About Faces

Faces are the common thread through the Los Angeles Printmaking Society’s group show at the Lankershim Arts Center in North Hollywood.

Fittingly, no two faces or styles are alike.

Sometimes reality and imagination intermingle as in Donna Westerman’s “Rita Colossus,” with a giant visage of Rita Hayworth looming over a hillside like a goddess emerging from the ocean.

In Masha Schweitzer’s “Self-Portrait as a Much Older Woman,” the artist views herself speculatively, in a mirror. Schweitzer’s works, including the oddly symmetrical and dreamlike “Sisters,” are among the most impressive, with a roughhewn, direct approach conveying tenderness and fragility.

David Rose is the show’s “straight man” by instinct and profession, having spent years as a courtroom sketch artist. He had an engaging exhibition in this space two years ago, and in the current show he displays no-nonsense images of King Hussein and romanticized portraits of ruddy seafarers.

By contrast, “Portrait of Richard Ruben” by Leonard Edmonson shows a wonderful, loony lightness of drawing, and Walter Askin’s mixed-media piece envisions multiple views of creatures, appearing as game-board pieces from another planet.

The show’s scope covers sculpture from Sandy Decker’s gnarled, post-Cubist heads to the clever trick-of-the-eye effects of Karen Mortillaro’s “Brothers.” Here, a man stands over another figure, lying in an apparently distorted heap, like rubberized matter.

But when viewed in the reflection of the wavy mirror attached to the work, the figure appears, magically, normalized.

*

BE THERE

“About Face” through May 8 at the Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Thursday-Saturday 2-5 p.m. (818) 752-2682.