ART REVIEWS : Sharon Ellis: An Eye for Post-Symbolism

For the artist bent on fabricating a cosmology, the four seasons make an irresistible motif that affords the opportunity not merely to invent culture, but to invent nature--as if it were one’s own.

At Christopher Grimes Gallery, Sharon Ellis joins an august company with a spectacular suite of paintings on this theme. Ellis has lately become known for her kaleidoscopic abstractions. These vibrate like wind chimes echoing in a hallucinatory episode and shimmer like stained glass glimpsed during an attack of vertigo. They are both classically poetic and baroquely hip.

Though the high-key colors and the dense layers of visual information are consistent with the abstractions, Ellis’ new work is different in that it struggles to transcend its references (the woozy forms of ‘60s psychedelia, the ersatz depths of computer imaging, the doomsday sentiment of French Symbolism) and become something genuinely idiosyncratic.

Ellis is painfully attentive to detail--thousands of white-hot stars glistening in a clear-blue summer sky; a fine network of black tracery signifying the desolation autumn augurs; the cytoplasmic haze of clouds that, with the approach of winter, envelops heaven and Earth. There is something of the religious zealot in Ellis’ desire to picture all aspects of her world. Yet her obsession has nothing to do with rendering the real.

Like Matthew Barney, who is also enamored of an arcane system of his own devising, Ellis is a practitioner of New Millenarianism or, perhaps more properly, Post-Symbolism. Expect to see more of this soon.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Saturday.

Surplus of Narrative: Inspired by the terse, insistently ambiguous language of film noir, photographer Eileen Cowin’s best work has always been both laconic and enigmatic, filled with clues that never add up and sudden glimpses that quickly fade from view.

Cowin’s photo-text pieces at Domestic Setting, produced in collaboration with writer Louise Erdrich, are less impressive. Mostly, they suffer from a surplus of narrative.

Here, as usual, the images emerge from dark backgrounds--a pair of closed eyes, a wrapped package, a glowing glass of milk. In carefully juxtaposing such signifiers, Cowin conjures entire lives.

Erdrich’s texts--photographed as typewritten pages, as printed texts or as handwritten fragments--are meant as addenda to these fragmentary tales. But they dominate, insisting upon a particular point of view, narrative trajectory and conclusion.

Part of the problem is also that Erdrich’s poetic language feels heavy-handed:

I understand this is all about betrayal how my own lies don’t choke me and I drink the cool milk, the cool milk, rising slowly from the table in one long motion as the bell sounds, as the blood, oh my heart. . . .

Its melodramatics are overwhelming, and jar in relation to Cowin’s wry sense of the absurd. While it is always good to see an artist of Cowin’s stature move in new directions, in this case, the direction is poorly considered.

* Domestic Setting, 3774 Stewart Ave., (310) 397-7884, through Saturday.

Eschewing the Spectacular: It’s easy to understand why photographer Mark Citret isn’t very well known. It isn’t because his work isn’t interesting--it is, as this survey at Paul Kopeikin Gallery will attest. It’s because the work is unassuming--which is not to say that it is slight, because it isn’t.

Citret is attuned to all sorts of things: light streaming across snow-capped landscapes (this is surely owed to his years working with Ansel Adams); things that resemble other things (an iceberg that doubles as a Sphinx); the detail that gives away the pretense (a seascape marred by a piece of white paper, as hallucinatory as a stray marshmallow); the fantastic fictions inspired by factual representations (a cache of abandoned bathtubs arranged like ancient sarcophagi or sleeping cows).

Everything about these images eschews the spectacular--the light is dim, the graphic contrasts are muted, the surreal forms are hidden behind the scrim of the everyday. In the hands of someone else, these little epiphanies might be trumpeted as artistic triumphs. Here, they read as observations that are no less striking for their diffidence.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-0765, through June 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.