Seven Artists Creatively Follow the Money at Bergamot Station

Since the skyrocketing of art world sales figures (and egos) in the 1980s, art has come to be associated more and more with money. Lately, money has also come to be discussed in the same breath as art. When the new $20 bill was recently released, art critics around the country (including here at The Times) weighed in on the aesthetics of its revamped design.

At the Sherry Frumkin Gallery, “On the Money: At the Intersection of Art and Commerce” is an amusing, provocative show that further blurs the boundaries among cash, commodity and culture. All seven artists in the show use money as their medium, as a raw material fully loaded with a political, social and emotional charge.

The implicit significance of the bills and coins makes every gesture of effacement and alteration necessarily double as an act of deconstruction. After all, a dollar bill is the perfect embodiment of the Post-structuralist critique--a ubiquitous multiple lacking both an original and an author. But, refreshingly, in this selection, matter ultimately wins out over mind, and impressive formal acrobatics overshadow theory-bending.

Oriane Stender weaves tiny, exquisite tapestries of shredded bills, finishing some of them off with thread, like small quilts. Ray Beldner, too, engages in some fancy cut-and-fold work. He fashions a lampshade out of a handful of dollars, sews others into a full-scale American flag and--at the other end of the spectrum of respect--turns yet more bills into a common doily.

Several of the artists extract found poetry from the words printed on the bills, Beldner by cleverly cutting away the extraneous letters, distilling “Federal Reserve Note,” for instance, into “Fear Not.” Robin Clark selectively scrapes the ink off the surface of the paper, leaving fragments (an ear, the scales of justice) floating on the desolate, ghostly sheet. Lisa Kokin partially covers lines of text in old sales and management training manuals with skinny strips of money (the object, after all), in some of the most delightfully subversive contributions to the show.

The Art Guys, a Houston-based pair, have scattered pennies, stamped with their name, across the gallery floor, adding to the atmosphere of festive irreverence. And what would a show about art and money be without the participation of J.S.G. Boggs, the artist infamous for using his hand-rendered money in place of actual currency? One of the bills he shows here recasts money itself as a vehicle for fantasy, and not just the means of fulfilling it. On his redesigned $1 bill, the formally enshrined male autocrat is gone. In his place, Boggs gives us the “First Female President,” casually dressed, signing a document and smiling.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Pulling Strings: Simply rounding the corner into Patricia Faure Gallery’s project room is an exhilarating experience. To come upon Jacob Hashimoto’s installation for the first time is to be offered the sudden, glorious gift of buoyancy.

Hashimoto, a young, L.A.-based artist who recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has created a canopy of sorts, comprising roughly 3,000 small kites. The untitled installation--a variant of the artist’s “An Infinite Expanse of Sky,” now at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art--brings to mind the repetitive, process-driven work of Ann Hamilton but with lighter intent.

Fashioned simply out of bamboo rods, string, and offset prints of sky and clouds on vellum, the rectangular kites hang from the ceiling in densely aligned rows that cascade, nearly to the floor, in a staggered diagonal. When you enter the gallery, the kites are at their highest point, about 20 feet overhead, and the sensation is breathtaking. Calligraphic shadows shimmer on the side walls; as you walk the perimeter, the kites sway in gentle, undulating waves.

At the far side of the gallery, with the kites hovering just above the floor, the view shifts radically, calling to mind--literally and metaphorically--the inside of a piano: all those strings required to create music, pure and simple.

Art felt directly through the body is not unheard of these days, but more often it induces visceral repulsion (think Damien Hirst, et al.) than a transcendent shock of weightlessness. Hashimoto’s vision is simple, elegant, beautiful--and necessary.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Jan. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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New England Homes: Maureen Gallace’s new paintings at Kohn Turner Gallery reassure that good, honest sentiment never goes out of fashion. In the form of tender nostalgia, it can even piggyback onto the popularity of issues of personal and collective memory. Gallace’s paintings, inspired by her youth in New England, read like a sweet scrapbook of memories. Half of the paintings depict homes in leafy, suburban Connecticut settings; the other half, seaside houses in Massachusetts.

The specifics of locale matter little here, however, because Gallace’s paintings are more about state of mind than street address. She paints in a spare, sensually modest style that corresponds well to the works’ small scale (typically no more than 14-by-14 inches) and focuses on one minimally articulated house at a time, anchoring it near the center of each canvas.

In the Massachusetts paintings, especially, the houses assume an anthropomorphic presence. They stand with all the quiet solemnity of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk by the Sea,” deep in private meditation.

Flourishes are few, but Gallace has a rich sense of color. A cool, foggy light permeates the Massachusetts views, while the Connecticut scenes glow with the viscous warmth of late summer. Rooted in private experience, Gallace’s work is comfort food for the eye: pleasant, unburdened by the transcendent ambitions of haute cuisine.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Thursday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Meditation: Enrique Martinez Celaya, unbound, is something of a marvel, a phenomenon akin to a force of nature. The artist, who was born in Cuba, lived in Spain, Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the U.S. before settling a few years ago in Venice. He has done graduate work in physics and electronics, patented four inventions and published several volumes of poetry. His art, in keeping with his nomadic intellectual capacity, takes the form of painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, often in combination.

It’s no wonder, then, that in writing about the work in his show, “Berlin: First Photographs,” at Stephen Cohen Gallery, he describes the process of making it as “a way of addressing time and the problems of self-containment.”

Celaya (who closed a show of paintings and sculpture at Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions last week) embraces fluidity as a defining force in life, time and art. He photographs, in a sketchy way that is often reinforced by scratchings on the negative and other manipulations, religious statuary, gravestones, flowers and his own sculptures of fragmented body parts. The images are permeated by death, but death as a persistent, evolving thing that infiltrates life and sculpts memory. Celaya uses the city of Berlin and its history, he writes in the show’s handsome book, as a metaphor for “individual remorse and collective longing.”

A few of the images in the show--”Cliff of Time (Your Hands)” and “Fourth Flower for Paul Celan”--have unusually concentrated poignancy, but most of the power in this show is cumulative. Its elegiac tone feels overwrought at times, but regarding the show as one continuous meditation causes its weaknesses to recede and its strength as part of the intriguing gesamtkunstwerk that is Celaya’s life to emerge.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (323) 937-5525, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.