Photographs Lack Flashes of Originality

Veiled in secrecy until a week before the opening, LACE’s “Annuale 1998” doesn’t offer much to get worked up about. Franklin Sirmans, a critic, writer and curator who heads the U.S. editorial desk of the journal Flash Art International, has chosen 11 able young artists from a wide pool of local applicants; but the combined results generate few intellectual sparks and even fewer flickers of genuine visual pleasure. Although it’s encouraging to see so many of the artists in the Annuale emphasizing political and social themes, much of their work suffers from a flat-footed approach that tends to undercut the complexity of the issues at stake.

This year’s Annuale places heavy emphasis on photo-based work (five of the 11 artists exhibit photographs or digital prints). Although it’s nice to see photography hog the stage for once, the problem is that the artists included here, nearly all of whom use photography to address the intersections between culture and landscape, approach their subjects with the same dispiriting sense of detachment.

There’s also a serious lack of new ideas. Jessica Irish’s postcard-sized images of the rear scaffolding of billboard signs look a lot like Catherine Opie’s freeway and mini-mall series, while Soo Kim’s cloudy blue sky-scapes, imprisoned behind walls of crisscrossed telephone cable, don’t really say anything more about the spatial contradictions of modern urban life than Lewis Baltz or Henry Wessel did with far greater scope and clarity several decades ago.

Annica Karlsson Rixon’s stacked C-print snapshots of anonymous truck drivers replicate, rather than question, our distanced view of these men when we drive past them on the interstate highway. Rixon’s color photographs offer no insight into the truckers’ labor, nor do they crack open the stereotypes that surround their heavily mythologized lifestyles.

H. Lan Thao Lam’s framed dollar bill, paired with stories of how the artist saw, spent and stole her first buck, launches a tepid critique of American capitalist enterprise abroad. More successful is Kira Lynn Harris’ ruthlessly spare homage to the late Ted Hawkins, in which viewers confront repeating images of the Venice Beach busker and R&B; great after stepping over a row of square stones placed on a reflective Mylar sheet.

Considering LACE’s ongoing commitment to video art, it’s surprising that there is no such work in this year’s Annuale. None of the paintings included in this show (by Alex Donis, Wendell Gladstone and Madison Webb) evidence the visual voluptuousness that makes L.A.-based painting so consistently alluring, although Donis’ light box paintings of world leaders engaging in homoerotic smooches do provide the Annuale with a few sorely needed moments of humor and irony.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 957-1777, through Sept. 20. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Blotter Acid Trip: “Gone,” a sprawling group show at Rico Gallery, ushers you into the illicit world of blotter acid art, an underground cultural phenomenon that began in the early 1960s and continues to the present day. Blotter acid art is made from the 8-by-8-inch sheets of paper that are used to transport and ingest lysergic acid, or LSD. (The drug is gradually neutralized over long-term exposure to light and heat.) Artists use an offset printing process to cover the blotters with cartoon icons, fractal patterns and pretty much anything else that comes to mind.

Culled from the collection of Bay Area artist and teacher Mark McCloud, these anonymously made blotters run the gamut from high art parody to pop culture homage. Superman, Jesus, Zippy the Pinhead, Beavis and Butt-head and countless others have all been immortalized on these wafer-thin sheets. Two of the more highfalutin blotters replicate works by M.C. Escher and Thomas Gainsborough, while still others recall the kinetic surface patterns of Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely’s op-art paintings from the late ‘60s.

The FBI is said to possess a rather substantial blotter art collection. Rumor has it, the feds used to produce blotters of their own in the hopes of corralling collectors and dope-dealers alike in “sting” operations. Although even the most visually complex examples of blotter acid art are not much more compelling than those “Magic Eye” stereograms from a few years back, the bits and pieces of underground cultural heresy that still cling to this contraband material is what really makes “Gone” such a treat.

* Rico Gallery, 208 Pier Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 399-5353, through Sept. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Tiny Revelations: At Works on Paper, Kim McCarty’s jewel-toned watercolors spill forth a jumble of impressions, images and memories that flow in and out of her mind at any given moment. These dazzling mosaics look like something Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi might have painted if he worked in two dimensions rather than three.

Each of McCarty’s vibrant paintings is composed of hundreds of individual blocks of color. From a distance, these thumbprint-sized cells coalesce into effluent, pulsating patterns shaped like the heart, lung, breasts or spine. When viewed up close, each translucent stroke of color reveals a tiny image: a coffee cup, a woman’s face or breasts, two people locked in an embrace, an embryo nestled in the womb. McCarty’s watercolors fairly burst with these cryptic images and quotidian observations, much like personal diaries or sketchbooks.

There is, admittedly, a certain Hallmark preciousness to the idea that life is a richly hued tapestry of individual moments, and McCarty isn’t entirely successful at banishing such cliches from her own work. Part of the problem is that watercolor is a medium that doesn’t easily lend itself to precisely evoked details. As a result, some of McCarty’s smaller images are awkwardly rendered, which diminishes their specificity and makes her paintings a bit too decorative for their own good.

McCarty’s strength, however, lies in the fact that she doesn’t attempt to resolve all of the chaotic bits and pieces of these shimmering pastiches into something that can be easily explained. Instead, her work reminds us that our inner and outer lives rarely cleave together to form neat, presentable packages. It’s the tension between the two that makes growth possible in the first place.

* Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 964-9675, through Sept. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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By the Numbers: The use of text and numbers in art has long been associated with Conceptualism’s heyday, when artists like Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner used words, instructions or mathematical principles to “dematerialize” the art object and focus attention on its underlying ideas and concepts. A smart and engaging group show at Remba Gallery demonstrates that today, artists are more likely to use text and numbers as material, employing systematic methods of production that are far more playful and idiosyncratic than those of their Conceptualist forebears.

Stephen Berens, Sonia Rijnhout and Karen Shaw incorporate letters, words or numbers into their work by way of chance operations. Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out where art ends and obsession-compulsion syndrome begins, as with Berens’ painstaking, page-by-page comparison of the similarities and differences between the text of Freud’s “Ego and the Id” and his master of fine arts thesis on his own artwork.

Works of art that rely on predetermined systems tend to slide in and out of the artist’s control. Rijnhout uses randomly chosen numbers to plot an overlapping series of thick black lines onto stark white canvases, while Shaw assigns a numerical value to the letters of the alphabet, then uses this system to generate random words from a series of Lotto numbers, pinning the results inside boxes to form elliptical language poems.

The main problem with these labor-intensive works, however, is that they’re not all that interesting from a formal standpoint. The best pieces in this show--JonMarc Edwards’ surprisingly sensual pictographs, Slater Bradley’s intentionally noisome video installation and Steve Hurd’s drippy, bubble-gum-pink painting based on an insipid teen fanzine--are as stimulating to look at as they are to think about.

* Remba Gallery, 462 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-1101, through Sept. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.