ART REVIEWS : Khedoori Explores Being, Nothingness

An expanse of empty space can suggest many things: a promise yet unfulfilled; the split second before something happens; a pause when there is nothing to say, or a breath when there is too much.

In new work at Regen Projects, Toba Khedoori dramatizes the artist’s struggle with empty space--its metaphoric possibilities and very literal threat. For what is more menacing than nothingness? Could any evidence of the artist’s fallibility be more convincing?

Khedoori shows three wall-sized paintings, each composed of several sheets of paper stapled to the wall. The paintings are a bit like Herculean doodles, notations blown up into object lessons: a window drawn again and again, with only the most minute variations; a brick tunnel that goes on and on, like something one simply forgot to stop drawing; and a series of simple geometric forms, rendered in paint that is precisely the color of a blue ball-point pen.

Surrounded by vast expanses of white paper, blank except for the faint erasures, half-hearted smudges and cat hairs trapped under the surface’s thin layer of translucent wax, these images seem as if they were produced by someone obsessed with details, but oblivious to the larger picture.

Yet they are not as random as they might appear. The images are like asterisks that direct the eye elsewhere--to the space that surrounds them and the vexing question of how to master it.

Khedoori’s work is daring in its scale and use of beauty. Many younger artists are dashing to embrace beauty, this decade’s multipurpose if rather redundant aesthetic. Few, however, are willing to ensnare it as a means and not merely an end.

Khedoori’s work, by contrast, is haunting precisely so that it might be haunted by the spirit of speculation.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Feb. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Mixed Media: The inaugural exhibition at the Marc Foxx Gallery is an installation by emerging artist Amy Drezner. Though Drezner has in the past worked primarily in sculpture, this installation includes photography, film and wall painting. Such an across-the-board mix might elsewhere bespeak a certain arrogance. This installation, however, is so restrained that the room is almost empty.

Two black-and-white films run continuously. They announce the artist’s agenda in lyrical terms. One features a close-up image of the cascading waters of Niagra Falls, the other, the slow side-to-side motion of the Atlantic Ocean.

As Drezner intends, we become aware of the abstract nature of these filmic images: the contrasts between white and varied tones of gray; the interplay between horizontal and vertical axes; the dynamic potential of any circumscribed space.

A grid of irregular black dots painted on an adjacent wall has the inverse effect: It suggests the narrative potential of abstraction, insofar as the dots create shifting patterns that play with our habitual modes of perception. Yet once the viewer mentally connects the dots, the work is pretty much over.

Drezner is concerned with subtle mutations in perceptual fields and larger feats of optical trickery; in repetition and difference, and in the ways in which detachment can segue into obsession. This is fascinating territory, but its very complexity seems to have cowed the artist. She doesn’t embrace complexity, but is determined to conquer it instead.

The one piece of sculpture in the show--a large, balled-up chain of wax-impressions of a grasp--is far more provocative, suggesting one direction in which this promising artist might move. This spherical object is both abstract and narrative. The story it tells is stubbornly contradictory.

It concerns intense concentration, a single task performed over and over again with almost liturgical exactitude. It likewise concerns distraction, for one’s thoughts could only be elsewhere when creating something this awesomely numbing. For all its compression, it is open-ended,, while the rest of the poetic work in this installation is didactic.

* Marc Foxx, 3026 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-2841, through Feb. 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Word Painting: “Text Acts” is the title of an exhibition of JonMarc Edwards’ paintings at Newspace Gallery, in which text acts like all sorts of things: Chilkat blanket designs, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the gridded matrices of geometric abstraction. Text also acts like text, though in a distinctly contrarian fashion.

Edwards makes paintings out of words, though those words aren’t immediately legible. The neat, multicolored, capital letters that compose them are piled one atop another with ingenuity. Just enough air and light is admitted into the graphic ensembles to allow them to make sense as language, but not so much that they don’t also make sense as images.

These paintings are nothing like concrete poetry, though it seems as though they should be. They are much closer to encoded bits of information, like something a computer would spit out if it had been programmed by Arts & Crafts guru William Morris, with a taste for whimsy.

Our impulse, is to decipher Edwards’ artful forms, to tease out a linguistic or pictorial meaning. The artist rewards the effort with any number of witticisms.

“New York School” consists of vertical columns of layered words that refer to this heroic movement: gesture, myth, booze, theory. The surface is obscured by much flamboyantly dripped paint. The O in THEORY, with a drip running through the center, looks like a pint-sized Barnett Newman. So much for vast ambitions.

Edwards’ work is unlikely to celebrate a Modernist aesthetic like Abstract Expressionism. It proselytizes for Postmodernism, but he is no pedant. Edwards demonstrates the textual basis of all art with such blithe matter-of-factness that one has absolutely no inclination to disagree.

* Newspace Gallery, 6241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Feb. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Pictorial Homage: Rocky Schenk’s fuzzy, saturated and gloriously moody photographs at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery look as though they were produced in 1894, not 1994. Dark-toned and evocative, these images of recumbent women, strange clouds and trees at night result from a technique almost identical to Edward Steichen’s Whistler-inspired tonalism. They read as homages to Pictorialism and the Photo-Secession.

Schenk, however, isn’t interested merely in paying obeisance. He has a taste for mixed metaphors.

Ironically, thrown into the mix to undercut what are obviously Schenk’s own rather syrupy proclivities, those mixed-metaphoric, tongue-in-cheek images don’t work. These include a spookily amorphous image of something entirely prosaic: a Neo-Gothic tract house with a four-door American sedan parked in front.

This photograph looks a bit too much like a novelty postcard. So does an image of a castle with turrets, taken at Disneyland. The latter conjures a Disneyland photograph by Jack Pierson, and the comparison is not flattering.

Despite their historicism, these images are timely. Schenk’s romanticism dovetails perfectly with the kind of retrogressive sentimentality permeating the art world.

It also reads as a response to the dazzling ascent of digital media. For as computer-controlled optical trickery becomes more and more sophisticated, technologically and aesthetically, photography is looking more and more old-fashioned: a future anachronism in need of redefinition.

* G. Ray Hawkins, 908 Colorado Ave., (310) 394-5558, through Feb. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.