ART REVIEWS : Group Effort Using Science Pays Off

It’s summer. Families disappear on holiday, businesses juggle profits and vacation schedules, and galleries put up group shows. For those who enjoy the eclecticism of potluck, short-story anthologies or eating appetizers for dinner, the summer gallery season can offer a little of everything in one trip. It’s usually just a bite, but occasionally there is something with enough substance to make it worthwhile.

Four artists who use science or scientific systems as a springboard for ideas compose a show with some interesting highlights at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery. Charles Gaines uses a by-the-numbers approach to conceptually based image making. Counting is his method of objectifying, ordering and reshuffling the apparent nature of things. Like most systems, his imposed numerical ordering often bogs down as finite ideas try in vain to get a handle on infinite randomness. But there is more than philosophic musing here. The work presented also indicates a level of social frustration. Systems applied to people can create more problems than they solve. Gaines gives us the imprecision of thought, even when handled with utmost precision. It’s an interesting idea.

For “Faces: Men and Women” (1979), an extensive triptych of images, Gaines took straightforward frontal photographs of individuals a la Chuck Close. He then gridded each face into bland negative-type drawings made of tiny, obsessive, hand-numbered blocks that suggest computer digitalization. The final image is a composite outline of the same person mixed with outlines of all the other portraits done up to that point in the series. This last image is a hard-to-decipher linear layering which tries to merge all faces into one. But the pointed effect of the unifying system is to strip the men and women of what little identity their pictures do have--their sex, nationality and all personality.

“Submerged Text,” a more recent conceptual gambit, takes up one large wall of the gallery. For this deconstruction of look-for-it/you’ll-find-it ideological predisposition, Gaines has selected a short text taken from an interview with Sinead O’Connor. Gaines then deleted all the words and phrases except those which could be taken to refer in some way to African-Americans. Although each letter or word that was eliminated is numerically accounted for by the system, ironically they do not count. All sense of context which they would create is effectively nullified. The words remaining-- dance, tap, anger --amount to an inflammatory rehash of black stereotypes stimulated by the racist premise of the system.

Random systems are also the realm of Stefan Kurten’s “The Diversity of Life” paintings. Looking like pages from a cheap elementary school text where students must circle images that are somehow related, Kurten keeps expanding the game until everything seems to relate--or nothing does. There is a lot of wit and cynicism in these pale, transfer-like images which put us back in school trying to find the meaning of life. “Ignorance” gives us the human brain surrounded by stray thoughts of beer, the planets and credit cards--stuff from the daily hodgepodge of living. But the ringer is an image of a fetus in the top half of the painting. Like pregnancy, which can change everything--from downing a beer to worry over money and the future of the planet--the image matures from carefree to earnest.

Linda Roush’s “Blanc Wall” is a strangely alluring, yet hard to appreciate, installation. Probably because it strongly suggests a thin transparent wall covering made of mundane bubble pack plastic, we discount its sensual plays with light as mere theatrics. It’s not until we’re informed that the piece was laboriously woven on the wall from narrow strips of clear plastic shower curtain to form an embossed skin, that we begin to take note of the mirrored references to Islamic decorative mosque windows. Still, the connection between decorative, light-impregnated barriers which frame space remains tenuous.

Sharon Ellis’ color-saturated paintings apparently also have a basis in scientific systems: the chaos theory and fractals. More than science, however, the images glow with the acid intensity of ‘60s psychedelic record album art mixed with repetitive, other-world geometry of computer-generated imagery. Ellis’ hallucinatory landscapes are disturbing, wreathed by poisonous flowers, or dissolving behind organic shaped clots of expanding nothingness.

Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (213) 395-0222); to July 27, except Roush installation which ends Aug. 24. Closed Mondays.