to pin down.

— Kaveri Nair

Antonio Adriano Puleo

THE HARRIET & CHARLES LUCKMAN FINE ARTS COMPLEX
5151 State University Drive, California State University
April 6–June 1

View of “Sculptured Paintings & Painting Sculptures,” 2013.

Stripping away affect and objective referent, Antonio Adriano Puleo’s new body of work relies on form, color, and process. Composed primarily of bits of string, fabric, wood, cardboard, and a large quantity of paint, these paintings and sculptures are refreshing in their direct simplicity. The exhibition as a whole is equally imbued with tradition and innovation, but four works in particular—Untitled 1b-35b, 1c-35c, 1d-35d, and 1e-35e, all 2010-13—embody this fusion; each consists of thirty-five nine-by-twelve-inch paintings in the shape of a grid. Like instruments in an orchestra, each individual painting has a presence that empowers and completes the whole, such as a mustard yellow canvas split by two verticals stitched together with string; four springtime-green horizontal panels hung together in a row, completed only by empty space; and two painted bands of fuchsia, rimmed with grey.

Puleo’s approach recalls not only the form but also the sensibility of Minimalism with form, color, and shape as a means of expressing essential experience through a distilled visual vocabulary whether via, as Frank Stella would have it, direct perception or, as Barnett Newman suggested, a new kind of symbol. At the same time, the work’s playful process evokes the use of unconventional materials in post-Minimalist collage and sculpture. X, Y, Z, 2011, one of several small to midsize sculptures included, is constructed simply of six wooden rectangles framing the central vertical, rays connected with bits of rope; like each painting in the large groups, its fragile ease and elegance might be lost were it not surrounded by so many of its compatriots, creating a language of their own.

— Annie Buckley

“Hi From California”

FREEDMAN FITZPATRICK
6051 Hollywood Blvd, 107
April 28–June 1

View of “Hi from California,” 2013.

Freedman Fitzpatrick’s debut exhibition offers a sense of the self-reflexive; it is as if the gallerists wanted to highlight their entwined roles as friend, worker, participant, and actor. The seven works in the show arrived in LA from Berlin and Zurich in a single suitcase and have been installed in a configuration that recalls a theater, complete with stage, props, backdrop, sound track, and actors: Swiss Shield Suits (all works cited, 2013), two faceless mannequins in sharply tailored white suits by Claus Rasmussen, stand tall in the middle of the room, overlooking the exhibition. Behind them, taking up the entire south wall, is Matthew Lutz Kinoy’s The Meadow, a twenty-two-foot-long painting of a lush, vibrant, brushy landscape broken up by nude, frolicking derrieres. The painting seems to dance to the audio work, Hi by Hannah Weinberger. The sounds are a loop of dings, whistles, and jolts that she created in response to the other pieces in the show.

Instead of a press release for the show, the gallery issued a script-like text written by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff of Berlin’s Times—a now defunct bar, hangout, meet up, and artistic hub in Neukolln. The text provides a backstory to the exhibition and also describes a ritual that took place a week before the opening: Alex Freedman and Robbie Fitzpatrick, former Berlin expats who recently moved back to the US, received the art-filled suitcase, and they took it to the Joshua Tree National Park in California. While wearing Rasmussen’s white suits, they buried the suitcase as the sun set. Imbibing ensued, and they woke the next morning to dig it up and bring it to the gallery, located in a corner of a Hollywood shopping plaza, sandwiched between a sushi restaurant and tobacco shop. There is a clear note of curatorial heavy-handedness here; yet, with rose-tinted glasses square on the nose, this exhibition is ultimately an honest approach to Los Angeles on its own slippery terms. It is also an astute way to inaugurate a small gallery.

— Summer Guthery

Connie Samaras

ARMORY CENTER FOR THE ARTS
145 N. Raymond Ave.
March 1–June 9

Connie Samaras, Edge of Twilight 18, 2011, archival ink-jet from film, 24 x 30".

This comprehensive exhibition of Connie Samaras’s work over the past fifteen years, curated by Irene Tsatsos, includes photographs and videos from six series. Most of the forty-four large color photographs depict land- and cityscapes in the United States and abroad, but two videos included in the series “V.A.L.I.S. (vast active living intelligence system),” 2005, shot in Antarctica, depict living beings, one a seal breathing through a hole in the ice, the other a man, fast asleep in a red snowsuit aboard a plane returning from the South Pole. Though actual human (or animal) life is rarely seen, its presence—that of those inhabiting the scene, the artist behind the camera, and, by proxy, the viewer—is continually invoked in Samaras’s works, whether in sound tracks of breath mingled with waves and engine motors, or in photographs including the glowing nightscapes of “Angelic States-Event Sequence,” 1998–2003, and the jewellike homes of “Edge of Twilight,” 2011.

For Samaras, photography acts as a membrane, a fragile but tough skin between the thing experienced and the one experiencing it, exposing the surrealistic simultaneity of subjectivity and objectivity, of the personal with the environmental, social, economic, and political. As curator Charlotte Cotton puts it in one of the many diverse essays included in the accompanying catalogue, during the 1970s “Samaras was beginning to connect in her life and emergent artistic practice to the enduring mantra of second-wave feminism: The personal is political. As a feminist and an artist, her biography needed to be consciously present in her art.” Three decades on, delivered through various narratives and filtered through the disparate lenses of formalism, feminism, and globalism, this now well-digested idea remains powerful in Samaras’s work, if subtly so, as if nestled within the sensuous layers of light and color, skylines and snowscapes, patiently awaiting discovery.

— Annie Buckley

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

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

“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