Bright Moments in a Bleak Existence

When the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles opened its new pavilion earlier this year, the inaugural art exhibition featured stunning video installations by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, dealing, often obliquely, with the phenomenon of contact between cultures. The museum’s second art offering, “A Process of Reflection: Paintings by Hisako Hibi,” also says something about cultural confrontation, and this time in the form of plain, hard truths. It’s a poignant show and a necessary one, a reminder of the fundamental power of art to nourish the human spirit, as well as the equally fundamental power of humans themselves to squelch that same spirit.

Hibi was born in Fukui, Japan, in 1907 and immigrated to the U.S. at age 14. When her family returned to Japan in 1925, Hibi stayed on in San Francisco, enrolled in art school, married a fellow painter and started her own family. In 1942, Hibi and roughly 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forced to abandon their homes and the lives they’d crafted by Executive Order 9066, an unconscionable measure prompted by wartime paranoia.

Removed first to the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, where horse stalls served as living quarters, Hibi nevertheless continued to paint. In fact, the inmates formed an art school there, which Hibi was involved in, and which grew to 800 students after settling into more permanent barracks in Topaz, Utah, later in 1942.

Hibi painted 70 canvases during the years she was interned. Most are now in the Japanese American National Museum’s collection, and they form the core of the current show, organized thoughtfully by the museum’s Kristine Kim. Painting in a spare, abbreviated style--often bearing the influence of Cezanne, other times a sense of Marsden Hartley--Hibi captures the stark gray angularity and the general desolation of the environment they were forced to call home.

Throughout, she focuses on what Primo Levi identified in the concentration camps of the Holocaust as “moments of reprieve,” small instinctual glimmers of humanity that transcended the camps’ dehumanizing bleakness. She shows a woman reading a letter from one of her children, a couple stopped in conversation, mothers and children in tender contact, a glorious sunflower (more sun than flower) thriving, as they all aspired to do, in the miserly nourishment of the desert.

After her release in 1945, Hibi moved to New York City, but her husband, George, died just a few years later. She became a U.S. citizen in 1953 and returned the following year to San Francisco, continuing to paint until her death in 1991. The postwar paintings here are as bright and unfettered as the wartime images are heavy with the burdens and sorrows of confinement. Spontaneous, fresh and vibrant, they provide a fitting postscript to the bleakness of what came before, but they also testify to a continuity of faith in the power and utility of art to express internal realities--at either extreme.

* Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., (213) 625-0414, through spring 2000. Closed Mondays.

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Playing With Scale: Representations of landscape typically offer the viewer some kind of orientation--a sense of scale, distance, perspective. Frank Van der Salm’s often don’t, at least not in any conventional way. In his first American show, at Jan Kesner Gallery, the Dutch photographer tweaks expectations, sometimes gratuitously, but often to mesmerizing effect.

In “Doll’s House,” he shoots a drab green Italian apartment building in soft focus but fills the frame with it, so that the lack of context and the blurring of details nudges the picture, although not quite far enough, toward an ambiguity of scale. In another image, shot in the Rhone Valley, Van der Salm reaches further, playing with depth of field in a more nuanced way, and he turns out a more complicated, disorienting and interesting picture.

Looking down on a town nestled between mountains, we see only a narrow band of buildings in clear focus. Structures in the immediate foreground and the verdant mountains in the distance are both blurred, which has the effect of casting doubt on the veracity of what’s sandwiched between them. The houses vacillate between appearing to be of normal scale and seeming miniaturized, like the tiny props of a model railroad display.

Van der Salm exercises other “special effects”--shooting through rippled glass or blurring the nightscape of Las Vegas until the lights devolve into oversized, luminous grains of colored sand spread across a black cloth.

In another particularly rich take on Las Vegas, Van der Salm adopts a cosmic perspective. From directly overhead, we see all the crass trappings of our culture of convenience--parking lots, rooftops littered with air handling equipment--and smack in the middle a contrived oasis, a rectangle of lucid blue, a rooftop swimming pool. Here, Van der Salm offers more context, rather than less, enough to qualify as commentary on the purchased oblivion of those sun-soakers by the pool--and by extension, the rest of us looking on.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-6834, through Aug. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In Search of Self: Janieta Eyre’s photographs, mainly of herself, belong to an extended family of staged self-portraiture that tends to navigate through cultural cliches or gender stereotypes to drum home the challenge of constructing something resembling personal identity. Eyre performs a more private masquerade.

Her photographs at Sherry Frumkin/Christine Duval Gallery are genuinely odd but strangely touching fusions of intimacy and idiosyncrasy. An indecipherability, or at least a sense of thwarted communication, lies at the heart of these theatrical tableaux.

Eyre, a young British artist living in Toronto, stares out from her photographs with deadpan earnestness while wearing bizarre thrift-shop ensembles of knickers, masks, patterned tights, mouse ears and lampshades. In one image, she appears in triplicate, wearing around her neck a placard with images of hands spelling out phrases in sign language. A black band covers her eyes, and around the waist of one of the figures is the image of a crying infant. Both suppressed sight and silenced voices are palpable forces in this stiffly posed and unsettling picture.

In doubling and tripling her own image within a single frame, Eyre conjures up the notion of multiple personae as well as the prospect of cloning. Photographers were seamlessly reproducing anyone and anything long before geneticists even tackled the challenge, and the results, as Eyre’s work attests, are just as psychologically wrenching. Eyre’s world boasts all the same components as our familiar, everyday reality--birth, death, sex, love, reverie, fear, authority and submission--yet it has the feel of a private obsession. A world not just invented but inverted, sense and nonsense are utterly interchangeable.

* Sherry Frumkin/Christine Duval Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through Aug. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Unrestful: For more than 30 years, Mowry Baden has been preoccupied with ordinary movements--the physical exertion involved and the perceptual framework that relates the expectation of an act with its realization. His sculptures are often kinetic, participatory environments, requiring the viewer to move through an altered space or activate a particular element.

The three pieces now on view at Post Gallery (two at the gallery’s Wilshire Boulevard location, one downtown) are all static, and not just physically. Each generates a slight sense of disjunction but stops short of any deeper, more complicated psychic engagement.

Mattresses figure in all three pieces, their lifeless bulk counting for more than their symbolic presence as the site of terrifically concentrated expectations, from the satisfactions of sleep and sex to the fears and fantasies the unconscious mind smuggles into dreams. Baden, an L.A. native living in Canada, repeatedly subverts the function of the mattresses, but they remain clumsy and inert, qualities that end up encompassing the sculptures themselves.

In “Suture Mastic” (downtown), a twin mattress set rests on a conventional metal frame. Hovering directly over it are two more sets, which, together, suggest a giant jaw poised to chomp.

In “Ever Pronating,” a pair of mattresses hinged upright like an open book threatens to slump down and sandwich anyone curious enough to step inside its range. “Broken Dreams,” too, negates the bed’s promises, substituting a hard fiberglass shell, split in two, for the usual soft, continuous surface. It’s unfulfilling as a bed, but it’s just as much of a letdown as a sculpture.

* Post Wilshire, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 932-1822. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Post Downtown, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 622-8580. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. Both shows continue through Aug. 14.