Photographers Make Ordinary Seem Unusual

“The Nature of Curves,” an exquisite three-person exhibition of photographs by Intae Kim, E.F. Kitchen and Leonard Nimoy at Louis Stern Fine Arts, demonstrates that the most successful images are often those that make the ordinary world seem utterly foreign.

Kim’s magnificent black-and-white photographs of Death Valley sand dunes evoke the strange, unearthly glow of lunar landscapes. They seem a million miles away from anything remotely familiar.

Kim’s superb control of shadow and light lends a distinct allure to these velvety slopes, where body and earth become erotic counterparts. In one image, the sand dune’s smooth contours and shallow enclaves evoke the elongated lines of a woman’s arched neck and shoulders, while several others recall the soft, undulating curves of the breast and belly seen in profile.

In her vibrant color Cibachromes, Kitchen employs Impressionist tropes to explore the effect of color, refraction and motion on shallow bodies of water that are littered with brightly hued botanical matter. Frozen in mid-movement, a school of goldfish looks like angular strokes of paint applied to the pond’s dappled blue surface. In several of the photographs, the water swirls around like a whirlpool, which creates spinning pinwheels of color from the flowers and waterlilies caught up in the whirligig motion.

Whereas Kim’s rolling desert landscapes recall the anomalies of the flesh, Nimoy’s classical nude studies evoke the tectonic push-and-pull of competing forces within the body: light and dark, hard and soft, angled and curved. A few of these silver prints have a grainy quality that heightens the tension between the ideal and the mundane. Despite the formal rigor of Nimoy’s workmanlike approach, his naturalistic portraits feel fluid and experimental, as if he recognizes that the human form can never be more than a work in progress.

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* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, through Aug. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.