ART REVIEWS : Patrice Caire Plays Mind Games With Info Technology

The awe and intimidation that is the emotional dichotomy of life in the computer age hits home in New York artist Patrice Caire’s installation at Shoshana Wayne.

The pieces are bright, witty and, with their large scale and veiled references to PC boards and neural networks, familiar enough to encourage mental gamesmanship. Converted into something of an oversize map or game board, the gallery floor is bisected by wide colored lines and numbers that remake the viewer as a game pawn or tiny pinpoint in space. Dotting the floor are odd objects or “markers” of bright plastic or black rubber that seem involved in separate, yet interrelated, games of their own. Weird hybrids of technology mix with symbols for information. These objects suggest everything from data nets and Pop Art push buttons, to futuristic chess pieces or soft wedges of galactic green cheese.

There is considerable humor and interwoven cross-referencing among Caire’s often obscure objects. Part of the fascination with what she presents is the way her devices blend science and a chuckling acknowledgment of the ultimate opacity of technology’s devices. In some pieces Caire takes the mechanical, electronic signals that are the visual “profiles” of certain sounds usually seen on scopes as undulating linear forms. Translated into flat Day-Glo plexiglass forms with wavy edges, her structures manage to mix color and shape into a compound of sight and sound. They are as optically radiant as they are impossible to read as noise.

Caire’s installation is clearly about information. But information presented as a near-solid abstraction; a thing in itself. Her objects, some wound with pieces of audio- or videotape, relate art to a communication cycle where meaning is encoded, contained and then accessed by a viewer. For an information society like ours, Caire’s work touches on some interesting ideas about consumption--information as a product to be bought and sold.

Of course, those remarks are also a high-tech parody on the commodity mentality of the art market. Yet Caire’s parody avoids the Haim Steinbach/Jeff Koons’ one-liner about art-as-collectible. Her approach, although stimulated by her objects, doesn’t end with them. In Caire’s terms, the game’s the thing, and art is a dynamic process rather than a static conclusion.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, to July 14.

Life’s a Beach: If you’re from anywhere else, you know that Southern California has a certain image. Right--sun-drenched beaches dotted with young, tight bodies. Painter Susan Clover never has shaken that fascination with the fantasy, and this current batch of paintings of radiant young things soaking up the rays is about as perfect a pitch for the Southern California version of Paradise as you can find outside the chamber of commerce.

Clover is a remarkable painter who rejoices in the vibrancy of bright color. Skin in her paintings has the prismatic delectability of a slicked-down Wayne Thiebaud. Hair is a tangle of unblended colored lines, water a glassy surface of impossible pure blue. Strangely, even though most of these images suggest the casual framing of snapshots taken anywhere from Malibu to Newport, their sense of fiction is foremost.

It’s not the forced fantasy projected by D.J. Hall’s smiling, sunny socialites. Rather, it’s the dreamy perfection of endless summer, where adolescence lasts forever, the beaches are clean and smooth skin is as immutable as carved marble. Clover lets that teen-age fantasy stand in vacuous silence while her lack of editorial moralizing (or should I say parental nagging?) here seems less an omission than a sighed wish.

Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to June 30.

Landscape Lithos: Color built up like pavers set on sand makes Joan Nelson’s latest landscape-based lithographs scintillate and glow. Even when dealing with a clotted mass of dense, dark vegetation that looks like it was lifted from a corner of one of Claude Lorraine’s sweeping landscapes, Nelson’s leaves and shadows have their own vibrant integrity. It took 11 separate runs through the press to get that punch and, miraculously, the additive process never gets muddy.

Unfortunately, that careful color work takes a beating. On half the prints the artist chose to bathe the color and meticulous detail in a final veil of colored varnish. The lighter, more atmospheric images of linear tree limbs fingering blue sky can handle the shift in color with only a peripheral loss of vitality, but the darker images almost drown. If Nelson’s prints are complex images carefully built up layer by layer, David Austen’s seven new lithographs are simple to the point of being dashed off. Like his paintings, which feature enigmatic objects or figures, these prints of abstracted flower forms and standing figures are similarly uncommunicative. Most interesting are the ways the artist moves liquid line into a lithe body or washes ground into suggestions of cave or curtain.

Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., Los Angeles, to July 28.

Fragments and Details: Gary Willoughby makes architectural drawings the way Sizzler builds salad bars--something for everybody, all at one time. But where his drawings of idiotic architecture are great fun and an inventive delight, the faux -front wood constructions dappled with gold leaf and tiny architectural details just can’t get moving. It’s not that they don’t reach for historical earnestness or even a whiff of time itself with their subtle surface cracking and the exactness of their modeling. It’s just they seem too much like assignments from Model Building 101. Correct but stilted.

The drawings are another matter entirely. Brightly colored, they blend fragments of all kinds of architecture without consideration for scale or century. Architectural pipe dreams that would give a builder fits, they also have a flip Postmodern rightness, carrying the current penchant for historic appropriation one step further into blue sky silliness.

Richard Iri Gallery, 8172 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, to July 11.