Dreams, Themes in Barnsdall Exhibitions

Two group exhibitions at Barnsdall Art Park concentrate on mostly lesser-known L.A. artists. Both address private worlds that end up appearing quite familiar.

“Xtrascape” at the Municipal Art Gallery is a thoughtfully oblique thematic exercise presenting nine artists. “Night Visions,” at the Junior Art Center, addresses a subject historically commonplace in art--our dreams.

Maybe its five artists are obsessed with dreamed imagery out of frustration at their inability to picture it as seen in the mind. Dreams, for example, move and meld in ways that art doesn’t. They’re more-or-less cinematic.

Guest curator Michael Lewis Miller’s catalog essay suggests that dream art actually may act as a substitute for sleeping apparitions. Since those phantoms are often surrogates for repressed desire, this imagery is double-sublimated. No wonder it looks like art instead of dreams. That’s what it is.

Art styles with an aura of unreality are by now standard metaphors of the nightscape. Nancy Mozur’s painting “Lay My Burden Down,” for example, depicts a crawling nude saddled with a burning orb and a giant lizard. Its combination of archetypal symbols and agitated surface address the waking subconscious as if it were sleeping. Even though Jane Chafin’s Edenic folk-primitive scenes are more lyrical, much the same can be said of her other works, such as “Serving the Muse.”

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Why is Suzanna Meiers’ assemblage more affecting than her painting? I think it’s because dreams, like precious-junk sculpture, often feel three-dimensional. Tiny tableaux like “Chance Meeting” probably get to us because their toy-like size evokes the childhood memories that awake in sleeping fancy. Maybe Meiers Herberg’s “Finlandia” evokes the nursery by imagining an entire landscape on a tabletop.

Jim Shaw is widely noted for art based on careful tracking of his dreams. Unlike the others who work variations on traditional surreal, expressionistic and folk styles, Shaw speaks through cartoons. “Dreamt of Comic . . .” is plainly a variation on the old “Archie” series. By making narrative less rational and exploiting built-in eroticism, Shaw gets down to the sexual fantasies that fuel most dreams. In that sense his approach is more analytical than expressive.

Miller’s curatorial approach makes “Night Vision” into an exercise in doubt. Questions are posed about the continuing viability of this kind of art. In a way “Xtrascape” tries to address them.

The exhibition, basically rife with old-fashioned Surrealism, tries to avoid association with the dream world by introducing sociological tides and newer media. Guest curators Christina Fernandez and Tania Martinez-Lemke say they intended to explore contemporary notions of a landscape between “The Real” and “The Imaginary,” whatever that means.

In practice, it means installations like “The Eighth Wonder” by the team of Morales and Nun~o. A wall-size, extremely snowy video loop, it looks like the Empire State Building scene from “King Kong.” Joo Kyung Yoon’s similarly large, equally static “Two Ships Are Crossing” depicts two figures standing in the ocean tide, each toting a suitcase. Both works have the effect of frozen nightmares.

Victoria Vesna’s “Bodies Inc.” is made up principally of large color photographs with text. Among the more interesting pieces, it evokes a futuristic world where everyone is constructed of artificial body parts. These androids live in a corporate police state so repressive the only freedom is in creating one’s own imaginary reality.

If these examples create the impression of thematic consistency, I apologize. Few pieces relate to one another and most seem to be halfway between departure and arrival. Niki Munroe’s “Untitled Airport Series” photos of empty boarding lounges make the point. Michael Leon’s big digital prints inhabit a zone between architectural renderings and hard-edge abstraction. Glenn Kaino and Matt Fukuda’s “Authentic Hawaiian” shirts and flags are on the way from clothing design to social satire.

Some of this undefined turf is oddly compelling. Matt Gainer’s “This Difficult Landscape, Excerpts From Historic Presidential Speeches” are digitized snippets from sound wave recordings that look like odd galactic landscapes. Glen D. Wilson’s photo panorama of Tolagnaro on Madagascar’s coast and his images of the locals lugging stuff are just nice, thoughtful pictures. If all this adds up to anything it’s an impression of art and culture in troubled transition.

* Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., through April 5, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (213) 485-4581.