Developing Photo Artists at Long Beach

One takes pictures without a camera, the other paints over her pictures: For photography’s 150th birthday, being celebrated at several Southern California institutions this year, the Long Beach Museum of Art has chosen to showcase two artists who eschew the conventional.

“Enlarging the Repertoire,” today through March 5, features works by experimental photographers Jerry Burchfield and Charlene Knowlton. They differ greatly in their approach and process, but are alike in their talent for innovation.

Burchfield creates “Cibachrome monoprints,” which, like all photograms, are made without a camera. He places objects directly on sensitized photographic paper and “literally draws with colored light to illuminate portions of a picture and cast colors here and there,” the artist said.

“When I was working with a camera, as I still do, I was dealing with reflections of things that were external,” Burchfield said. “This way of working is much more personal. With a camera, either you find things and photograph them or you stage them. What I do, is I have a particular idea and I figure out an approach to expressing it and I work out some sketches, so that when I go into the dark (room), I’m working from some sort of preplanned idea. But I’m also working totally from instinct, and literally creating the image in the dark.”

Burchfield’s small to large works “deal with human circumstance and political and social issues.”

Knowlton, whose background is in abstract painting, makes “painted photomurals.”

She first paints expressionistic backdrops, then places in front of them live models made to resemble “modern-day aborigines” whose bodies have been painted with “with beautiful, wild, abstract patterns,” she said.

She then photographs the set-ups, blows up the shot to mural size, and paints over the layered imagery, so that the final product hardly looks like a photograph.

Showing a connection between the ancient and the new, her works, sometimes three-dimensional, also contain symbols of contemporary culture, such one which includes her 1966 Mustang.

“Yes, you react to (the works) immediately,” Knowlton said. “They are not comfortable little things. And I couldn’t do that with just paint. It would be romanticizing the whole thing.

“It’s not so much that I want to push the limits of photography,” she added, “it’s just that I want to use anything I need (in order) to say what I have to say. It’s where art is going at this point.”

LOCAL TAPE MAKERS: Five video works by California artists will have their debut in an exhibit opening today at the Long Beach Museum of Art:

--”In Heaven There is No History,” by Victoria Beardon, combines fact and fiction to explore cult brainwashing in Southern California.

--”Let Me (Entertain You),” by Hilja M. Keading, scrutinizes television advertising.

--”Memory Slope Section: L.A.,” by Lynn Kirby and Erika Suderburg, look at early Los Angeles history.

--”. . . Once You’ve Shot the Gun You Can’t Stop the Bullet . . .” by Jayce Salloum, of Lebanese descent, who looks at her own life and heritage.

--”Blinky the Friendly Hen 1978-88” by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, is “an allegorical documentary about the life and death” of Blinky, a press release says.

The videos were produced through Open Channels, the museum’s television production grant program, and will be shown on cable stations across the state following the exhibit.

PRINTS FOR SALE: A variety of prints from the 15th through the early 20th centuries will be sold Feb. 3-5 at the fifth annual Los Angeles Fine Print Sale, at Butterfield and Butterfield Auctioneers, 7601 Sunset Blvd.

Twenty print dealers, including Los Angeles’ Tobey C. Moss and Marilyn Pink, will offer woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs and drawings.

The fair runs 6-10 p.m. Friday, noon-8 p.m. Saturday and noon-6 p.m. Sunday. James Cuno, director of the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, UCLA, will lecture on two local master print collectors at 11 a.m. Saturday. Admission to the fair is $2 per day.

FOR THE RECORD: The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art has changed its spring schedule. “Peter Shelton: Waxworks,” a show of 34 sculptural objects by the Los Angeles artist, April 7 to June 4, will supplant a survey of Jake Berthot’s paintings, announced Jan. 8 in Calendar’s 1989 preview of art exhibitions.