‘Different Looks’ Explores Power in Seeing, Being Seen

“Different Looks,” a provocative group show at UC Riverside’s Sweeney Art Gallery, tries to turn the deceptively straightforward act of looking on its ear. Curated by artist and writer Ken Gonzales-Day, this smart but uneven exhibition of photography, digital art and drawing by seven L.A. artists alternately sails and stumbles over its internal contradictions.

The show’s persuasive (if familiar) argument is that looking, and being looked at, can be powerful expressions of social power and control. Gonzales-Day spins this idea in an unexpected direction by selecting images in which people are either visually obscured or entirely absent. A compelling exception to this occurs with Vincente Golveo’s show-stealing “Download,” 1998, a wall-length display of ballpoint-pen drawings depicting hundreds of Asian and Pacific Island men in various states of sexual arousal.

Golveo’s carefully rendered drawings, each copied from downloaded Internet files, transform the instant sexual gratification of online porn into a sustained, and deeply erotic, devotional act. Across the room, Margaret Morgan’s wonderfully wry, postcard-sized color photographs of the sinks, toilets and utility closets in public restrooms (shot from multiple angles, not unlike nude studies) ask us to take a long, hard look at places we’d rather not think about.

The efforts elsewhere feel more tentative. At times, the artists seem to be replicating, rather than undermining, the conventional visual strategies that they are presumably trying to question. Installed in another grid formation, the working-class truckers in Annica Karlsson Rixon’s color photographs are barely discernible, anonymous blurs, making Rixon’s snapshots the conceptual equivalent of drive-by shootings that tell us little or nothing about their subject’s experiences. Likewise, Hillary Mushkin’s banal, surveillance-style photographs of an anonymous woman in her home don’t generate much tension beyond their slasher-movie allusions.

In Jose Alvaro Perdices’ nearly monochrome black-and-white photographs of gay bars, the only signs of human activity are the tiny flashes of light emerging from near-total darkness. Perdices’ cryptic images speak eloquently to the public secrecy that homophobia enforces, but by the same token, they look an awful lot like the interiors of locked closets.

Culled from archival film footage, Bruce & Norman Yonemoto’s black-and-white stills feel out of place here, but a satisfying sense of closure is provided by Joseph Santarromana’s gorgeous, digitally manipulated photographs of unidentifiable objects suspended in space. Defiantly amorphous and unreadable, these secret signs confound our efforts to label or classify them. Santarromana’s strangely sensuous images are also unexpectedly utopian. They speak of the undeniable pleasure we take in looking, and suggest that someday, our differences might simply be celebrated, rather than endlessly deconstructed and analyzed to death.

(‘Different Looks” is presented in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs by Raoul Gradvohl and Garry Winogrand, also organized by Gonzales-Day, which is on view at the UCR/California Museum of Photography).

* Sweeney Art Gallery (in Watkins House), 3701 Canyon Crest Drive, Riverside, (909) 787-3755, through Dec. 13. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Visual Poetry: In his newest paintings and sculptures at Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions, Enrique Martinez Celaya uses poetry as a material element, scrawling the words to his poem “Berlin” in thick black pencil directly onto the gallery’s walls and across the surface of his wax models of body parts. Yet Martinez Celaya is at his best when he deploys poetic devices in exclusively visual terms.

Fragility and violence, memory and its loss exist side by side in Martinez Celaya’s spare, haunting paintings. Many depict human or birds’ heads and disembodied limbs floating in empty space. Sometimes these heads appear to be wrapped, mummy-like, in white strips, or imprisoned behind vertical bars, as if the Cuban-born artist were likening the mind to a prison house filled with painful memories that refuse to fade with time.

These spiritual themes are balanced by Martinez Celaya’s selective application of organic detritus like rose petals, dirt, hair and butterfly wings, which suggest a range of earthbound associations while drawing you into the physical reality of his paintings’ tactile, sensuous surfaces. Likewise, his wax sculptures of heads, arms and forearms appear worn, pocked or cracked, the resinous flesh like the crumbling exterior of an aging building.

Although Martinez Celaya is undoubtedly a talented poet, the lyric force and universal themes evoked by his haunting paintings and sculpture succeed well enough on their own. No further context or explanation feels necessary--Martinez Celaya’s visual poetry has made any other language superfluous.

* Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions, 915 Electric Ave., Venice, (310) 452-1014, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Backstage Secrets: In his second solo show at Marc Foxx Gallery, Hiroshi Sugito’s extraordinary paintings make you feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland after she swallowed the contents of the bottle labeled “Drink Me”: Everything seems either much too big or far too small.

Employing a subdued palette of cream, salmon, pale yellow and periwinkle, the Japanese artist paints over-large, box-like rooms that appear to be empty, but, upon closer inspection, are actually filled with tiny beds, chairs or flowers that are pressed against the walls or scattered about the room like Lilliputian party guests.

Sugito lures you into a baffling world where size, scale and conventional perspectives are subtly overturned, and the distinctions between front and back, interior and exterior are thoroughly confused. Trained in Japan’s Nihonga painting tradition, Sugito’s delicate paintings seamlessly combine Eastern and Western representational perspectives.

Several of the rooms appear to slant downward, as if sliding toward you, while others look like grand stage sets viewed from behind the stage, as if you are looking out into the space of the audience. The empty chairs suggest that perhaps the “audience” is meant to be seated onstage, watching the real action as it takes place somewhere off in the distance.

Just as Lewis Carroll or Jonathan Swift crafted whimsical characters and absurd events to satirize the folly of their times, Sugito’s ant-sized, abandoned stage sets suggest that there are complex power plays we’ll never know about taking place behind the scenes. Like Alice’s topsy-turvy Wonderland, Sugito’s delightfully disorienting paintings become “curiouser and curiouser” the longer you linger before them.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5571, through Nov. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Pretty Postcards: At Stephen Cohen Gallery, Lynn Geesaman’s stunning color and black-and-white images provide a photographic tour of Europe’s most breathtaking parks, gardens and monuments. It’s easy to imagine one of Jane Austen’s memorable heroines wandering contemplatively through these picturesque walkways and shady, tree-lined vistas.

Geesaman’s photographs are instantly recognizable. Using a signature technique that she prefers not to disclose, she blurs the edges of the objects in her landscapes, which softens her otherwise rigidly geometrical compositions. Seemingly lit from within, at times Geesaman’s striking images look more like Impressionist paintings than photographs.

Centering her compositions around decorous stone fountains, idyllic gazebos and old-fashioned wooden benches that are, as Austen might say, “happily situated” alongside winding streams and sheltering trees, Geesaman celebrates the beauty of a “natural” world that is cultivated entirely by human hands. The best of these images hint at an ongoing struggle between nature’s wild and undisciplined movement and our efforts to impose order through landscape design.

Unfortunately, Geesaman doesn’t push these ideas nearly as far as she could. Faced with images of such incandescent beauty, you feel almost churlish for noting that Geesaman’s postcard-perfect photographs bypass many thought-provoking questions about the ways in which we shape the natural landscape according to our own needs.

As a result, Geesaman’s photographs leave you caught between sense and sensibility. If you like drop-dead-gorgeous pictures that ask no impertinent questions, these deliriously romantic photographs are likely to sweep you right off your feet. If, however, you long for images that stimulate the mind as deeply as they do the senses, Geesaman’s landscapes may leave you unfulfilled.

* Stephen Cohn Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 937-5525, through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.