It’s Life in the Big City, and It’s Suitable For Framing

Much has been made of the so-called “horizontal” nature of Los Angeles: the suburban sprawl. It is a source oA.’s lack of cohesiveness and also its diversity. Or, as gallery owner Mickey Kaplan likes to put it, “L. A. is the second-largest city in the country, and we still have coyotes running around the middle of it.”

Kaplan’s gallery, Installations One in Encino, is showing works by 24 different artists that address these complexities of life in Los Angeles. The show, titled “Urban Landscapes,” runs through Sept. 24.

“My original idea was to have a group show using the urban landscape as a common base for expressing each artist’s attitudes, impressions and directions of Southern California,” said Wayne Hodge, the show’s curator. But that’s not exactly what he got. “I now find the artists’ interpretations as varied and extreme as the environment we live in.”

Said Kaplan: “It’s like walking into all the different areas of Los Angeles in one gallery.” An artist might focus on the beach or the mountains or, he added, “get down and dirty in the gutter.”

But the cliched images of Los Angeles are avoided.

“This isn’t a post-card show where you’re going to see Malibu and Olvera Street,” Kaplan said.

The artists, all members of LAART (an organization formed by Kaplan in an attempt to build a support system and a sense of community among L. A. artists), come from a mix of social, educational and ethnic backgrounds and work in a variety of media.

The artworks include Louis Jacinto’s photo studies of the name Los Angeles as it appears around the city (in street signs, etc.); Gloria Hajduk’s “TV Still Life Landscapes,” which are pastel and ink images of shoes that she acquired when she worked as an artist’s model; Sally Lamb’s near prehistoric depiction of the Santa Monica Bay, and Hodge’s own paintings from photographs he took of signs all over Los Angeles (an ironic rendering of the neon words Fine Art , for example).

Kaplan’s future plans for LAART include the opening of a second gallery at 21820 Burbank Blvd. in Woodland Hills in October. Like Installations One, the ground-floor office building space is being donated rent-free by the developer until a tenant is found.

When the space is leased, Kaplan simply moves his operation to another space. “Eventually, I hope we can get 10 or even 15 gallery spaces,” Kaplan said. “The trick is to get them faster than we lose them.”

Also in the works: a quarterly LAART magazine. But Kaplan spends most of his time searching for new LAART member artists. “Nobody joins LAART without me going to their studio and looking at their work,” he said. “If I like what they’re doing and they like what I’m doing, then we’re married.”

What Kaplan does involves much more than organizing shows. “The gallery is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. Emphasising that LAART is not a co-op in which every member takes turns showing work, Kaplan describes his organization as a thought-out, for-profit venture involved in art storage, establishing a strong collector list and cataloguing artists’ works.

His ultimate long-term goal, however, is to identify all the artists in Los Angeles. “I’d meet them in a big stadium and then we’d all exchange business cards,” he said.