LA CIENEGA AREA

A series of self-portraits by photographer Judy Coleman takes the theme of falling as a means of exploring the expressive possibilities of motion and the emotional experience of being at the mercy of gravity. “Things happen suddenly and without warning in life,” Coleman explains, “and we’re always trying to find balance and a way to stabilize ourselves.” It’s a fertile idea, but Coleman appears to be stuck on a single interpretation; all of her pictures seem to reside in the same troubled dream.

Massive black-and-white photographs of female nudes plummeting through the swirling void, Coleman’s work has something inexplicably ‘60s about it. A trace of Maxfield Parrish can be detected, along with a dollop of Alphonse Mucha and a heavy dose of Odilon Redon. In “Fair Warning,” for instance, we find a body writhing in a murky pond teeming with sperm shapes, while a huge triptych titled “All Fall Down” depicts three female forms in the process of mutating into something strange and unhuman. The faces of all Coleman’s fallers are obliterated, a device that lends them a nightmarish cast worthy of Hieronymous Bosch.

Flickering with the soft-focus dreaminess of a silent movie, the pictures are subjected to an involved procedure developed by Coleman. A small photographic print is cut, etched, drawn on and painted using oil, wax, shards of glass and ash. The worked-over print is then rephotographed and enlarged--and I do mean enlarged, perhaps to its detriment. Her images are so turbulently emotional that making them so big--and cutting them into odd shapes that are fitted into oddly shaped frames as she often does--sends them right over the top. Not surprisingly, the best piece in the show also happens to be the simplest. In “Fire Fly” we see an elongated figure in the midst of a graceful dive; she seems to be freeing herself of the hysteria that grips most of Coleman’s work. (G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 7224 Melrose Ave., to May 9.)