ART REVIEWS : ‘The Panic Zone’ Has Questions for the Media

It seems to come straight out of a mid-’70s blaxploitation film: he, bearded and well-muscled, smiles for the camera, cradling a long-barreled gun in his arms; she, dressed all in white, stares lovingly up at him. Over their heads float the words BLAST EM! --conjuring in one blow the glamour, brutality and cynicism particular to a certain fictionalized vision of urban crime.

This image, however, like the others in “The Panic Zone--Home Boys--and The Hooda,” photographer Donald Fergusson’s compelling debut exhibition at Bess Cutler Gallery, was not staged on a studio back lot. These images were shot on the streets of South-Central and East Los Angeles, where reality has lately proven more dramatic and more shocking than anything Hollywood might contrive.

Or so, Fergusson implies, we are led to believe by the media that present that reality to us; urban warfare, after all, makes not only good box office but good copy.

Fergusson’s black-and-white images record what the artist sees in the most economically depressed communities of Los Angeles: the extraordinary rendered banal by sheer force of repetition: graffiti-stained walls, police officers patrolling the streets with rifles slung absent-mindedly over their shoulders, bodies being carried away in zippered white bags.

But these images do not lay claim to the “truth” of what they depict. For the tensions they interrogate are only secondarily those between the powerful and the disenfranchised. What the work focuses upon instead are the hazy lines of demarcation between reportage and dramatization. At a time when reality-based TV dominates the airwaves (and is indistinguishable from the news or the movie-of-the-week) and in a place where an amateur piece of videotape destroyed the credibility of the city’s police force, this focus has become especially important.

To that end, Fergusson sets up a conflict between the disappointingly mundane images and the hyper-inflammatory texts that accompany them: “BLAST EM!,” “SOUTH CENTRAL ZONE WAR!,” “DARE TO WATCH DA HOODA.” The language functions doubly, providing the works with the requisite drama as well as an ironic commentary on our desire for that drama--a desire too regularly indulged by those who provide us with both our information and our entertainment.

The work falters only where the artist himself, affixing a pair of bullet-ridden windshields to the gallery wall, gives in to our taste for the sensational. Here, he compromises his critical role in order to play ghetto showman. It’s an unappealing turn, and one that foregrounds the tricky issue of class. For although he lives and works in East L.A., Fergusson was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and educated abroad--in England, and, most recently, at CalArts.

Questions of exploitation have long haunted the history of documentary photography. Fergusson cannot be expected to offer the definitive answers to those questions. But neither can he be permitted to circumvent them. Perhaps in his next body of work, this very interesting artist will widen his focus in order to take in--and at least begin to investigate--his own very powerful photographic apparatus.

Donald Fergusson at Bess Cutler, 903 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-6673. Closed Mondays. Through Jan. 29.

4 Women’s Installations: If there is something instinctively wrongheaded about an exhibition whose participants are grouped solely on the basis of their sex, there is at the same time something very necessary about providing a space for those who have been systematically excluded because of it.

This is both the shortcoming and the virtue of “Four Sites” at John Thomas Gallery, a quartet of small installations by women, ranging from the surreal to the overtly feminist, from the pensive to the quirkily phenomenological.

“Eclipse,” by Connie Zehr, materializes one of the artist’s dreams; as such, it is the most hermetically sealed of the installations. A massive polystyrene fireplace, painted shades of hot red and orange, dominates the three-dimensional tableau. A headless figure walking a tightrope is balanced delicately upon the hearth; in front of it lies a carpet of stones strewn with green wax leaves and a toppled wax head. The Flintstones-like dimensions of the fireplace aside, “Eclipse” is stylishly moody. But the look it appropriates from Surrealism is jarring in light of its failure to engage with that system’s larger politics.

Sandra Rowe’s installation mires text within a constructed space in order to explore the perfunctory nature of women’s lives. Two wooden doors face each other across a field of dirt. On one is inscribed “She Lived”; on the other, “She Died.” On the back wall, all but obscured by washes of gold-toned paint, are two stories told in clipped sentences, one woman’s “happy” ending barely distinguishable from the other’s brutal fall. The piece is affecting, marred only by the inclusion of four small assemblages whose commodity orientation is at odds with the installation’s more broadly didactic intent.

Suvan Geer’s sound-active installation, “Coverup,” addresses the human instinct toward self-preservation; as such, it provides an interesting counterpoint to Rowe’s scenario. Here, three large headpieces--made of beeswax, pine-cone scales and tree bark--are mounted upon the wall, metaphors for those devices we invent to protect us both physically and psychically. Yet those devices are neither salutary nor redemptive; in fitting the headpieces with a mechanism that projects the sound of panicked breathing whenever a viewer is positioned under them, Geer insists that all that propels them--and us--is fear.

In its mix of the playful and the philosophically speculative, Judy Sugden’s work, which utilizes everyday objects to shatter the time/space continuum that orders our world, is by far the standout of the exhibition. In “Cages Beyond,” a large bird cage propped up on a wooden table appears as if halfway submerged into the wall. Turn around to look at the wall opposite, and the missing half has materialized, the inexplicably invisible made all the more inexplicably visible.

What Sugden has done, in fact, is to sever the assemblage in two, affixing either side to opposite walls at vertiginous angles. But the effect is that of the fluidity of forms, transgressing the heretofore unbridgeable boundaries of time, space and logic and coming out unscathed but irreversibly altered at the other end. That is, of course, precisely what the best art does to and for us. And although this isn’t true of all the work in the exhibition, Sugden’s wonderful work certainly qualifies.

“Four Sites,” at John Thomas Gallery, 602 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; (310) 396-6096. Closed Mondays. Through Feb. 1. Monstrous Images: If you think you are familiar with L.A. artist Tim Ebner’s work--which in the past has interrogated the possibilities for abstract painting in a post-industrial, consumer-oriented society--prepare to do a double take on your way into Rosamund Felsen Gallery.

Forget single or multipart panels resembling terrazzo or linoleum flooring, or dense layers of Dunn-Edwards house paint coated with ultra-shiny resin. Think hundreds of grimacing monsters--fangs bared, eyes blazing and claws out--covering massive canvases from edge to edge, like serial images borrowed from a recurrent nightmare, or a single jammed frame of a Japanese horror film.

In some of the images, the monsters are intercut with forms that resonate with the art historical rather than the popular imagination--rudimentary bowls, discs and wheels flattened against the painted surface in the manner of Terry Winters. In others, the monsters overlie grids of monochromatic stripes, which refer to Ebner’s own history and iconography--the unavoidable subtext of this work.

Along with the large paintings and two plaster objects whose curved contours echo the paintings’ mysterious, half-articulated forms, the exhibition includes two beds: a maple four-poster version, which belongs to the artist; and a futon tucked into a darkened alcove, belonging to a close friend.

The beds are indeed for sale, each accompanied by a small black crucifix painting designed to hang overhead. But they are present in the show, the artist insists, for his own sake--to betoken intimacy, to help counteract the alienation of experiencing one’s work in the oppressively sterile gallery space.

On the one hand, such emblems of the artist’s private psychodrama seem absurd in this context. On the other, their inclusion is a move that is less ingenuous than clever. For in a show like this one, where the informed viewer will probably spend more time speculating about the artist’s abrupt shift in style than actually looking at the work, the presence of Ebner’s most personal possession insists upon--and simultaneously ridicules--the whole voyeuristic spectacle.

As for the paintings, they suggest that painterly expressiveness is far from bankrupt. Bright, energetic, deftly worked and amusing, they mix up “high” culture with “low,” personal imagery with communal myth. Beyond that, we will have to wait and see. Then again, isn’t that enough?

Tim Ebner at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd.; (310) 652-9172. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Feb. 1. Idiosyncratic Universe: When we lament childhood’s passing, it is not the loss of innocence that we mourn; it is the loss of the only time in our lives when we are permitted to indulge obsessiveness, spirituality and millenarian thought without being branded insane, antisocial or both.

Or so suggest the spectacular paintings of Houston-based Lee Smith, on view at Koplin Gallery. With an iconography taken straight from pre-1960s suburbia (wading through marshes, signaling to Mars and test-firing rockets; hilltop levitations, back-yard forts and pet burials) and an alarmingly post-nuclear palette (bright green skins and ruby-red earth), Smith fabricates an idiosyncratic universe where all things are possible and perhaps even probable.

Peopled by blank-faced children whose stiff movements seem to be preordained by ritual, this is a universe that adults can inhabit only by proxy. In “Two Finger Levitate,” grown-ups are signified by a tiny light shining in a tiny window of a house in the far distance. But where this light is mundane, the light that shines on the world of children is extraordinary--candles crowned by glowing yellow halos, and the sky above exploding into purple swirls and gusts.

If the work of other artists currently exploring the modalities of childhood and adolescence--Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley among them--seems rather cynical by contrast, this is not to say that Smith’s work is entirely romantic. For there is a quiet but palpable malevolence lurking beneath its skin, waiting--patiently, so far--for the right moment to erupt.

Lee Smith at Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica; (310 319-9956. Closed Sundays and Mondays . Through Feb. 1.