2005

AROUND THE GALLERIES
Fresh, original voices in L.A.
L.A. Weekly hosts its first annual biennial at Track 16 Gallery. And more.

By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer

With no art museums in Los Angeles expressing any inclination — for good or ill — to hop aboard the international bandwagon of biennial survey exhibitions, L.A. Weekly has stepped into the breech. The lively and generally satisfying show at Track 16 Gallery, quixotically said to be the publication's "first annual biennial," is less a wide-ranging survey of what's happening now among the city's artists than a group exhibition keyed to a distinctive curatorial sensibility. The show is stronger for it.
L.A. Weekly art critic Doug Harvey has selected 16 artists who work with mixed media, plus a handful of single-channel video artists. Few have shown widely, and some are having their debut. A welcome sense of discovery, coupled with a distinct lack of interest in established marketability (or attendance at one of L.A.'s many prominent art schools), attends the show.
That said, the four exceptional collages and a five-panel folding screen by Elliot Hundley, whose work has been seen in group shows at Regen Projects and LACE in the last year or so, set the pace and tone for this biennial. Hundley's collages are assembled from thousands of small scraps of paper — cut-up snapshots, magazine photos, pieces of colored tissue paper, etc. — which he glues or affixes with straight pins to board or heavy paper. These fragments of a camera-mediated, reproduced and disposable landscape are pinned like exotic butterflies in an anthropologist's research lab, and they are just as compelling, mysterious, obsessive and beautiful.
Hundley often includes chopped-up nude figures, as if laying bare his specimens might somehow reveal more than meets the eye. But the fragmented and pinned body parts instead become vaguely ominous. They're like markers for a humongous crime spree, charted on a police detective's push-pinned city map.
Atomized experience is a leitmotif in the show, conveyed by a preponderance of work that employs techniques of collage and assemblage. (Messiness abounds.) This is not visionary work made in the old L.A. manner of Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz or George Herms, but a post-assemblage sensibility inflected by such sober precedents as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon. Grim agitation, a clenched resolve to make silk purses that retain some of the bloody stench of sows' ears, is everywhere encountered.
Notable are Sarah Cromarty's romantic images of journeys at sea or in the forest, which she coarsely gouges into slabs of plywood, then paints with grimy stains and oleaginous colors sometimes sprinkled with glitter. Wistful yet repellent, forced in their cheerfulness yet moody in pitch, they embody our currently conflicted social and political moment.
Avigail Moss' dark wall-hangings in purple-black felt, cut and stitched in the shape of giant teardrops and lightly sprayed with paint, are exotic abstractions — lovely as a Venus flytrap. Adrian Ellis makes organic stalagmites from thousands of commercial ketchup packets, their unseen innards composed from a mass-produced confection the color and consistency of bloody ooze.
Cartoon-like yet monstrous, "The Lean Years" is a gnawed and stumpy figure rising from a painted dinner table and carved from foam by Erik Frydenborg. Imagine Saturn devouring himself rather than his children.
And Glenn Bach's loose-limbed drawings are composed from whirlwinds of blunt and choppy pencil marks that struggle mightily to coalesce into serene landscapes glimpsed from the back porch — but they can't quite manage so rose-tinted a task. Their depicted world insists on coming apart at the seams.
Among the videos projected in a separate gallery, the standout is an organic abstraction assembled from thousands of flickering, brightly colored pixels by Christine Siemens. Her fabricated image looks like something glimpsed through an electron microscope — cells, microbes or enzymes — to a soundtrack of cars whizzing by on a highway. Oddly, and without ever using figurative imagery, the brief loop recalls John Steinbeck's tortoise attempting the harrowing task of making it across the perilous, sun-baked pavement without getting summarily squashed.
The biennial is timed to coincide with the current issue of L.A. Weekly, designed to survey the Los Angeles art scene, and it's paired with a show of cover art from the publication, selected by art director Shelley Leopold. A mid-show celebration will be held at 7 p.m. on October 28, featuring art-rock band Fireworks, a DJ set by artist Shepard Fairey and a performance piece by Joseph Deutch, whose graduate school performance inspired by the game of Russian roulette caused such a ruckus last winter at UCLA.