Cityscapes Through a Dark Lens

At Angles Gallery, Irish artist Willie Doherty’s riveting video installations and photographs manage to be both blatantly seductive and utterly unremarkable. His first L.A. solo exhibition invites us to enter bleak urban landscapes in which fragmentary bits of information--a chain-link fence, a pair of headlights on an unmarked car, a piece of filmy plastic blown by the roadside--seem to hint at undisclosed forms of violence.

Most of these photographs were taken in or around Derry, a Catholic suburb in Northern Ireland where Doherty was born and where he continues to make his home. Although his work is rooted in the context of the Irish “troubles,” Doherty takes no sides in the conflict. His pictures are similarly equivocal. Drained of geographic specificity, these landscapes could exist anywhere. Doherty’s point is that no matter where we live, the ways in which we perceive terrorism are mediated primarily by our television screens.

Captured in noirish tones of midnight blue, forest green and velvety black, these nighttime landscapes pull you into their illusory surface depth. By pairing surveillance-style documentary photographs with blurry, slightly pixilated images shot directly from his television set, Doherty emphasizes the different ways in which the media manipulate our perception and interpretation of violence and terrorism.

“Small Acts of Deception 1” (1997) juxtaposes a Cibachrome image of an unmarked car parked on a dirt road with a grainy close-up of a limp hand lying on a patch of grass, its fingers loosely bound with white rope. From this we might surmise that the two photographs describe the setting and aftermath of a kidnapping or murder. However, nothing except their proximity leads us to believe that the two images are connected, or that they refer to any specific act of violence.

In the 1998 videotape “Sometimes I Imagine It’s My Turn,” viewers move swiftly through a forest as if fleeing from an aggressor or stalking a victim. Suddenly we come upon on a man lying face down in a muddy clearing, his face and upper body buried in an oversized black parka. The camera darts warily in and out of this scene so that we never get a clear picture of the entire body.

This pattern of discovery and retreat is repeated in an endless loop, as if we are reliving a traumatic memory or mentally returning to the scene of a crime. Doherty asks us to identify with both the terrorist and the terrorized--to imagine, if only for a few horrible moments, that our turn has come.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 and 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Saturday.

Into the Woods: It’s impossible not to feel dwarfed by Anselm Kiefer’s massive books and woodcuts at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, culled from the period of 1977-97. In many of these works, we see giant black sunflowers shooting toward the sky like burning suns, which seem to herald Kiefer’s desire to reach back into the annals of Germany’s horrific past in order to forge new connections with a universal spiritual cosmology.

Like his mentor, Joseph Beuys, Kiefer views art as a spiritual transaction through which the artist passes between the material and spiritual realms. The woodcut process (here, the prints are mounted on canvas) has particular resonance because of its connection to trees, a seminal motif in Kiefer’s oeuvre. Over many of his canvases, Kiefer paints swirling concentric circles that are shaped like a painter’s palette, but they also recall the inner rings of a tree trunk that record the passage of time.

What really keeps your eyes glued to these arresting works, however, is Kiefer’s characteristic incorporation of organic matter like ash, sand, straw, seeds and twigs, which he applies to the canvas with the expressive fluidity of paint. These textured layers heighten the woodcuts’ sculptural and architectonic qualities, while emphasizing the play of illusion and materiality across the surface.

In the early 1990s, Kiefer took a three-year break from making art. His return marks a shift away from explorations of German identity to themes that address death, transformation and renewal. In new works such as “Die Funfte Posaune” (1996), a presentiment of hope goes hand in hand with Kiefer’s distinctive pictorial irony. A swarm of insects seems to descend upon one of his typically scorched landscapes, but step a few feet closer and the insects are revealed to be sunflower seeds (some appearing slightly chewed), scattered over the surface of the picture plane with the promise of new beginnings.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through May 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

No Dirty Art: Yolande Macias McKay uses soap to sculpt sleek male nudes and replicas of games like Twister, Sorry and Monopoly. Buoyed by a sly sense of humor, McKay’s sculptures mock outdated Modernist truisms about aesthetic purity, which she links to current cultural obsessions with sanitized cleanliness and rigidly enforced codes of personal hygiene. McKay has been poking at this Greenbergian straw man for a while now, and in an exhibition of new work at Richard Heller Gallery, she continues to shadow-box ideas that disappeared from the arena long ago.

McKay’s reinterpretations of childhood game boards as pliable geometric abstractions are anything but cool, crisp and hard. No clean lines either: “Panoply” (1998), a Monopoly board without any of the street names, bulges impolitely from the middle like a swollen belly or an after-dinner belch; in the next room, a replica of Twister lies flaccid on the floor, like a soggy bathmat.

In the show’s best piece, 50 doll-sized, somewhat androgynous male figures in various shades of blue dangle helplessly from a row of nails. Titled “Blue Boys” (1977-1978), they provide visual puns on male sexual frustration (think cold showers), while their diminutive size and waxy sheen suggests the accommodating plasticity of sex toys. These tiny blue youths lined up unevenly against the white wall also offer a cheeky retort to the way Yves Klein used nude female bodies as “living paintbrushes” by dipping them in his signature blue color.

For all their frothy fun, McKay’s sculptures only skim the surface of soap’s more disturbing connotations with ethnic cleansing, racial purity and sanitized sexuality. McKay is well aware that cleanliness can be a powerful symbol of cultural oppression and social control, but she needs to probe these connections even further if she wants her work to have real staying power.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through April 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

‘Lowly’ but Lovely: In a group show at Marc Foxx Gallery, four young artists make funky contraptions that are simultaneously scrappy and structurally elegant. Titled “Low,” the exhibition features floor-mounted sculpture fabricated from “lowly” household materials, such as coffee cans, paint buckets, plastic crates and Styrofoam.

Each piece relies on conceptual strategies that double back on themselves or otherwise confound the viewer’s efforts to make sense of them. The results are both ingenious and perplexing. T. Kelly Mason’s pathetic model of Grand Coolee Dam employs a milk crate, a clip-on fan and a 50-watt lightbulb. When the light and wind are aimed at a sheet of reflective Mylar, they splash soft ripples of light against a corner of the gallery wall. In its gentle refusal of macho ambition, the piece is strangely affecting; but, as Mason’s intended homage to Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, it’s muddled and pretentious.

More visually concise are Jason Meadows’ orange bench, which passes between a pair of mirrors through two narrow slots, and Robert Blanchon’s transparent glass drawing bench. Each work plays with illusions of depth and perspective by using three-dimensional forms to draw with (and in) space.

Evan Holloway’s vertical black boxes resemble monster stereo speakers. One emits a faint scraping noise, the other a CD recording of the Pachelbel Canon. The music’s vibrations cause the tin canisters stacked inside each box to quiver and rattle, dissolving the Canon’s lilting strains into pools of loud buzzing and static.

The meaning behind these twin pillars of sound remains something of a mystery, but Holloway leaves us with a parting gift: a subliminal message said to be incorporated into the audio track. If you are receptive to that sort of thing, Holloway’s piece will become a part of you, continuing to work its magic in all sorts of unknown ways as you go about the business of everyday life.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 857-5571, through April 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.