A New View of Life on the Home Front

Until very recently, family values and contemporary art have had precious little to do with one another. But as family structures diversify and art keeps pace with these changes, it’s becoming increasingly clear that cutting-edge works are no threat to the social principles and standards that spring from and foster domestic tranquillity.

While avant-garde radicals may despise this development, modern-day romantics embrace it with growing boldness. At Regen Projects, Catherine Opie’s new photographs celebrate middle-class domesticity with more verve and passion than have been brought to this subject in several generations.

To make the series of impeccably printed images from which the nine on display are taken, the L.A.-based photographer loaded her equipment (and dog) into an RV and headed out on a 10-week road trip that took her through Tulsa, Okla.; Durham, N.C.; New York; Minneapolis; and San Francisco. In these and other cities, Opie photographed lesbian couples and families, relaxing in backyards, hanging out in kitchens, lounging on sofas, staring out windows and playing with children.

Happy moments predominate. A pregnant woman and her partner float lazily in a swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills. Another couple watches their 2-year-old daughter with great contentment. The sweetest picture portrays a middle-aged pair holding hands as they sit in bright yellow chairs, between a big satellite dish and propane-tank trailer.

But all is not bliss in Opie’s photographs, which refuse to idealize home life. In a low-ceilinged New York apartment, tidiness barely glosses over a sense of claustrophobia. In Durham, a sunny afternoon of yardwork gives way to deep tensions. And in a San Francisco flat, four young women cannot hide their expression of life-long defiance, even when sitting around their cozy kitchen.

Opie’s series is a love poem to relationships that flourish in the privacy of home. Her sumptuous color prints do not portray a group of individuals as much as they give physical form to the emotionally charged relationships between and among women who know each other extremely well. It’s heartening to see a gay artist practicing “straight” photography as if the genre were tailor-made for her quietly beautiful works.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through May 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Spills and Chills: Ingrid Calame’s first L.A. solo show of paintings and drawings delivers on the promise the young artist has exhibited in various group shows over the past three years. At the recently opened Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Calame’s graphic abstractions could be the offspring of Helen Frankenthaler’s worst nightmares and Stanley Kubrick’s coolest fantasies.

Composed of the silhouettes of spills she has traced from city streets and sidewalks, these supersaturated abstractions are stain paintings gone wrong. Neither spontaneous nor gestural, they are executed in enamel on aluminum, in a synthetic palette that shares more with postindustrial mishaps and high-tech manipulation than organic forms and natural processes.

The gallery’s main space--whose floor, walls, ceiling and chimney-like skylight are painted bright white--is vintage Kubrick, a cube of palpable light both sexy and ominous. It also looks as if it were made for Calame’s precisely articulated paintings, whose razor-sharp contours begin to resemble 3-D cartographies, and whose modest size is belied by their impressive scale and density.

In the rear gallery, four colored pencil drawings on Mylar insist on their two-dimensionality. Unlike the paintings, in which solid shapes overlap one another to form tense spatial illusions, the drawings consist entirely of outlines, suggesting X-ray dissections of another image’s otherwise invisible layers of under-painting.

Whereas Calame’s works on paper seem to embody a single split second of time (in which everything is mysteriously visible), her panels give shape to longer temporal expanses, over which impossibly complex layers appear to have piled atop one another. In both cases, her bold abstractions warp time and space by drawing viewers into a mesmerizing world where materials and illusions fuse.

* Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., #8, (323) 525-1755, through May 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Bold Abstractions: Over the years, Richard Allen Morris has remained one of San Diego’s best-kept secrets, a 66-year-old painter’s painter admired by other artists but unknown to a wider audience. At Chac-Mool Gallery, his first solo show in Los Angeles is beginning to bring his abstract works the attention they merit.

Nearly 30 spunky paintings from the 1990s fill the main gallery. Most are painted on thin vertical strips of wood, which measure between 1 and 6 feet tall and less than 5 inches wide. Morris has deftly slathered so many thick smears of brightly colored acrylic over each piece that they look less like images than objects. The best ones resemble sticks that have been cobbled together out of nothing but juicy color, as if the artist somehow had managed to melt a rainbow and use it to make his paintings.

In the back gallery, 25 small panels, made in the 1970s and 1980s, are gems in the rough. Traces of John McLaughlin’s austere abstractions and Nicholas Wilder’s built-up surfaces can be seen in Morris’ casually accomplished works. But a sense of whiplash urgency gives these seemingly offhand canvases a power all their own.

In fact, more artists (and more well-known artists) are indebted to Morris than he is to them. In format and palette, fellow San Diegan David Reed has learned a lot from him, as has James Hayward, who, along with John Baldessari and Denise Spampinato, are the show’s curators. Although not directly influenced by Morris’ deliciously loaded works, Michael Reafsnyder’s eccentric abstractions find a sympathetic echo in the boldness with which they disregard fashion and march to the beat of their own drummer.

* Chac-Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., (310) 550-6792, through Saturday.)

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Drive-By Art: Rather than bemoaning diminished attention spans and increasingly speedy gallery visits, Robert Stone’s new installation makes the most of this situation. A treat for viewers who like to look at the world out of the corners of their eyes, his slight piece doesn’t even require that you stop your car.

Stone has tinted the front windows of Bliss, an on-again, off-again gallery in the two front rooms of artist Kenneth Riddle’s Pasadena home. Based on the metallic tint of a downtown IBM office tower, the highly reflective windows look out of place on the classic Craftsman house on the quiet tree-lined street. To emphasize this visual dissonance, Stone has made a new front door, replacing the clear glass of the old one with an off-centered sheet of tinted glass.

Like one-way mirrors, the altered windows provide greater privacy for those inside the house. To outsiders, they endow the home/gallery with a sense of corporate authority.

Six boring photographs of a female model posed on the porch and lawn add very little to Stone’s mimicry of a chic institutional look. The best thing about his uninspiring project is that it is largely available on a drive-by basis, well beyond the gallery’s brief weekend hours.

* Bliss, 825 N. Michigan Ave., Pasadena, (626) 398-0855, through May 2. Open Saturdays and Sundays only.