Display’s Small Photos Demand a Closer Look : By NANCY KAPITANOFF

You will have to slow your pace to really take in the images in the photography show at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. There’s no way to just come in, scan the images from one vantage point and get a sense of their content, technique or impact.

That’s because almost all of the 49 photographs by five artists are no larger than 5 by 7 inches. If you want to see them, you’re going to have to move up close.

“There’s something inherently intimate about a small photograph,” said gallery director Paul Kopeikin, who decided to organize his first group show, “Small Is Beautiful”, after several photographers showed him their small images.

“There’s a process of discovery as you get closer and closer, and a payoff at the end,” said Victor Raphael, a Los Angeles-based artist in the show. “In that one-to-one relationship, you’re affected differently. A lot more gets revealed to you.”

Raphael took his Polaroid camera to the Getty Museum--”a place I can use as a refuge and resource for peace of mind,” he said--and photographed everything from sculpture and Van Gogh’s painting, “Les Iris,” to columns, vestibule ceilings, atrium floors and garage doors.

Applying gold and metal leaf to his Polaroid prints, he created his “own take and spin” on the things that caught his eye, he said.

With this enhancement of his images, ancient sculptures have been transported through time. Flooring patterns and structural and design elements that most of us never notice now seem rather captivating.

“The Polaroid is something that everybody understands,” he said. “There is a democratic nature to it. I make something special out of something common.”

Los Angeles-based photographer Margaret Moulton has made up the diptychs and triptychs of her “States of Grace” series from black-and-white photographs that she has taken over the years.

“It was fun to combine images that I’ve had for a long time,” she said. “The ideas suggested by the combinations are an unearned gift. They tap into an intuitive part of my experience.”

The triptych--”Sheer Abandon”--with two images of a child frolicking on the grass, and one image of feet sticking out from water--convey those few moments when one didn’t have to think about anything else but spinning around in delight. Her visions of “Angels,” including a girl wearing a 4-H Club uniform and a woman watching a softball game, relate to each other in their form and content. Juxtapositions in her other works convey a more ominous tone, relating to the issues of poverty and race.

Moulton thinks of these works “as visual poems or haiku,” she said. “I give viewers enough information to keep them going. I want them to stop and look and see what comes up for them.”

In each of J. John Priola’s manipulated, hand-toned gelatin silver prints, the frames are clearly not extraneous, but part of each piece. Titles have been attached to the rich, dark wood that serves to heighten the highly theatrical nature of his allegorical compositions.

The San Francisco-based multimedia artist appropriates imagery from 16th- through 18th-Century painting and sculpture “to talk about sexual issues and gender, and the theories of Carl Jung,” he said. “There is always a duality--such as beauty and ugliness or beauty and a shocking element.”

In “Guilt” he discusses homosexuality through a tableau based on a Jean-Honore Fragonard painting. In “Bonds of Love,” a used condom and an open hand are each surrounded by honeysuckle. “David and Goliath” presents a dual self-portrait.

John Woolf makes reflective plate photographs that he calls “Goldtypes.” Images printed on film positives are placed on top of gold-leafed reflecting plates. Contained in gold-leaf frames, the image and frame, like in Priola’s work, form a singular object.

“I have chosen to photograph late Hellenistic and Roman sculpture, from the 2nd Century B.C. to the 2nd Century A.D., because this period captures the transition from the Greek ‘ideal’ of the human form to the Roman ‘portrait’ of the individual personality. To me this transition is the first, and perhaps the most eloquent, expression of the ‘modern’ sensibility,” he said in his artist’s statement.

French photographer Thierry Urbain has captured wide-open desert landscapes in his surrealistic black-and-white images that resemble scenes from a science-fiction film. The contradiction of containing such vast space in such small photographs serves to magnify their mystery.

“Small Is Beautiful” is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Jan. 20 at Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave . , Los Angeles. Call (213) 937-0765.

DIGITAL DISPLAY: The CyberSpace Gallery, which opened this fall in the EZTV Video Center to give ongoing exposure to computer mediated art and the artists who create it, is presenting its second group show.

Although the first exhibit contained primarily installation projects, this show of work by 16 artists consists of mostly wall art. A national competition, it was juried by Patric D. Prince and Randal Oliver.

“At EZTV, we’ve had a 10-year interest in digital art,” said Michael Masucci, curator at EZTV and co-director of the CyberSpace Gallery. He said they opened the

gallery because “there are no places to see digital art on a regular basis. We want to be a liaison between the underground and the traditional art institutes, to help educate the museum community.”

Chronologically, the show begins not with a digital work, but with Guy Marsden’s animated, analog computer piece, “Coloura Ethera.” Colorful abstract images dance on a monitor enclosed by a cabinet.

“There’s an analog computer inside of it. It’s 10 years old, kind of a computer antique,” Masucci said. “But it stands the test of time. It’s a beautiful image with almost three-dimensional depth. I still enjoy seeing it.”

The more contemporary installation, “Art Dresser” by Magi Bollock, is an interactive computer and video piece that comments on the pressure on women to conform to society’s standards for female beauty, and the media’s role in selling those images.

A viewer can sit at this re-creation of a woman’s dresser--adorned with mirrors, a small lamp, a lipstick, a purple crocheted doily and a picture of a loving aunt--and add her or his image to the piece. Additionally, participants can run a choice of animations over their own images to ponder various notions of beauty.

Several different printing processes and art techniques are represented in the wall art pieces. Karin Schminke’s “Sycamore” digital photograph was printed on the high-quality Iris printer. Dorothy S. Krause has merged and manipulated images on her Iris print, “Crusader,” and then enhanced it with pastel and gold leaf. Frank Rozasy has embellished his electrostatic reproduction, “The Lines and Dots Began to Eat Her Body” with a gestural use of paint.

Paul Brown’s “Baudot of the Mysteries of Telex Revealed” is a laser print. Dona Geib realized her “Boxed Poems/Repeat” through a thermal transfer on paper. Edie Paul has created a collage of video prints in “The Laughing Cobra.”

Other artists represented in the show are Diane Fenster, John M. Gage, Vincent Koloski, Erol Otus, Teresa D. Parks, Susan Ressler, Gerd Struwe and Mara Wave.

The show at CyberSpace Gallery is open 2:30 to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, noon to 6 p.m. on Saturdays , through Feb. 28 in the EZTV building, 8547 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Call (310) 657-1532.