Marriage of Visions

There’s a unique air of marriage in the current exhibition over at the Village Square Gallery in Montrose. The artists Kim Keehong and Sunny Yook, both Korean-born, are partners in life, and, although they take separate routes in their artwork, one can detect a subtle cross-filtration of influence.

While Keehong creates dynamic, semiabstract paintings, sometimes alluding to objects, Yook creates ceramic sculptures--objects themselves--that slither along a fine, wavering line between the utilitarian and the imaginative. Together, their show manages to be an example of divergent artwork enjoying peaceful cohabitation.

Keehong’s acrylic paintings are based on the juxtaposition of simple, bold forms, with thick, tactile surfaces that lend texture to the imagery. Sometimes, hints of still-life aesthetics are detectable, demonstrating the still-life artist’s observation of materials for their shape and mass, and relationship to light.

In a work such as “Relic,” based on an ambiguous object--a canoe or a flute, possibly--Keehong establishes a sense of considering the inexplicable subject matter, in a manner at once ritualistic and objective. A similar paradox crops up in “Ice and Fire,” with its modular composition, in which two rectangles contain objects, framed on a dark green perimeter.

In other pieces, he takes to manipulating artistic definitions. A series of layered rectangles forms “White Shadow,” from its goopy black base to a tan quasi-frame laid on top. A sky-blue area contains the block of white, an irrational “shadow.” The title “Blue Window” leads us to interpret the small section of blue in the upper corner in real rather than abstract terms. That’s an operative shift of attitude, between what’s real and what’s perceived or imagined.

Kim’s subtle, expressive ceramic work includes vessels, plates and boats (vessels of another sort), never approached with a conventional sense of function. “Green Bay Teapot,” for instance, suggests a boat, doubling as a teapot. Given her taste for duality, the work nicely complements the paintings in the gallery. These actual objects could feasibly be subjects filtered through her husband’s conceptual mindset.

Cross-town Traffic: Normally, the Los Angeles Printmaking Society camps out in its designated gallery home in NoHo, at the Lankershim Arts Center. Recently, though, LAPS members ventured to Burbank for a group show at the Creative Arts Center, under the fitting, catchall title “Trends in Printmaking.”

Printmaking’s umbrella has expanded, like most areas of human endeavors, into the computer domain. Anne Marie Karlsen’s iris inkjet prints convey a complex collage effect, with a design sense whose symmetry and density suggest both the influence of mandalas and Heironymous Bosch. Fittingly, given those reference points, the visual dazzle underscores her more serious themes, like the question of gender bias in the church, in “Her Highness.”

More of a direct sting of political commentary comes through in Patrick Merrill’s mixed media pieces, including “Resist Patriarchy.” Rough-hewn and interwoven with the graphic tactics of agitprop, the piece proudly belongs to the culture of protest.

With the proper air of gothic exaggeration, Elaine Brandt’s “Prey/Possessed” depicts a young woman being leered at by a menacing man-cum-ghoul in a business suit. And Joel Rothberg’s “Exorcism” is a relief etching of a foreshortened, Christ-like male figure, in an ad hoc religious operating room, with the proper expressionistic effect in the details.

On lighter, friendlier turf, Walter Askin’s images are simple and loopy visions with bold use of colors and space--easygoing comic-book dream scenes. Belle Osipow’s “Coat of Arms” presents itself as separate pieces of a puzzle, assembled loosely on the wall.

And Masha Schweitzer’s monotypes mainly express rugged, picturesque charm, whether it’s the air of sociability in “The Girls” or the convergence of lolling cows, congested traffic and rain clouds in “Sylvan Fields.”

The show, which ends today, confirms suspicions that the artists involved in the LAPS are a lively, and clearly varied, bunch. The exhibition is likewise.

BE THERE

Kim Keehong and Sunny Yook, through Oct. 17 at Village Square Gallery, 2418 Honolulu Ave., Suite C in Montrose, 1-5 p.m., Thursday-Saturday; (818) 244-4257.

“Trends in Printmaking,” through today at Creative Art Center Gallery, 1100 W. Clark Ave. in Burbank. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday; (818) 238-5397.