URBAN ART : Color and Light

In one of the city’s most unusual art outposts, the only paint in the place is that covering the walls. At Cyberspace Gallery (the name comes from the imaginary fields that take shape in virtual reality’s synthetic world), computers, virtual reality and holography are the primary media.

In the West Hollywood gallery’s inaugural show three months ago, you could watch a 3-D computer video display in which a man and a woman appeared to converge. The latest exhibit includes a dummy standing next to a chest of drawers. Open a drawer and a camera takes a picture of your face and projects it onto the monitor that serves as the dummy’s head.

Not your usual gallery experience? That’s the point, says curator Patric Prince, a Cal State L. A. art history professor . “Thousands of artists use new media and have no venue for showing it,” she says. “I’m not talking about just computers, but even stuff like lava lamps. We wanted to give a home to what is otherwise underground work.”

The market being what it is for computer art, lava-lamp art and other untraditional work, the gallery is unabashedly low-budget, and sales are a sideline at most. Prince thinks of the gallery as an experiment in the future of art. “When I said 10 years ago that we’d be looking at this kind of work, people looked at me with those quiet little smiles they’d use if I said I’d been abducted by aliens. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to tell them that those ‘experiences of the future’ are available now.”