ART NOTEBOOK : Places to Uncover the Undiscovered

There’s a whole slice of the contemporary art scene that feeds on the thrill of discovery. Established artists and galleries might offer works with staying power--maybe even a shot at history--but some collectors and art viewers thrive instead on sniffing out the riskily new and untried: the unheralded young artist just out of school, the new gallery in an obscure but inexpensive location, the artist-run shows that advertise by word of mouth, not gallery guide.

To call this an art underground may be going a bit too far. Most artists--and all gallery owners and curators--are interested in getting artwork into the public eye. But it takes a little more looking to locate low-overhead places such as the following.

ART DERVISH: Even before she graduated from UCLA in 1988, 25-year-old Dianna Cohen, who is a painter, had developed a taste for organizing art shows for her peers. For two years, she co-curated UCLA’s undergraduate art exhibitions. And through a friend, she was also introduced to older artists’ “steam shows”: one-night events in large parking lots or other non-art spaces that often featured kinetic sculpture and that, Cohen said, were fraught with “fire and welding and steel and music.”

Since graduation, Cohen has organized five group shows--two of which were held in a working sheet-metal factory, which she and artist friends transformed into an art exhibition space during weekend downtime.

The two most recent exhibitions have been staged at a moveable art showcase Cohen has dubbed ATLA, a streamlined form of “at L.A.” It currently resides in a garage space in the La Brea-Beverly Boulevard area. Not quite a gallery--any artwork purchased is sold through the individual artist, not by Cohen as a dealer--it is one painter’s activist response to a lament voiced by most young or otherwise emerging artists: how hard it is to get work shown.

Cohen hopes to mount a total of 10 or more very different shows over five months; some may only last a day, she said.

Among the works shown in January at ATLA’s opening exhibition were a dream-based installation piece by John Boucher, mixed-media work by a 17-year-old artist known as Baqi, and serially blinking vintage suitcases wired with tiny Christmas tree lights by Wayne De Selle, who often serves as Cohen’s sounding board and co-curator. Cohen’s own work currently runs to striped oil-on-plywood puzzle paintings with interlocking jigsaw-cut extensions or missing pieces.

ATLA’s current show, “Media Bombardment,” presents work by Erika Greenberg, Jody Zellen and Mac James, three artists who use painting, photography and collage in different mixed-media proportions. The title, Cohen noted, refers both to the artists’ bombardment of their canvases with imagery, and to the information deluge emanating from television, advertising and the world in general.

Cohen is also planning to curate some shows for more mainstream galleries, although their scheduling and other approval processes seem to proceed rather more slowly than she does. “I have ideas, but they come up too quickly,” Cohen said. “I also believe in doing things rather than talking about them--because you could always get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

“Media Bombardment” through Feb . 20 at ATLA. Call (213) 931-3610 for location. Open 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays .

GARAGE SALES: Speaking of garages, the granddaddy of L.A. garage galleries, Thomas Solomon, will soon be moving from his two-car spaces to another location: an industrial-scale mechanics garage on Fairfax Avenue. Solomon had hoped to open his operation in the larger space yesterday, but construction delays have postponed the date until later this month or early in March.

Thomas Solomon opened his garage gallery on a residential street near Fairfax Avenue in 1988 and has been showing the work of emerging artists there since--with no sign, no listings, no advertising save historical Los Angeles postcards, mailed out selectively. He chose the garage format, Solomon has often explained, because of its intimate scale (“it makes for very focused viewing”) and because of the residential garage’s connotations of experimentation and discovery (Apple computers, Mattel toys and any number of rock ‘n’ roll bands started in humble garages).

In the new garage gallery, the address of which he does not yet want to reveal, Solomon’s operations will be on a larger scale. “It’s a different, industrial-type space,” Solomon said. “And I will be doing listings and advertising.” He’ll still be working with emerging, lesser-known artists, Solomon said. But he will also show work by better-known ones--some of whom probably got their start in his first two-car garage.

Thomas Solomon’s Garage, (213) 653-8980.

817 PICTURES: A set of brass street numbers on the gray door is all that identifies The Gallery at 817, a photography gallery that opened last October upstairs from the Pan Pacific Camera Center on La Brea Avenue.

Its roots are in a mix of frustration and philanthropy. Gallery Director Catherine Whyte Rhodes, a photographer who graduated last year from CalArts, was frustrated just trying to get her work seen by established gallery directors--nevermind landing a show--and at first went looking for a “really alternative, low-rent place” to serve as a forum for emerging photographers.

Steve Kaner, owner of Pan Pacific Camera, was willing to let her start a not-for-profit gallery in an upstairs space. According to their agreement, the gallery’s share of proceeds from sales will either be plowed back into operational costs or used to help fund photographic books, grants or other projects, Rhodes said.

“The overhead is low enough that I can show work that other galleries maybe can’t afford to show,” Rhodes said.

She said her focus will be on conceptual photography, although she recently made an exception to show the work of a 79-year-old Louisiana photographer, Fonville Winans.

On view through Saturday are solo shows of work by Gregor Kraus and Ross Amador--the first for each photographer.

The Gallery at 817, 817 N . La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 933-5614. Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday .

BORROWED TIME: Marly Stone--a photographer and mixed-media artist who lives in Oregon--came to Los Angeles for the first time in years, she said, in search of good gallery representation. Instead, she ended up with a donated, if temporary, gallery of her own in Venice.

Through Saturday, Stone will be manning a compact space provisionally dubbed the Alley Gallery, showing work ranging from recent sculpture-inspired photographs from Pietrasanta, Italy, to figurative sculpture composed of found railroad springs and other materials.

The space is one of three recently completed and as yet unleased small galleries in back of the Windward Farms building at the corner of Windward and Pacific. It was offered to Stone by Thomas Sewell, former publisher of a now-defunct local art publication called Main Magazine and co-owner of the building.

Sewell said he has been following Stone’s work--which is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris--and decided to lend her the space both to show off the new gallery spaces and to help her. “It’s such a drag trying to find a gallery--it can be so humiliating,” Sewell said. “I wanted her to have a good quick fast show.”

For Stone, who said she balked at first at the idea of representing her own work, the experience has been an intriguing one. Visitors so far have ranged from movie stars to street people to a lone pigeon who circumambulated the entire gallery two days in a row.

“I wasn’t sure if I could live with people’s reactions to my work every day,” Stone said. “Everybody isn’t always going to like you or your work. But something like this is good for you--watching different people liking different things.”

Marly Stone “Guides” through Saturday at the Alley Gallery, 1515 Park Row, Venice, (213) 301-9658. Open noon to 5 p.m. weekends and 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday .