A Multi-Sided Look at ‘Lone Woman’

“Original Accounts of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island,” a group show at Side Street Projects, has the feel of 19 different rockets launched from a single pad. Some misfire and crash to the ground, others reach respectable heights and a few soar into an orbiting groove that’s thrilling to behold--even as it destabilizes the solid ground we thought we stood on.

Artist Connie Hatch organized the show, inviting 21 artists (some working in teams) to respond to the case history of an Indian woman who survived alone for 18 years on San Nicolas Island after the rest of her tribe had been taken to Santa Barbara by missionaries in 1835. Somewhere within or between the multiple surviving accounts lies the true story of the woman, who was dubbed Juana Maria when finally located and brought to the California mainland in 1853.

Why she wasn’t with the rest of the tribe when it was rounded up (some say she jumped ship, believing her young child was left on the island) and why she died so quickly after she was discovered, are questions that might never be answered definitively. The answers lie in those vast interstices that make history the stumbling, splintered thing it is, rather than a grand, smoothly flowing narrative. The most compelling works in this show not only acknowledge history’s contingency and fluidity but revel in it, poke fun at it and beat it at its own twisting game.

Erika Rothenberg approaches the subject with her characteristic pithy, tongue-in-cheek humor, using a chart to compare four different versions of the woman’s story. The graphics are as basic and the tone as earnest as any grade school science fair project, but Rothenberg’s little exposition is razor-sharp, cutting to the heart of history’s malleability. Historical narratives, the work chortles under its breath, are responsible first (and perhaps only) to the needs and agendas of their writers.

James Luna, Lori Blondeau and Bradlee LaRocque parody the commercial exploitation of the native in their piece, “The Single Lady of the Cove of Libidinous.” A text panel and museum-style display case filled with pseudo-artifacts (such as a beaded vibrator and suede-fringed high-heel shoes) tell an outrageous, time-warped version of the woman’s story. In this account, the islander survives her transition to the mainland and becomes a hot performance artist, then takes her act to Las Vegas, where she stars at the “Lucky Lady Casino and Holistic Village.” At the peak of her fame she quits and disappears, to the chagrin of those who profited from her but, admittedly, never really knew her.

Outrage, dismay and wonder at the woman’s fate percolate among the other responses by Kaucyila Brooke, Armando Rascon, Catherine Opie, Annetta Kapon and others. Deborah Small and Ray Khys Esquerijo present the most introspective work here, a poetic musing on the state of the woman’s soul. They frame a wall-mounted canoe bedecked with feathers, shells and sage with text panels bearing a montage of thoughts on her life of waiting. “I am all that I remember,” it reads. “I am more than I know.”

That any historical narrative can be unbraided like this, into its constituent strands of data, intent and context, is a given by now, but a process edifying and entertaining to behold when carried out with such sensitivity and subversive panache.

* Side Street Projects, 1629 18th St. #2, Santa Monica, (310) 829-0779, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

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Substantial: New work by Gronk, at the Pacific Design Center’s Feldman Gallery under the sponsorship of Daniel Saxon Gallery, shows just how much times have changed, and how much the artist has changed with the times.

Gronk started out as one of L.A.’s quintessential artist-activists of the early 1970s, staging interventions with the collective Asco and struggling, through dark humor and violent, serrated line, to claim a place for Chicano art in the collective, institutional consciousness. Now, 25 years later, with more than one major museum show under his belt, Gronk is an insider to an art world that has started to make up for lost time and lost opportunities, courting disenfranchised audiences and the funding dollars that come with them.

Gronk’s work still rumbles with dissonance, but not the raw clamor of the street. His new paintings, and even more so his beautiful prints, speak in a gallery voice. They’re still highly charged and pulsing with energy, but with a view turned inward more than toward the larger cultural landscape.

The prints, from 1996-97, are as lush and luxurious as ripe fruit. They fuse hints of bodies and landscapes into a Fauvist celebration of saturated color and dark, edgy line.

Such fertile abundance is not what drives the “Denial” paintings (all from 1998) that form the core of this show. They are darker in spirit and infused with a sense of personal struggle, privately coded.

Grand, dark transmutations play themselves out across these large canvases, cluttered with spewing volcanoes and puffing steam. One painting is reminiscent of the architectonic faceting of Torres-Garcia, another brings to mind the organic shapes of Gorky, yet another the harsh scribbles of Basquiat.

Painted in a scorched-earth palette, Gronk’s forms threaten internal combustion. “Denial” is the proclaimed theme of this work, and what it denies is easy interpretation. Gronk has grown beyond the one-bite immediacy of his earlier work. What these paintings demand is a long, thoughtful chew.

* Feldman Gallery Building, Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave. (enter on San Vicente), (310) 360-6451, through Saturday. (An abridged version of the exhibition will continue at the Daniel Saxon Gallery, 552 Norwich Drive, (310) 657-6033. through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.)

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Vehicles: “Technical Poetics” is a contradiction in terms that nevertheless achieves satisfying fusion in the group show currently at Sherry Frumkin Gallery. With so much “because I can” wizardry clogging the airwaves and sight lines these days, this show restores faith that new technology is also being used as a vehicle, not just an end in itself, and with pathos, humor and a healthy respect for its polar opposite: the subconscious.

Dreams, for instance, are evoked in Sukran Aziz’s enchanting installation of what she calls “memory drops.” In the gallery’s darkened back room hang dozens of perforated silver orbs, each the size of an orange. The room hums with white noise, but the cacophony gives way when you place an ear to each of the orbs and enter the surprisingly private space created by the voice of a man, woman or child recounting a dream. Like stars punctuating the sky, each self-contained capsule of fears, fantasies and unexpected encounters looks like every other but has its own rich secrets to tell.

The decidedly unmechanical nature of the night preoccupies other artists here too, like Mary Tsiongas, whose sound and projection installation links the moon’s quiet white face with its power to pull the tide and send waves crashing. Ed Osborn’s “Night Sea Music” is an astonishing, quite low-tech affair composed of casually calligraphic skeins of black hoses and wires, splayed across one wall, connecting small motors to tiny music boxes. When activated, the hoses rotate in slow-motion spasms and twitches, setting off a gentle rain of tinkling sound.

Rebeca Bollinger and John Kalymnios both contribute works of only transient appeal, but Jim Campbell’s photographs blurred and fogged by pulses of electrical current are fascinating and haunting. Worth saving for a light dessert are David Krueger’s three telephone receiver sound pieces that spoof the depersonalization of modern communication. “Ultraplex,” a parody of those droning movie-theater recordings, is a savvy, laugh-out-loud delight.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through Oct. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Memories: The tremendous presence of Jonathan White’s new work at Angles Gallery is predicated, paradoxically, on absence. Photographs, transferred to canvas through the cyanotype process, they are large, quiet ciphers. Their deep Prussian blue is vivid and immediate--especially as the emulsion is stained into the very weave of the canvas, rather than resting atop its surface--yet the images themselves derive from distant places and times. White made the pictures as souvenirs, on boyhood travels to Monument Valley, the Roman Coliseum and the Southwest.

Time, transience and the residue that constitutes memory have engaged White in earlier paintings, sculpture and drawings; but photography bears a special, symbiotic relationship with loss and longing that White channels effectively here. However dispassionate the views, they trigger an emotional response: a melancholy sort of nostalgia for what is irretrievably gone.

Two more cryptic images in the show are greatly enlarged fragments of photographs from which White has excised himself. One shows a loosely upholstered couch with an ashtray sitting on the cushion, and the other what appears to be a bookshelf. Though less affecting than the travel snapshots, these fixations on domestic details bring to mind Bachelard’s theories about feeling a primal connection to the childhood home--and seeking to restore it.

White’s work is ultimately more minimal than sentimental, but what keeps it lingering in the mind is the frisson it stages between the two--between the reductive and the richly associative, between the insistent monochrome of the blueprint and the emotional nuance of the childhood memory.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Oct. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.