ART REVIEWS : A Mix of Romper Room and Science Lab

Science and playtime converge in Michael Joaquin Grey’s overloaded installation at Stuart Regen Gallery.

Monkey bars covered with pewter foil and topped with aqua Plexiglas and oversize fake eyeballs stand like a monument to illogic in the center of the main gallery. A tricycle, over which Grey has slathered a layer of pastel-blue silicone, sits dysfunctionally in the back room’s corner, its left rear wheel protruding awkwardly on a 15-foot axle. And a 10-foot-long double telescope, mounted on the wall and coated with a purple Play-Doh-like substance, faces a yellowish lump of urethane cast in the shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s small brain.

At once hilarious and perplexing, Grey’s odd collection of high-tech materials and altered toys gives you the feeling that you have stumbled into a dream world that is a cross between Romper Room and an eccentric scientist’s laboratory.

Fifty-two crudely sculpted wads of modeling compound and at least three times as many building blocks cover the floor in three groupings. These arrangements could be random but also could represent the permutations of some biological process of chemical recombination. Cast in pewter, they have undergone another transformation that lifts them out of the worlds of playtime and science and deposits them in the realm of art--of precious collectibles that are continually rearranged by collectors and critics.

Grey’s willingness to exploit models of knowledge derived from contemporary genetics and supercomputers gives his second solo show (since earning his MFA at Yale two years ago) the superficial sheen of being hip to the latest propositions of theoretical physics.

Sculptures “carved” by lasers out of liquid resin, samples of the lightest substance that exists (low density silicon aerogel) and 70 wax-transfer images taken from a 3-D animation of a functioning neural network (made in collaboration with colleague Randolph Huff) demonstrate Grey’s fascination with the materials and procedures of advanced science.

If this tendency to celebrate the trappings of science gives his installation a for-specialists-only inaccessibility, its Silly-Putty cows, fiberglass hammerhead sharks, pewter-coated merry-go-round and photographs of the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz” deflate such pretentiousness. Grey isn’t interested in using his art to illustrate scientific principles. Nor does he intend to refer to science in order to intimidate uninitiated viewers.

For all its in-group theatrics and up-to-the-minute effects, his installation is remarkably Romantic. It doesn’t seek some brave new world of biogenetic mutations so much as it wants to discover the mysterious poetry at the basis of existence. The games it plays are those of a child--precocious enough to know that reality too often destroys fantasies, but still young enough to believe that the odds might be beaten.

Grey’s art can be thought of as a kinder, gentler version of that of his classmate and studio-partner, Matthew Barney. Last summer, Barney shaved all the hair off his body, donned a swimming cap and mountain climbing harness, and clambered around the gallery’s walls and ceilings by means of titanium clips and specially designed ice-screws as his assistant, dressed up like former Oakland Raiders football star Jim Otto, slid around on a dolly among sculptures made from Vaseline, video-taping the performance.

Where Barney’s art probed the quasi-masochistic compulsions of an antisocial perfectionist, Grey’s installation invites its audience into a less self-involved and more open-ended exploration. His jungle gym symbolically recalls Barney’s solo climb, but also recalls grade-school playgrounds and carefree recesses, shared events that emphasize group participation and, above all else, fun.

* Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Feb. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Puzzlement: The beautiful paintings that make up Fandra Chang’s first solo show at Shea & Bornstein Gallery aren’t really paintings. They puzzle because they’re not really anything else either.

Instead of stretching canvas over wooden frames and painting on its surface, the 27-year-old Art Center graduate stretches silk scrims over shallow, rectangular recesses in wood panels. On these delicate, soft-hued fabrics that have been treated with photo emulsion, she prints faint images of the surrounding wood’s grain. The objects that result are deeply intriguing. Their exacting craftsmanship is out of sync--if not at odds--with the intense visual ambiguity they generate.

Chang’s most arresting and subtle images are three vertically oriented diptychs titled “Rebound,” “Recurrence,” and “Recapitulation.” Each pair consists of a powder blue diamond centered in a 17-inch square of finely sanded maple. The diamonds neither slip behind the picture plane established by the wood at their perimeters nor come forward to intrude into the viewer’s space. Even though they seamlessly merge with the maple, they still seem to hover or float free of that more substantial material.

Simultaneously dissonant and perfectly resolved, Chang’s paintings focus with extreme precision on surfaces that just cannot be brought into focus. Disruption and coherence fuse in her intelligent art, giving physical form to many of the abstract issues central to a powerful strand of non-representational painting.

Thought of abstractly--or in strictly formal terms--her exquisitely crafted panels are backward paintings. Not only do they seem to expose painting’s literal backside to viewers, they also seem to reverse every relationship integral to this art.

Chang’s wooden frames do not function as physical supports for images so much as they constitute pictorial grounds themselves. Paint does not sit on skin-like surfaces so much as its effects are suffused into materials usually subordinated to supporting roles. Made without brushes or even any pigment, her images strip abstract painting of its traditional associations and procedures, denuding it of sentimentality and nostalgia.

The grain of the maple and its image in the silk appear to mirror one another in Chang’s deceptively clear diptychs. Each centralized diamond divides the remainder of the panel into four triangles. Each of these, in turn, splits into two apparently identical halves. Made from sections of lumber sliced in half lengthwise, their knots and distinctive granular patterns nearly, but not identically, double each other.

Chang thus orchestrates images that seem to have printed themselves. To the eye, every one of their sections could have resulted from the abutting area being inked and folded over upon it. Her paintings seem capable of both unfolding into infinity and collapsing into nothingness. They glimpse an impossible-to-picture space in which formlessness reigns.

As if thoroughly ambivalent about being either absolutely present or utterly invisible, Chang’s images pursue effects more related to photography and print-making. By deploying natural patterns and mechanical reproduction, they relocate painting in the realm of perception, as an unsentimental, sometimes inhuman activity. Chang’s paintings reward painstaking scrutiny with difficult beauty.

* Shea & Bornstein Gallery, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 452-4210, through Feb. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Mixed Bag: The small group of works by Joan Brown (1938-1990) at Koplin Gallery catches the Bay Area figurative painter at her best and her worst. Brown’s more intimate drawings preserve the quirky humor for which her art is remembered. Her larger enamels on canvas fall flat. They seem trapped in a world of new-age cliches, somewhere between the simplifications of her awful public obelisks and the all-accepting vacuity of a Pop painter who totally missed the biting sarcasm of that movement.

Brown’s acrylic paintings on paper of her friend Mary Julia have an offhanded freshness that is intensified by their tendency to situate their subjects in big fields of bright colors. Stylized, theatrical and sometimes downright decorative in their bold patterns, the flashy backgrounds contrast radically with the diminutive awkwardness of the isolated sitters.

The overall effect is charming but pointed. Like New Yorker cartoons with a kick, Brown’s pictures draw out our sympathy. They usually depict a common character who seems to be out of place, slightly embarrassed, but also secretly thrilled at finding herself in an unfamiliar situation. Brown’s best works embody an “Oh-wow-I-can’t-believe-it’s-me” feeling.

The two largest paintings in the exhibition, from the ‘80s, don’t maintain Brown’s trademark balance between portraiture and pattern-and-decoration. Although “Year of the Tiger” centers on a realistic portrayal of the artist among two-dimensional zodiac symbols, flat designs and Chinese diagrams, it lacks the loose, ad hoc quality that gives Brown’s smaller works their distinctiveness.

* Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 319-9956, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Dreamy: For her first solo show, Laura Cooper has transformed Sue Spaid Fine Art into an upside-down dreamland from which gravity has been banished. Sheets of uncolored muslin cover the ceiling from which hang almost all of Cooper’s intangible objects. The gallery’s lighting system has been relocated on the floor, evoking the sensation that we’re walking on the ceiling.

Tiny nine-tiered beds recall the fairy tale about the princess sensitive enough to feel a pea under as many mattresses. Three pieces refer to Rapunzel’s hair. An umbilical-like tail dangles from a woven rug affixed to the ceiling. A doll, whose head has been replaced by the artist’s own hair and whose body consists of a six-foot wool braid, hangs upside-down by the door. And four fabric tendrils sprout hands and feet, suggesting that body-less limbs are leaking through the ceiling.

Five little ladders made from the beaded chains used on light fixtures add to the sense of weightlessness of Cooper’s installation. A series of steps suspended by similar chains engages the bodies of adults and thus suggests that the rest of the show borders on being too cutesy. Although Cooper’s art tries to inhabit the magical space between wakefulness and sleep, and often calls to mind this pleasant sensation, it remains unconvincing if you’re not in the mood to be lulled by its low-tech illusions and standard effects.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Feb. 29. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.