ART REVIEW : John McCracken’s Sculptures Rooted in the Here and Now

Bathed in natural light, John McCracken’s beautifully installed exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery’s long, narrow, second-floor showroom (and adjoining open-air balcony) is a garden of unearthly delights. The pleasures it elicits have an otherworldly feel, though they’re firmly rooted in the here and now.

Five compact stainless-steel sculptures rest on ordinary pedestals and punctuate the gallery with flashes of silvery brilliance. These stout, four-, five- and six-sided forms appear to dissolve when you look directly at them. When glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, their hallucinatory insubstantiality intensifies.

Two pristine wall-works--a gorgeous, 5-foot-long black wedge and an almost 8-foot-square slab of fire-engine red--lead up to the exhibition’s anchor, an 8-foot-tall blue column at the end of the gallery.

From any point of view, only two or three sides of this six-sided sculpture are visible. As you walk around it to piece together a complete picture, its girth appears to shift: sometimes looking as if it’s too wide to wrap your arms around, and at other times as if it’s just a skinny slice of color.

All of McCracken’s impeccable sculptures hover in this ambiguous space between concrete substance and shimmering immateriality. On the balcony, a massive and weighty stainless-steel column nearly disappears in the sunlight, making the world feel momentarily magical.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Dec. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Family Photos: Eileen Doman is a 42-year-old self-taught painter from rural Illinois who makes small acrylics on canvas based on black-and-white photographs from old family albums. At Liz Blackman Gallery, 16 of these remarkable pictures tell a captivating tale of the weirdness at the center of ordinary, Middle American life.

A former telephone operator and beautician, Doman makes paintings to add color to the lives of her relatives, as they’re immortalized in snapshots from the 1950s and ‘60s. Colorizing the highlights of her extended family’s past also adds a little liveliness to her own life as a housewife, transforming Doman from a passive spectator of her family’s previous history to an active re-creator of its special moments.

Neither cynical nor critical--despite being awkward, unflattering and full of distorted proportions--Doman’s eccentric acrylics strike an odd balance between affection and alienation. Although the subjects of her portraits often have pinched faces, contorted torsos and shrunken limbs, these bodily irregularities do not signify any viciousness on the part of the artist.

On the contrary, Doman’s stylistic oddities or painterly shortcomings signal her attempt to do nothing more than to put back into the pictures what the camera missed: the colors of real things and the spirits of those depicted.

* Liz Blackman Gallery, 6909 Melrose Ave., (213) 933-4096, through Jan. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.