ART REVIEW : Photography Lies and Tricks Are Focus of ‘Investigations’

Four Los Angeles artists in their 30s blithely spin a few fantasies to demonstrate how photographs lie. Their targets are not just photographs, but any type of information that reaches us at second hand.

Gathered under the title “Deliberate Investigations” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (to Nov. 12), installations by David Bunn, Una Barth, Connie Hatch and Dede Bazyk range from complex and clever to simple-minded. You have to work pretty hard to get to the bottom of things, but the effort is nearly always worthwhile.

Bunn’s piece “Curvature (Some Projections)” sets up competing systems of classification. Based on Frederick Kiesler’s 1942 design for Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, the installation is as tricky and self-reflective as a hall of mirrors.

The dislocating effect begins with the strange, convex shape of the birch-paneled room. The walls are studded with wood brackets holding what appear to be colorful tiles. Actually, they are Polaroids of out-of-focus details from maps.

A series of 12 “guides” to the installation provide sources for fragments of information painted on the wood brackets. But each guide offers a different frame of reference, pertaining to Guggenheim, her gallery or even the geographical regions in the photos.

As you immerse yourself in it, this witty, extraordinarily intelligent piece begins to suggest an analog to the way the mind sifts through immense quantities of information that may reaffirm, negate or enlarge on facts the brain already has stored away.

Una Barth groups black-and-white photographs and abstract images taken from various sources to create a heightened awareness of seeing as a visceral activity. The work forces you to become aware of the visceral activity of looking and the invasive bullying nature of shock effects. In “Untitled No. 6, Configuration No. 2,” Barth juxtaposes images of a helicopter’s beam in the night sky with a solar eclipse, a dizzying sunburst pattern and a woman picked out of the darkness by a conical beam of light. The abrupt light and dark contrasts, the optical strain induced by the graphic pattern and the emphasis on both revelation and concealment create a cruelly intense effect.

Connie Hatch’s photo-and-text installation, “Some Americans” from “A Display of Visual Inequity: Forced to Disappear,” makes for some fascinating reading. But the visual and visceral impact of the piece doesn’t have enough oomph.

Illuminated by lights on the floor, 24 black-and-white photo-transparencies of faces cast elongated shadows of themselves on the wall. The faces belong to people who have “disappeared”--died before their time or simply vanished due to causes beyond their control.

The images come from various sources: the face of a little girl who disappeared from her home, from a carpet-cleaning ad; the image of the blues singer Bessie Smith, who died after being denied admittance to a “whites only” hospital, from an album cover. Texts explain the circumstances of each case.

But the lighting effects--which also cause the viewer’s shadow to fall across the images--aren’t sufficiently dramatic to create a sense of the “transitoriness of memory,” as the catalogue suggests, or notion that the viewer is momentarily blotting out history.

Culled from biology textbooks, Bazyk’s brightly colored, hugely enlarged free-standing and hanging models of blood cells, bones, pupae and other biological imagery have the inviting, fun-zone look of a children’s museum display. But the premise behind this installation--that science today offers only cold, irrelevant theories rather than warm, friendly facts we can observe for ourselves--seems confused.