‘COLA’ Puts Spotlight on Local Winners

Last year the city’s Cultural Affairs Department launched an entirely praiseworthy program. Annually it accords a group of established local artists unrestricted grants of $10,000 apiece. That’s still a nice hunk of change. An exhibition celebrating the current batch of 12 recipients is on view at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park in “COLA: 1997-98 Individual Artist Grants.” (The acronym stands for “City of Los Angeles.”)

Since artists are selected by the sole standard of personal merit, the show shouldn’t have a theme. Working methods vary from Alice Fellows’ painting to David Bunn’s poetic video performance, Sue Ann Robinson’s book-making, Betty Lee’s photo narrative and Erika Suderberg’s installation piece. Finding broad unifying concerns in such a variegated group comes as an intriguing and paradoxical surprise.

For example, the most insistent similarity is marked individual difference. Each body of work suggests an aesthetic cosmology so secret its meaning may even be a mystery to its maker. One is reminded of L.A.’s stereotypical image as--outside the official mainstream--a vast collection of offbeat loners.

This sense of private metaphysic finds a corollary in the artists’ manifest attitude to physical substance. They’re not just indifferent to corporeal authority, they seem to go out of their way to avoid it. Therman Statom’s big installation fills the nearby Junior Art Center. It encompasses a lot of stuff, such as glass, mirror and shiny steel cable. It’s matter with great presence, but reflective properties minimize substance. The title, “Something Other Than What Was Available at Press Time,” suggests a very oblique critique of the media.

This kind of direct rejection of the physical must give pause to anyone inclined to dismiss it as mere flimsiness or ineptitude. Even when artists act out of pure intuition, you have to assume their work is the way they want it. The aggregate of his work talks about being an artist in an increasingly illusory world built on videotape and electronic facades.

If anybody here should know what he’s doing, it’s the senior member, James Doolin. A Realist painter grounded somewhere between Edward Hopper and Paul Cadmus, he’s earned his reputation as one of L.A.’s leading under-recognized talents.

His scenes of everyday life on lower Robertson Boulevard ring absolutely true as a distilled vision of reality. Figures in a composition like “Bus Stop” are noticeably self-absorbed. Even more striking is the fact everything in his pictures expresses volume but not weight. Doolin makes clear that this is no error in a series called “Psychic.”

Depicting the neon sign advertising a storefront seer, the largest version couches the subject beneath an empty billboard and in front of a spectacular sunset that’s the same exotic shades of fuchsia and lavender as the neon. Wonderfully eloquent, modest and sly, the image tells us that L.A. light turns both nature and kitsch into a revelation of weightless transcendence.

Bruce Richards’ meticulous little paintings mainly depict emblematic tortoise shells and are just as self-protective. Renderings of small turtles that used to be painted and lettered with “California” for the tourist trade seem particularly repugnant today.

Patssi Valdez is noted for paintings of haunted magical interiors. Here she moves outdoors but everything remains in the landscape of her mind. Alice Fellows makes small spectral white-on-tan abstractions that put one in mind of ectoplasmic bones. Robin Mitchell shows somewhat raw paintings and sculpture based on the circle motif. They look like the visionary imaginings of a bright, lonely child.

Things take a narrative turn in Betty Lee’s photo series, “I (am a) Spy.” It deals with what it feels like to be an Asian in a white culture. Evidently, like every other artist represented, she feels like an outsider. Eileen Cowin’s video “ . . . and the daughter married the prince” is a relatively accessible yarn about the various social fictions that make us believe in romantic love and leave us disenchanted.

Books used to suggest companionship and communication. Most of Sue Ann Robinson’s hand-made volumes are too delicate for general handling. “Chisholm Hours”--a touchable exception--seems to relate cowboy memorabilia to a religious experience.

David Bunn somehow inherited the entire card catalog of the old downtown library after it burned. He proceeded to concoct a kind of found poetry from the cards. He’s shown doing a reading in the elegant rotunda of the central library in Liverpool, England. He appears to be completely alone declaiming to himself.

In Todd Gray’s installation, “Untitled (reading),” the projected silhouette of a person peruses a book. In another part of the room a volume is spread open on the floor. The silhouette of a figure doing a sexy dance is projected on the pages. So much for communication.

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* Municipal Art Gallery, Junior Art Center, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., through June 21 , closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (213) 485-4581.