ART REVIEW : Show Focuses on Works of 15 Photographers

Suppose you are an artist working quietly in Portales, N.M., or Maplewood, N.Y., or, for that matter, Fullerton. Your stuff has been in numerous group shows and a few solo exhibits. You aren’t represented by a gallery, however, and you are getting tired of being a one-person public relations office, constantly mailing your slides to individual museums and galleries that may not even bother to answer. You might even be willing to fork over some cash to someone who could help.

Discerning a marketing niche, Jonette Slabey of Santa Monica founded Artists’ Liaison two years ago. Her advertisements in the art press invite artists throughout the country to enter slides of their work in a nationwide contest. Art dealers in Chicago and California are invited to scan these images and select the ones they want for an “Artists’ Liaison” exhibit in their galleries.

The inducement for dealers is exposure to a huge selection of new work at one time with no strings attached (fees are collected from the artists). No further commitment is involved, but galleries are free to continue to represent artists of particular promise.

After perusing hundreds of these submissions earlier this year, BC Space owner Mark Chamberlain chose the work of 15 photographers from points east and west to show in two batches at the Laguna Beach gallery. (The second exhibit remains on view through Oct. 8.)

Some of these photographers are essentially traditionalists, including Karekin Goekjian, who turns out landscape views remarkable mostly for their rich, unusual color. Others are just starting to find voices of their own, and a few have broken through into strong, personal work.

But the earlier exhibit, which closed in August, contained the lion’s share of thoughtful photographers with a clear and personal sense of direction. Among the real discoveries were Carol Horst, Greg Erf and Alex Traube, whose work, though no longer on display, can still be viewed at the gallery upon request.

Horst, who combines her black-and-white photographs in book formats, creates a soft, pale universe of beds and sleeping people and the mundane-turned-eerie stuff of their dreams. Erf makes 11-by-14-inch contact prints, incisively pairing views of urban and suburban blight with the architectural remnants of a more gracious age or displaced corners of nature. Traube dives into the memories and thoughts of the people in his 16-by-20-inch photographs and comes up with the brief, telling quotations that are part of each print.

In the second batch of this photographic sampler, several artists seem to be still groping for a personal visual language or appropriate subject matter.

Michael David Laskavy dovetails little islands of photographed images with his spare line drawings, adding a second level of detail and verisimilitude. The technique is intriguing, but so far Laskavy doesn’t seem to have come up with sufficiently meaty ideas for these pieces.

Randy Reddin pursues a mystical humanism in his prints of old men and adults with young children, manipulated to glow with erratic bursts of light against silvery-black backgrounds. But there is something desperately contrived about this activity; the subjects remain unremarkable and mundane.

Only in his image of three old men--one alert, one in open-mouthed sleep, one in plump senility--does Reddin find the visual means to bring viewers to the heart of his wonder at the passage of life and the bonding between parent and child.

Even the photographers with more fully resolved techniques seem more laudable for their views of contemporary society than for the freshness or durability of their artistic approaches.

The major exception is Stephanie Regen, who subjects the gestures of prominent figures--in grainy reproductions from newspaper photographs and TV news stills--to tartly satirical sociopolitical scrutiny. In “Ollie: The Open Palm,” Regen gravely “interprets” the image of Oliver North waving from a balcony by explaining that his open palm signifies “truth, honesty, allegiance.”

Shelley Bachman’s somewhat baffling “Selective Fictions” are sandwiches of two or more seemingly unrelated photographs between two panels of text. These written passages seem to be about conflicts between genuinely idiosyncratic private thoughts and the kind of information that consists of little more than repackaged cliches and bland ideas unrelated to the quirkiness of real life.

One of Bachman’s pieces contains photographs of a woman’s face and a teen-age girl lying on her side as she watches a portable TV that is also on its side. (That image, unlike most of Bachman’s other photographs, has a wonderfully peculiar quality all by itself . )

In one text, someone (the girl’s mother?) burbles with amazement at how “by switching the channels back and forth she (the daughter?) can assume a new personality within seconds.” In another text, someone (the girl herself?) wonders whether she is “missing a lot by simply watching others on TV and not allowing myself to be watched by them. Yet somehow I feel someone is watching me.”

Susan Margaret Kerr and Diane Malley work as a team to conceptualize and assemble “Occupied Territories,” images of nude women regarding their private parts in mirrors. Assemble is the operative word, because the bodies are a patchwork of photographs lifted from ads catering to women (lipsticked lips, made-up eyes) or from such “men’s” magazines as Hustler.

These photographs easily convey the commonplace--though undoubtedly true--idea that women today are hard-pressed to look at themselves without the intrusion of media-created images of “perfection.” But these are little more than visual slogans, hammering home a theme with vigilante fervor.

Francesca Lacagnina’s triptych images of women are openly romantic in a way that clearly aims at imaginative richness without quite achieving it. By collaging and hand-coloring her photographs, the artist gives attenuated nudes cat masks and talons, turns them into profiled Egyptian figures and juxtaposes their bodies with long tree branches and voluptuous roots.

These images seem over-structured and forced into mythological molds without enough breathing room for true oddity or accident. But in another piece not on view--in which the body of a woman in a bird mask appears to be imprinted on the dirt near a cluster of birds--Lacagnina breaks through to something bizarre and wonderful.

Despite the unevenness of the images in the show, the sheer intensity, venturesomeness and diversity of the photographers is a welcome surprise. There are voices out there in the towns and cities of the United States who clearly have fresh and striking things to tell us, if we would only listen.

.

“1988 Artists’ Liaison” continues through Oct. 8 at BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 497-1880.