The Galleries : Santa Monica

L.A. artist Craig Stecyk has a reputation for making socially conscious art that’s a little too weird for conventional art world transactions. His current project, an elaborate multi-media installation, titled “Northwest Passage” (referring to the migratory path that ducks follow on the Pacific Flyway), is an inquiry into power, victims and victimizers as symbolized by the precarious existence of our friend the duck. Ducks are a workable metaphor for all sorts of social and ecological issues, but there’s a major gap between Stecyk’s ideas and way he illustrates them.

This show involves three galleries, the first of which is a weathered tin shack that doubles as a video screening room; on the video monitor is a montage of ducks and duck related imagery. The walls of the second gallery are draped with camouflage nets, while the center of the floor is covered with a triangle of wet sand. Marching across the sand is an army of decoys painted neon colors. In the the third gallery we find a duck blind, inside of which is a revolving rifle. On the walls are two-dimensional ducks cut out of metal. The floor is covered with a thick blanket of dead leaves, while the interior walls of the duck blind are decorated with portraits of famous duck hunters--Truman, Idi Amin, Hitler.

Stecyk is a somewhat obsessive artist, and the materials he uses are all loaded with hidden meaning; the leaves, for instance, were collected from sacred Indian burial sites. It takes some detective work, however, to root out all the supplementary information that ties this complex piece together. At a glance, it’s difficult to deduce how Stecyk feels about ducks, much less the myriad other issues alluded to in “Northwest Passage.” (Meyers/Bloom, 2112 Broadway, to March 18.)