LOS ANGELES—ArtInfo's Southern California correspondent, Amra Brooks, offers an opinionated assessment of some of the most interesting gallery and museum shows currently on view in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Galleries:

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
Jeff Whetstone
March 18-April 15, 2006

 

In Whetstone’s first solo show in Los Angeles, curated by Catherine Opie, his background as a biologist comes through in these black-and-white landscapes that depict rural life and the spirituality inherent in wild nature. There is a dark element that comes into play when we see how humans—whether a hunter or a child playing in a creek—come into contact with their lush surroundings. In one photo, vines cover and seem to devour power lines on a hillside. Whetstone's black-and-white work draws from the history of early American photographers who used their practice as a way to survey the land.

David Kordansky Gallery
"The Figs Play Fox Dead"
March 24-April 22, 2006

This show features new paintings, drawings and sculptures by Markus Amm, Aaron Curry, Alan Michael, Giles Round and 2006 Whitney Biennial participants Jay Heikes and Adam McEwen. The show explores the relationships between abstraction and representation, focusing on work that pushes the concepts inherent within each field. What at first may seem abstract comes to reveal solid references, while representational works render abstract lines, patterns and colors. For example, McEwen’s painting Bomber Harris, 2006 uses pieces of smashed chewing gum on a black background to map out bombings in Iraq.

Marc Foxx Gallery
Jason Meadows/"Life on Mars"
March 18-April 15, 2006

Los Angeles artist Jason Meadows exhibits four new abstract sculptures based on loose narratives of the planet Mars. By using simple shapes and materials that evoke a feeling of 1970s nostalgia, the sculptures themselves look almost like oversized, mechanical children’s toys. Meadows explores his own concept of “earthbound” structures and uses materials and forms that emphasizes a planet’s gravitational pull—yet many of the works have moving parts suggesting their potential energies.

Los Angeles Museums:

UCLA Hammer Museum: Hammer Projects
(The Hammer Projects are temporary exhibitions that focus on work by emerging artists.)

Miranda Lichtenstein: Jan. 28-April 30, 2006
Lichtenstein’s Polaroids are shadowy and saturated still lifes that evoke early photographic practices as well as impressionistic hues and 18th-century paintings. The floral, fruits and vegetables are bathed in an eerie golden light that recalls the vintage hues and feel of early botanical studies. The slightly skewed backdrops add an unsettling element, and one can imagine discovering some sort of wilt or rot on the fruits or flowers.

Fikret Atay: Jan. 24-April 19, 2006
Atay, a young Turkish video artist, films young boys in his homeland. The work focuses on isolation, solitude and violence through simple means: by showing how these young boys navigate through their days, making drums, playing war games and dancing. He filmed the videos in the Kurdish city of Batman and gives us an insider view of the culture by using youth as a universal way for us all to enter and relate to a foreign space.

Brenna Youngblood: Jan. 14-April 12, 2006
Los Angeles-based artist Brenna Youngblood takes her own photographs of her community and from her everyday life and collages them in dizzying rhythms and patterns through layering and multiplicity. There is often a dark sense of humor that lies in the outcome of her juxtaposition, or her reworking of people and places or architectural structures.

Monique van Genderen: March 18-July 30, 2006
This Los Angeles-based artist makes large-scale wall painting by using different kinds of adhesive vinyl. Her work uses ideas of graphic design and computer-based drawing to explore concepts of painting. Modernist abstraction is a direct reference, and the way that light plays with the vinyl material reminds of watercolor and other painterly techniques.