Hale’s ‘Prostitution’ Reflects Social Ills

Tedious political didacticism on one hand, or confessional self-indulgence on the other afflict much recent art that concerns itself with social topics. Christina Hale’s stunning drawings at Robert Berman Gallery steer clear of these extremes, claiming a solid place for themselves where the personal and political fuse in the form of everyday social conditions and responses to them.

This is the first solo show for the young L.A.-based artist, and it’s as impassioned, memorable and urgent as they come.

Hale draws in graphite on large sheets of heavy paper that look as though they were torn casually from a roll. Pinned directly to the wall and hung two or three high, the drawings are presented with a rawness and immediacy that echo the imagery within.

Hale’s figures usually appear nude and have a monumental, sculptural quality that harks back to Mexican muralists and, through them, to great Mayan stone carvings. They have presence, and a latent, vital power beneath their smooth, gray skin.

The show’s title, “Westside Prostitution,” alludes to activities represented in some of the drawings, but Hale favors the periphery over the main event. Here, the term “prostitution” comes to suggest the general, broader state of oppression and desperation suffered by any underclass.

Violence, drugs and jail are part of the equation, too, and Hale moves deftly, poetically from the concrete to the metaphoric, showing a smiling young woman holding a gun to her own head in one image (poignantly titled, “I Want to Go Home”) and in another, drawing someone’s finger sliced off at the knuckle so it looks like the barrel of a gun, pointing straight out of the picture. Nails pierce the skulls and toenails of several figures, razor blades slice their skin, embraces read doubly as tender and violent.

Hale writes short, caption-like phrases in a crude hand across the top and bottom of the drawings--”Awaken in Captivity,” “Strapped,” “Warriors Gathering Here”--and she usually draws an inner frame around the image. The frame, porous and often incomplete, reminds that these are excisions from the daily flow, diary notations blending observation with dreams and fears.

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* Robert Berman Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-9506. Through March 4.