‘Summer Fun’ Show Lives Up to Its Name

In this season’s crop of summer group shows, “Summer Fun” at Jan Kesner Gallery stands out for two reasons. First, its 20 photographs by 11 artists focus on people who are enjoying themselves, whether sightseeing, swimming, rock climbing or just lying naked on the front porch. Second, a high level of quality characterizes nearly all of the exhibition’s beautifully printed pictures.

Diane Arbus’ black-and-white photograph of a woman wearing nothing but a frilly bonnet, wristwatch and swan-shaped sunglasses hangs next to Roger Minick’s color print of a woman in a swimsuit and her husband in cutoffs. Both images show that Americans don’t have to dress up to have a good time.

Taking this idea to its logical conclusion are five vintage photographs by Bruce of Los Angeles, each depicting a couple of buck-naked beefcakes posing on the beach. In contrast to such brazen displays of flesh, Saul Leiter’s subtly tinted picture of a nude woman reclining at home on a hot afternoon is as shrouded in shadows as it is suffused with sultry sensuality.

Another type of self-absorption takes shape in Richard Misrach’s lush landscape, in the foreground of which a rock climber practices an upside-down toehold. Likewise, the shirtless boy playing basketball by himself in Danny Lyon’s image is oblivious to his garbage-strewn surroundings. And the young swimmers in an otherworldly photograph by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee are perfectly happy to be splashing around in a setting that’s anything but picturesque.

John Humble’s photograph of the Santa Monica Pier silhouetted against a smog-choked sunset monumentalizes the capacity to lose oneself in the pleasures of the moment. Like the rest of the works in “Summer Fun,” his dreamy picture is not merely about pleasure, it actually delivers it.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-6834, through Aug. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Unresolved: The best thing about “i candy: LA in Flux” is the first half of its title. Once you get past these two words, which employ the catchy economy of a Top 40 hit to fuse soft-core autobiography (the lowercase i) and pretty pictures (often called eye candy), there’s not much to look at and even less to think about in this 16-artist exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery.

Organized by artist and producer John Boskovich, “i candy” has the presence of a student show, albeit a highly polished one. Although there’s no hard and fast rule for determining exactly when an art student stops being more of a student than an artist, and starts being more of an artist than a student, too many of the works in this overcrowded exhibition are so tentative, exploratory and unresolved that it’s impossible not to notice that they’re not sufficiently developed or thoroughly thought through to be displayed in a commercial gallery.

To read the show’s checklist is to discover that six of the artists Boskovich selected are still enrolled in graduate or undergraduate programs, and that another six earned their undergraduate degrees only two months before the exhibition opened. The remaining four participants have very brief exhibition histories; but that’s hardly a problem in the world of contemporary art, where newness is often valued above all else.

The biggest problem with “i candy” is that too few of its works seem to belong to voices that have come into their own, or visions that are not watered-down versions of established artists. Art schools--not art galleries--are supposed to create environments that allow aspiring artists to discover what they have to say and how best to say it. Here, these fundamentally different venues are treated as if they play the same role.

In the end, “i candy” does a disservice to all 16 of its artists. Even those whose works are fairly advanced look bad in the context of so many unresolved objects and ideas still in the very early stages of development.

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* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Aug. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.