Art Reviews : ‘U-Pic-It’: Focus on Photography’s Status

In “U-Pic-It,” Larry Hammerness transforms Sue Spaid Fine Art to resemble the foyer of a photo processing lab. Thirteen photographs are spread around the room, each in a different format: wall-sized murals, window transparencies, light-boxes, hand-toned prints. These are accompanied by price sheets, order forms, three-ring binders full of sample images and a couch, color-coded to the self-consciously spectacular photograph of a Malibu fire hanging above it.

However witty, “U-Pic-It” takes its place within the increasingly hoary tradition of post-Conceptual critique. Over a decade ago, Louise Lawler transmuted her New York gallery into a generic model of a bank, complete with potted plant and deposit slips. Like Lawler, Hammerness renders absurd the debate over whether the gallery is a space of commerce or one of disinterested contemplation.

In the process, he pinpoints the intellectual bankruptcy of forever wrestling with the question of photography’s status. If the specifics of the set-up deflect us from the fact that none of this is new, other things are compelling here.

The hundreds of images displayed in the binders encompass a range of categories, including “Inanimate Objects,” “Studio City Earthquake” and “Flowers.” Seemingly exhaustive, the choices are actually idiosyncratic. He undercuts photography’s status as Ur-medium encompassing all others, condensing and homogenizing the things of this world so that they fit neatly into its archive of images.

Then, there are the images themselves, boasting a mega-watt palette and an eye attuned to the well-ripened cliche. A life-sized cut-out of a skate-boarding icon, who once sliced across the ground at unimaginably high speed, is here congealed into the stuff of product placements. A scene of the empty Colorado desert mimics the style of mid-1970s “New Topographers,” for whom the most extraordinary images were those least marked by the interference of the photographer. In Hammerness’ version, the artist’s shadow is conspicuous.

Hammerness is also enamored of earthquakes, fires and other scenes of disaster. The irony is that the chaos these images evince contrasts markedly with Hammerness’ own sure sense of control.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Sunday.

New Meanings: In J. John Priola’s small, black-and-white photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery, such everyday objects as a wishbone, a pacifier and a jewel box are imbued with menace, absurdity or melancholy. Some are spotlit as harshly as commercial products; others are silhouetted like antique portraits. All, however, are isolated within a darkened void, disengaged from any narrative, until we begin fabricating narratives for them. It’s impossible not to.

If these objects are conceived as clues, the context is cinematic--all white lights and portentous swells of music. If these are mnemonic devices, it is therapeutic, as a photograph of a syringe would seem to insist. If these are pieces of evidence, the narrative context is juridical and matter-of-fact.

Indeed, the only images that jar are those in which matter-of-factness is eschewed for symbolism--such as an egg and an apple. These too easily devolve into hackneyed still-life studies, wherein classical beauty overwhelms the conceptual program.

The work as a whole is more ambitious. At the risk of staking a claim too grand for images so diminutive, one might argue that they function as allegories of the photographic project itself. Photography’s mandate is demonstrated as clearly as in any textbook.

Ordinary things are rendered extraordinary in and through the processes of representation (cropping, framing, lighting, etc.). Meaning is conceived as an after-effect, a residue of form.

In this case, form is so insistently sculptural it resonates with trickery. The objects seem to be winking at us. If trompe-l’oeil painting is uncanny by nature, these eccentric photographs redouble its effects. To become absorbed by their mundaneness is an unnerving experience.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-0765, through Saturday. * Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Eve., (213) 654-4731, through Saturday.