Artist’s Multiple Images Create Complex Environments

Make no mistake, Midge Lynn draws with a careful hand and a discerning eye, capturing details and visual settings with a refined draftsmanship. But there’s more than meets the eye or the craft in her work, gathered under the exhibition title “Environmental Drawings,” now at the Orlando Gallery.

By piecing scenes together into multiple imagery--often in triptych form--Lynn creates “environments” in an often complicated, and sometimes coy way. She flirts with unexplained, open-ended narratives by bringing together pictures that don’t always allow for easy connections to one another. There are, potentially, stories being told here, but without easy guideposts for our visual reading pleasure.

Disjointed, serial imagery is hardly new in the shadow of such post-modernist image shufflers as David Salle, but Lynn has her own spin on things. There is something both cerebral and casual about Lynn’s drawings and their presentation. Her triptychs, in folding three-paneled frames, refer to the archetype of religious art, but also to the comforts of home, as represented by fold-out picture frames on the mantle. But her domestic references are as vague as other scenes, as if recalled from dreams or foggy memories.

“Self-Portrait” shows the artist as a young girl in the middle panel, clutching a photograph of her father and herself. To the left is an image of cigars (re: the lingering memory of smells) and, to the right, young legs laced with ribbon.

“Self-Portrait with Fear,” by contrast, finds the full-grown, fully matriculated artist walking down a road, next to an image of cracking asphalt, a handy metaphor for dread in the land of earthquakes.

In “Push-Pull/Psyche,” converging images include a woman’s shoes, with chain links instead of buckles and a man with a sinister smile in a tie decorated with the same chain links. A chain runs beneath the two images, separated by a walrus. Out of this, we get an impression of both affection and repression, the twin symbolism of chains, and, in the walrus, a thematic curveball.

The loosely defined narrative connection continues in the photography of Frederick Kuretski, also at the Orlando. Kuretski’s black-and-white “Domestic Politics” series conveys romantic ebb and flow in the spare confines of unfurnished apartment spaces, where couples come into and out of contact. In another direction, he shows warm-hued, tightly framed color nude studies in his “Small Particles” series. The pieces are inherently erotic, even though we’re not quite sure what parts of the body we’re seeing. There’s the conceptual rub.

* Midge Lynn’s “Environmental Drawings” and Frederick Kuretski, through Monday at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; (818) 789-6012.

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Retrospective Views: The Platt Gallery at the University of Judaism is showing the work, posthumously, of two artists of divergent styles and outlooks. Differences notwithstanding, the work making up “Art Was Their Life,” by Harry Bornstein and Carol Tolin, shares a passion for and belief in the art-making process as a life-affirming source.

* “Art Was Their Life,” through Sunday at Platt Gallery of the University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. Hours: Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; (310) 476-9777.