LA CIENEGA AREA

Monochrome color photos by Barbara Ess celebrate what most photographers try to avoid: blurred, streaky images, distorted depth of field and obtrusive shadows and specks that smack of rank amateurism, bad equipment, or both. For Ess, these effects are deliberate, produced by homemade pinhole cameras, random manual exposures and less-than-perfect negatives.

Her subjects initially seem quite banal: a baby in a bathtub, a couple embracing on the beach, a boy eating at a table while a man stares out the window. They quickly take on added significance, however, triggering a series of emotional and conceptual responses ranging from some nostalgic childhood dream state to the paranoia engendered by hidden surveillance. Genuinely surreal, her works define an ambiguous area between subject and voyeur, the phenomenal world and the artist’s role as willful manipulator. The challenge is to see how far Ess can exploit this process before it slips into a predictable signature.

Also on display is a series of paintings by Jamey Bair that use the chance occurrences of formal process to dictate structural parameters of the painterly image. Each work’s tempera surface is heated so that it cracks to form a mosaic of abstract shapes. These are then painted in retinally charged hues used in color blindness tests to form interlocking chips of color, usually focusing in on a central “aura” of light that exudes a sense of benign spirituality. The totality is then heavily lacquered so that the work has the appearance of an Old Master painting: cracked, time-worn and historically “significant.”

Bair is clearly working with a lot of interesting ideas, specifically his formal interplay between chance and contrivance, science and alchemy. As yet, the results are still undeveloped, working better as precious objects than resonant abstractions with something new to say beyond clever process. (Michael Kohn Gallery, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to July 10.)