“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which takes its title from Joan Didion’s 1966 essay about love, betrayal, and death in the San Bernardino Valley, brings together six artists—Ed Ruscha, Alex Israel, Alex Hubbard, Julie Becker, Lutz Bacher, and Rachel Harrison. The exhibition begins with Bacher’s Reflex Yellow, 2008, a massive arc of wood that winds like a ramp through the gallery—an immaculate curve of cold sunshine, a yellow brick road, a McDonald’s golden arch split in two, one half of a golden dream. Behind this, Israel’s Sky Backdrop, 2013, is flush with pinks, purples, and pale blues—firmament before gloaming, aesthetically clean to the point of sterility. As such it performs a kind of vacancy, palpably masking some other, unspoken truth.

Opposing Bacher’s behemoth of a sun and Israel’s disinfected sky is a painting from Ruscha’s series “Psycho Spaghetti Westerns,” 2010, in which shredded tire rubber and fallen doors obscure the artist’s sublime landscapes—auspices of a grimmer land. Four photographs by Becker in 1999 show cluttered, claustrophobic interiors in which the wood paneling of the walls and floor reflects off television screens, subtly posing a feeling of entrapment. And then there is her sculpture, 1910 West Sunset Blvd, 2000, for which the artist cast a portion of a dirty sidewalk from a Los Angeles street in her studio. The pavement is marked by its past—on it is a faded pink-and-purple chalk drawing of castle, and a rusty pipe protrudes from its side. Becker has also embedded a bike light and a lone slipper in cement onto its surface. This is not the slipper of Bacher’s world (ruby red?) but one that is domestic and decrepit, texturing the realm of Bacher and Israel with reason—their work insisting on the dream of a place. Or in Didion’s words: ‘The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”