ART REVIEW : ‘Voyage’ Criss-Crosses Science and Art

“Voyage to the Nth Dimension” playfully proposes that science-fiction inspires some of the most interesting art being made today. With chaos theory, genetic hybridization and drug-induced reverie very much at the center of today’s discussions about the mysterious sources of creativity, this summer group show at Sue Spaid Fine Art provides a timely, if fleeting, sketch of the intersections between science and art.

The show includes photographs, sculptures, paintings and drawings. When these six artists use science as an authoritative crutch for their otherwise aesthetically empty constructions, their work suffers. When they combine the superficial guise of science with the true purposelessness of art, their double-edged objects take off.

Michael Joachin Grey’s purple, Play Doh-coated telescope--the largest, most weighty and portentous piece--anchors the exhibition. It returns the sophistication and difficulty of complex observation to childhood playtime. Grey’s useless instrument insists that sculpture does not provide its viewers with something to look through, but something to look at. Stopping vision in the mute physicality of matter is the point of his lumpy, hand-crafted telescope.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Rory Devine’s “Untitled (German Landscape Painting)” replaces the illusions in a Caspar David Friedrich painting with words printed in black on the gallery wall. In his clever eradication of illusionism, Devine trades one kind of representation for another, more abstract model. His work evokes the loss that occurs when painting turns to language.

Fred Tomaselli’s jam-packed galaxies of aspirin, antacids, amphetamines and saccharine, and Erik Otsea’s brutal cross-breeding of animals and war machines steal the show. Both amusing and menacing, they bring science and art together in a tense mix that generates a surplus of ambivalence.

To “paint” skyscapes and abstractions, Tomaselli encases illegal and over-the-counter drugs in resin. His weird materialist critique of Modernist art locates its sense of disembodied transcendence in one’s mind. In his exquisitely artificial images, painting’s Utopian impulse returns to the body. Consciousness is shown to be an invisible but undeniably real galaxy, far more intimate and gripping than painted abstractions.

Otsea uses a bird and a fish, both dead, along with a model fighter jet and submarine to create a rudimentary family tree, which traces all the possible permutations of their interbreeding. His warped science lesson begins with photographs of each element, mounted on simple stands. The mock genealogy continues with neatly cut sections of the fish wedged between corresponding segments of the submarine. Likewise, the bird is interspersed between parts of the plane. At the end of Otsea’s demented depiction of the cruel collision between nature and culture, distinctions between air and sea collapse.

Larry Hammerness’ boldly colored tick-tack-toe board of large photographs and Joe Lewis’ charcoal and chalk drawings of loaded dice also play out of the intersection between the games of boys and the business of men. More illustrative and less twisted than the best works in the exhibition, they too locate male fantasy at a conflicted intersection between art and science.

Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Aug . 23 . Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.