Street Scene Theatrics

From the title of Gregg Segal’s photographic exhibit at the Brand Library Gallery, “Ordinary Souls: the Life of L.A.,” we’re led to expect reportage from the everyday urban front, some objective vision of the city’s populace. But such a cool, documentary approach never quite materializes. Nor does the Segal approach wrest compassionate portraiture from depictions of ordinary souls.

Instead, the photographer, without apology, relies on various conceptual devices and effects, which he layers on for a more subjective and stylized approach. More often than not, the images seem staged, as when the artist attempts to elicit empathy for the underprivileged. But Segal offers a new spin: He melds social commentary and artistic theatrics in a technique that can be jarring, but which allows us to ponder old ideas with a fresh mind.

Segal’s L.A. is a place fraught with guns and an aura of fear and danger. It’s a place visited by ghosts of drive-by shootings and by homeless people who place their remaining faith in tiny, cherished objects: a man with a pair of clean, white underwear grins maniacally; a homeless artist boasts a new painting.

But there is also a sense of community, as in his affectionate shots of wet people gathered in places like the Echo Park pool.

In his “Families With Guns” series, Segal shows color images of folks casually adorned with firearms, clutched matter-of-factly, like lifestyle accessories.

His most theatrical, and also most poignant series, “They’re Still Here,” is on the opposite wall. Dramatically lit vignettes depict families of drive-by victims in their South Central neighborhoods, with pleasant photos of the deceased projected into the scenes, like cosmic visitations or lingering memories.

People become props in the funniest series, “L.A.: What’s Your Sign,” in which odd placards are held by an assortment of people, who become vehicles for the artist’s absurd non sequiturs. An older woman sitting in a beauty shop, her hair in curlers, holds a sign that reads, “LA IS NOT A CITY. IT’S A FARM TOWN. ROME IS A CITY.”

Segal’s images are deceptively lucid, created with a sharp attention to craft and a careful eye. But beyond the surface, props and deliberate manipulations thicken the plot and make us question our own expectations of the medium.

The Brand’s Skylight Gallery, perhaps the most sprawling art space in the Valley, has been put in the service of art of monumental scale and has provided group shows with plenty of room to breathe. In the case of its current exhibitor, Smiley Quick, the grand dimensions help to accentuate the lurid hues and gritty, over-the-top intensity of his paintings, in a show called “Memories in a Tank.”

Made on unframed, crumpled paper of epic scale, Quick’s larger pieces scream for attention with their undertone of fashionable angst. This is an approach common to neo-expressionist work, but also to much earlier art: Echoes of artists such as Bosch and Beckmann are detectable in Quick’s often violent, yet abstracted and mythical, vignettes.

These are dense fever dreams, nightmarish enough to be funny. Demons are afoot, as are naked bodies, sometimes impaled. A swastika pops up, almost as a reflexive afterthought, a knee-jerk symbol of dread, in “Nobody Said.”

Narrative suspense rears its head in “Room to a View of Cruel Invention,” a rectangular canvas piece in which multiple nude bodies are flung about a room, descended upon by authority figures. The painting gains what mystery and tension it has from the simultaneous presence of sexual repression and unstated debauchery.

In “Epilogue to an Act,” we find a tangle of assorted ghouls, a seductress and hints of some catastrophe just passed or on the horizon. Or both. We’re never quite sure where Quick is coming from--or where he’s going--with these ambiguous, tortured allegories, and that’s part of their charm and frustration.

In stark contrast, he also shows a few small charcoal and watercolor studies, the calm amid his deliberately staged storm.

BE THERE

Brand Library Gallery--Gregg Segal, “Ordinary Souls: the Life of L.A.,” and Smiley Quick, “Memories in a Trunk,” through Oct. 18. The gallery is at 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. Hours: 1-9 p.m., Tuesday and Thursday; 1-6 p.m., Wednesday; 1-5 p.m., Friday and Saturday; (818) 548-2051.