“Reduced Visibility”

If abstraction can distill the essence of an otherwise quotidian occurrence, it can also achieve a seemingly contradictory end—simply obfuscating the obvious, rendering any meaning arbitrary. “Reduced Visibility,” curated by Kurt Mueller, carries on this tradition of duplicity. The exhibition comprises five artists working in the more politically entrenched region of abstraction. Its success depends on the viewer’s interest in and, at times, tolerance for didacticism.

Mueller does well in choosing artists who gravitate toward the sublime. Trevor Paglen’s blurred vistas, which capture a purported secret military testing site off the coast of southern California, formally reference Rothko’s color fields. The sci-fi-seeming content of the large-scale photographs enriches the ambient mood created by the works’ atmospheric soft focus. Lisa Oppenheim’s “Multicultural Crayon Displacements” series, 2008, similarly embraces a modernist aesthetic: Drawing from Crayola’s recently launched color palette—expanded to include non-Eurocentric skin tones—Oppenheim creates photograms of rectilinear compositions. The results are as sumptuous as her concept is hackneyed. Rico Gatson also deals with racial overtones in his video installation, History Lessons, 2004. This frantic montage of culturally loaded source material, like scenes from The Birth of a Nation and imagery of the 1965 Watts riots, pulsates to a syncopated beat on two screens separated by a black divider. The result is engaging, but at times it is unclear how the commentary extends past a trendy music-video montage. The quietest voice in the show packs the most punch. Mark Lombardi’s drawings of corporate malfeasance are direct and elegant, composed of simple arching lines and circles that trace various money trails. They are disturbing without relying on irrelevant aesthetic decisions to enhance dialogue. The works are abstractions, to be sure, but illustrative enough of the myriad scandalous financial ways of our times to insinuate a cabal of paranoia without coming off as heavy-handed.