ART REVIEWS : ‘Invitational’s’ Controlling Personas

The “Invitational 93” at Regen Projects showcases four Los Angeles artists at the beginning of their careers: Frances Stark, Jennifer Pastor, Toba Khedoori and Catherine Opie. Disparate in style, medium and subject matter, their work shares at least one quality--the strong sense of a controlling artistic persona. These personas are positioned along a graded continuum. On one end, we get the self-in-training--incipiency (however tongue-in-cheek) as identity. On the other end, a crystalline self, forged by anger.

Stark is the edgy romantic, spinning a patchwork Bildungsroman out of scraps of late-adolescent debris. A card-carrying member of the cult of Self, she is obsessed with dissecting the minutiae of her own life, desperately willing the pieces to assume a coherent shape. Yet she is simultaneously ironic about the possibility of taking her place in the pantheon of great artists as heroes, prophets, outsiders and martyrs.

Here, she juxtaposes a well-fingered copy of Henry Miller’s “Sexus” with a simulation thereof, into which the first three pages have been painstakingly copied and the rest left blank. Aping a role model can be exhausting, especially when his shoes don’t exactly fit. Giving it up is a decision, too, as the “incompletes” and “missed semesters” on Stark’s otherwise impressive college transcript (again copied in carbon paper) likewise indicate. This institutional portrait of the artist as divided self--peripatetic wastrel and Type-A omnivore--suggests that maturity is a chimera and fumbling is productive.

Whereas Stark trades on wry humor, Pastor opts for absurdity. Her sculptures are impressively engineered and skillfully constructed. Formally, they make sense; conceptually, they tend toward eccentricity. Her piece for this show has the feel of a philosophical experiment in a high-tech, designer laboratory. A steel and resin table is pierced by a tall, double-headed lamp: One side sheds light on a delicate bird’s nest; the other warms up a chilly, steel replica. Pastor transmutes Plato’s myth of the cave (Where or what is reality?) into an overheated and overfunded Silicon Valley tableau. Her interest is in the operations of artifice, but her byword is studied irrationality.

Khedoori is far more self-effacing, though her work is massive in scale. Huge expanses of white paper hang on the wall, their surfaces ripped, mottled and covered with wax and stray dog hairs. Like dream screens, they seem at once white-hot and coolly impassive. They reveal nothing as they wait for something to happen. Something does; incidental images appear--a row of boxcars, a series of explosions. But nothing is explained. Khedoori favors poetic indeterminacy, but never at the expense of formal discipline. The beauty of these objects lies in the fact that they are both raw and finished, opaque and sheer.

Opie seduces us into a confrontation. Her photographic portraits, with their lusciously colored backgrounds and amply pierced and tattooed sitters, instantly trigger voyeuristic attention. But what happens to the voyeur when she realizes she isn’t looking at what she thought she was?

An image that resembles a father and teen-age son reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to picture two women; a woman with a perfect set of false eyelashes and a Junior League flip bears the traces of a five o’clock shadow. Is this a woman? A man? A woman made up to resemble a woman who looks like a man? What’s unsettled here is not only the identity of the sitter, but that of the viewer, as well. Opie illustrates the tyranny of gender and decries the sharply circumscribed notion of beauty it allows. In so doing, she opens up a different, and more open (if still not unbounded) realm of desire. Her work is bedazzling.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424 , through Oct . 30. Closed Sunday and Monday .

Moondancing: Fred Stonehouse’s paintings evoke a moonlit world where smoking angels sob, animal heads perch upon human bodies, and overripe fruits drool, as if enticed by their own corrupted flesh.

If Stonehouse’s imagery is rife with anachronism and incongruity, so, too, is his style. Here, the varnished surfaces of late Medieval painting are wed to the magic realism of Mexican folk art. Image is likewise wedded to text. Inscribed on white banners or spelled out in puffs of smoke are Latin or Spanish phrases, some of which translate to “The Unknown God” and “Too Pure for This Earth.”

These paintings at Caplan Gallery imagine the end of the world. Yet, unlike the prurient, doomsday fantasies of Hieronymous Bosch, Stonehouse’s images are curiously flat, without affect. Perhaps this is because they are not fevered visions, but knowing pastisches. Nor are they, despite all indications, religious paintings. Why, then, such an insistently Christian iconography--wounded lambs, creatures with translucent wings, even a disembodied hand whose falling teardrops form a Latin cross?

On the one hand, it is about the creation of a certain look. Indeed, these paintings are remarkably self-conscious; this is part of their seduction. At a time when crucifixes and monastic garb are featured in Vogue, however, Stonehouse has to beware being overtaken by the sheen of fashion.

On the other hand, religious symbols provide a way into a series of questions that are otherwise too difficult to approach. Once in, we begin to read things differently. Details that might have seemed tangential become important.

In one image, for example, a cigarette-smoking figure clutches a tiny, dying shark. What is most interesting, however, are the figure’s tattoos: an eye, a light bulb, a hand and a question mark. Without exactly saying so, Stonehouse presses the issues of vision, knowledge, action and faith. He suggests that revelation is not always a matter of plumbing the depths, but sometimes of scratching the surface.

* Caplan Gallery, 2224 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-2170. through Oct. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.