Syrop’s ‘Dead’: Chilling, Mind-Boggling

Mitchell Syrop’s latest installation combines the logic of crossword puzzles with the awkwardness of high school and the unevenness of cheap wallpaper. At once chilling, goofy and mind-boggling, “Why I Wish I Was Dead” is the most ambitious, engaging and thought-provoking work he has made.

An expanded version of his 1992 exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Syrop’s work-in-progress at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is a project he has worked on intermittently since 1974, when he was still an art student.

Its current manifestation includes five gigantic wall-mounted grids of taut monofilament from which hang thousands of 8-by-10-inch laser-printed senior portraits. A sixth web of monofilament runs between two walls, allowing Syrop to suspend yearbook photos in three-dimensions.

Being works in progress, more than half of the slots in the grids are still empty. Scattered around the floor are stacks of candidates for many of the blank spaces. Some recently printed images, to which hooks haven’t yet been affixed, are push-pinned to the wall in the positions they’ll soon occupy.

In the middle of the gallery, cardboard boxes packed with portraits are lined up next to Syrop’s desk, where he is scheduled to work on and off for the duration of the exhibit. Despite the presence of a computer, scanner and printer, his quirky research is low-tech, hands-on and labor-intensive.

Syrop uses the computer only to enlarge, crop and reverse the photographs--to ensure that the faces are the same scale, that clothing is an incidental trait, and that the heads tip at similar angles.

Culled from what must be a daunting collection of yearbooks from 1968-1976 (the year color photos where introduced), these black-and-white pictures of graduating seniors are arranged in groupings that share characteristics.

With an impressive sensitivity to detail, Syrop masterfully matches hairstyles, poses, facial features and expressions. Scanning his grids--the largest of which has slots for almost 1,000 pictures--is like watching a slow-motion, low-budget version of morphing: a fair-skinned boy with wide sideburns and bangs mutates into a curly-haired nerd with glasses and glazed eyes. And so on, until extremely different people are linked in a potentially infinite series of striking overlaps and strange similarities.

Syrop’s art is exciting because there are no borders between his fluid groupings. Every trait that might establish the identity of a subgroup also belongs to at least one other cluster of students. The viewer’s imaginative participation is required to make connections among myriad differences.

Although each of the wall-mounted grids contains only one category of people--such as white men, black men, white women or teachers--it isn’t difficult to imagine that Syrop could find enough portraits to link all his grids. Boxes labeled “Spain” and “Asia” suggest that this might be in the works. His small, 3-D grid, which includes students and teachers, takes a step in this direction.

Even in its current state, Syrop’s project is a noble antidote to forcing individuals into restrictive categories. His yearbook pictures are inspiring because they ask us to expand our capacity to discern differences within seemingly homogenous groups. By implication, Syrop’s project invites us to imagine a social order with as many categories as members.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-0433, through May 15. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Patience Is Rewarded: Scot Heywood’s paintings require considerable patience. At Ace Gallery, 14 powerfully understated works from the past three years generously reward the time you give them.

First, one’s eyes must adjust from the hustle and bustle of the street before being able to discern whether Heywood’s minimal abstractions are monochromes or consist of subtle combinations of different colors with matching values.

When capable of making these distinctions, the colors of the two-, three- and four-panel works seem to change. Gun-metal gray drifts toward olive-green; brick red softens into delicious burgundy; medicinal white melts into buttery, bleached gold; and the cold black of the void segues into the rich brown of the earth or the deep blue of the sky after sunset.

Although Heywood’s paintings are hard-edged and geometric, they’re not reductive. They don’t strip art down to a single, essential experience or pursue a sterile idea of purity. On the contrary, they embrace the unpredictability of ongoing experience, challenging our visual acuity by focusing our eyes on hair-splitting distinctions.

To get us to focus on exactly what we’re seeing, the 42-year-old, L.A.-based painter purges reference from his work. Although his triptychs echo the structure of Renaissance altarpieces and his horizontal diptychs recall the format of landscape paintings, neither of these genres inform his series.

More importantly, Heywood’s abstractions don’t look like watered-down versions of other more famous paintings. Wholly his own, they belong to an original body of work.

His most ambitious and eccentric series consists of four-part paintings divided diagonally and hung at 45-degree angles. Each looks like a baseball diamond with a fault running through it: Half the field seems to have slid out of position, causing second-base to travel halfway to first, which has ended up in the bleachers.

Because it’s impossible to determine where the centers of these paintings are located, they demand to be apprehended intuitively. Initially, they appear to be off-balance and out-of-control. After awhile, they settle into an oddly classical equilibrium.

Our struggle to concentrate gradually relaxes until easy-going perusal takes over. More appropriate to Heywood’s slow paintings, this drifting, indeterminate attention allows us to follow their complexity almost effortlessly.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., 2nd floor, (213) 935-4411, through April 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Punchless: In the past three months, three accomplished, L.A.-based abstract painters have exhibited sculpture along with their two-dimensional work. Unlike Roy Dowell’s and Sabina Ott’s successful forays into three-dimensions, Nancy Evans’ fence-like constructions pack none of the punch of her paintings.

At Sue Spaid Fine Art, six acrylics on panel are Evans’ best paintings. Less cluttered and more crisp than before, her new works flaunt a wide-range of painterly tactics.

Evans often coaxes pigment suspended in gel medium to behave like a collage. Even when seemingly torn, the surfaces of her layered paintings still seem gloppy and liquid. Contradictory fusions such as this charge her art with intrigue.

To Evans’ credit, no two paintings look alike. It is as if she has momentarily paused on a path of rapid discovery to carefully pursue six separate strands generated by her wild, painterly experimentation.

Each of these paths could sustain a significant, extensive series. In the past, rampant, almost out-of-control sampling has defined Evans’ method. Lately, refinement and sophistication have begun to enter the picture. More focus should ensure that her paintings will continue to move further away from her sculptures.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through April 30. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.