Photographer Escapes Unemployment by Opening Own Art Gallery

Randall Scott has thought about opening an art gallery in an office building since 1989, when he was an intern at Security Pacific Bank’s art exhibition space in Costa Mesa.

“I saw how an art space could function in a corporate space. It’s an outlet for people in the building to enjoy and to bring their clients through. And building owners can say, ‘We support the arts,’ ” Scott said.

Last April, his idea became a reality when he started up the Randall Scott/TBA Gallery on the ground floor of a three-story office building in Santa Monica. The 29-year-old photographer had been working as the assistant director of Gallery at 817 in Los Angeles until January when the gallery abruptly closed.

After what he called “two months of hard-core unemployment,” he decided to pursue more entrepreneurial adventures. “Faced with the fact that you can’t find a job, you create one,” Scott said. “Even though the economic climate said not to do this, I did it.”

Scott found a building in the Fairfax area with empty space well-suited for showing art. He contacted the building’s leasing agent, the John Alle Co. A company representative responded immediately, saying another client with a building in Santa Monica had previously expressed interest in donating space to an artist who could use it as a studio. That client, David Houtz, was willing to meet with him.

“The first person I called was the person who said yes. It scared the hell out of me,” Scott said.

Houtz agreed to donate the rent on Scott’s space. “Everyone has been supportive, from the leasing agent to the building manager,” he added.

Scott is using his space to call attention to the work of emerging and early career artists primarily from the Los Angeles area. “I’m most set on showing artists who have a definite commitment to making art, whether it’s social or aesthetic, and who, looking five or 10 years down the line, will continue to be working and testing ideas,” Scott said.

The gallery’s current show, “Surface Two: part 2” presents the highly personal photo-based works of four artists. Craig Roper creates what he calls “Photographic Tapestries.” Multiple prints of a single identifiable image the size of snapshots have been chemically treated to alter the prints’ tones, and hung in rows to form tapestry-like wall-hangings.

In “Cowboys and Indians,” images of an Indian headdress make up the work’s perimeter, which surrounds pictures of an upside-down cowboy boot hung on a fence post. The boot is coming apart; nails stick out of its sole.

In “Spiral Jetty,” a photograph he found of a jetty project has been reproduced numerous times; but, as Roper has constantly alternated the spiraling pattern’s direction, the piece has a sense of movement.

Miki Warner shoots black-and-white photographs of cloth and prints them on photo linen. The images seem to take on the shapes of body forms and also convey the feeling of movement.

Laura Parker built layers of images in her “Vanitas” series with image fragments, Xerox fragments and bits and pieces of nature. She placed the layers under and on top of translucent paper, photographed these mysterious compositions and made cibachrome prints of them.

Cam Slocum’s painterly, impressionistic, gum bichromate on paper images of mission doors emit a haunting presence. The effect is derived from a layering of different pigments.

While Scott organizes a new show in this space every month, he is also working with artists to present non-commercial, site-specific installations in other venues, such as restaurants, houses or Laundromats. The “TBA” in the gallery’s name refers to these “To be arranged” shows, which Scott said he hopes to put together on the spur of the moment. “An artist could get a phone call, and the reception could be two days later. I like the spontaneity of it,” he said.

Scott said he could not have opened the gallery if the space hadn’t been donated. “There are a lot of people who support me--artists and collectors who like what’s happening and come in and help me out by buying work,” he said. “I’m living on a shoestring now, but in the long run, I’ll achieve a goal.”

“Surface Two: part 2” is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday at Randall Scott/TBA Gallery, 3201 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, through Aug. 29. Call (310) 828-1125.

RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE: Malinda Wyatt, director of the Jan Turner Gallery, has always been fascinated with the avant-garde art movement that flourished in Russia some years before and after the revolution of 1917.

But she thinks now is a particularly appropriate time to exhibit work by those artists. She has organized “Avant-garde of the 1920s: Works on Paper,” an exhibit of 10 works by six artists--five of them Russian, one of them German.

“The period is so rich and so well loved,” she said. “There are constant references to it in contemporary work. But also it’s been ruminating in my brain how we live in a world where cynicism has become so popular--where Bart Simpson is a hero to every 8-year-old--that I think it’s a good idea to look back at people who worked at that time. They had more problems in Russia and Germany than we have here now, yet there isn’t a shred of cynicism in this work. It’s all about problem solving and moving forward.”

The avant-garde movement evolved from the Russian folk art style and artists’ interpretations of Cubism and Futurism to non-representational Constructivism and Suprematism. The exhibit presents invigorated reflections of these schools of thought.

Four of the artists represented here are women: Antonina Fedorovna Sofronowa, Nadeschda Udalzowa, Ella Bergmann-Michel and Nina Kogan. Wyatt said they are not as well known as their male counterparts--Ivan Kljun and El Lissitzky--because no comprehensive monographs have been written about any of them.

Kogan’s three gouache on cardboard Suprematist compositions indicate her association with Kazimir Malevich, the inventor of Suprematism. She studied with the renowned avant-garde artist at the Popular Art Institute in Vitebsk, and subsequently taught at the school.

“These artists wanted change, and they wanted everyone to benefit from it,” Wyatt said. “They were hopeful.”

But by the end of the 1920s, the Soviet state would reject the new art styles and demand that artists produce propagandistic works of “socialist realism.”

“Avant-garde of the 1920s: Works on Paper” is open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday to Friday and 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday at Jan Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, through Sept. 5. Call (310) 271-4453.