Imaginative ‘Daydreaming’ Alters Familiar Narratives

It’s August and the group exhibitions are proliferating at area galleries. At George’s, a nine-artist show called “Daydreaming” is among the more refreshing. Organized by artist Leonard Bravo, the otherwise modest assembly manages to persuasively assert the value of imagination over knowledge.

Most of the work begins with mediated experience, ranging from television and advertising to fairy tales and comic books, then attempts to revivify it in an imaginative way. Narratives that seem vaguely familiar suddenly spin out of whack.

Sean Duffy renders the Devil’s Tower landscape from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in synthetic fur, then shrink-wraps it in the form of little TV screens. Kyungmi Shin makes scrolls whose wallpaper “calligraphy” is composed of tiny inkjet repetitions of magazine photographs of embracing football players and a homeless mother.

Michael Pierzynski wittily sails a ceramic schooner across a vision-doubling sea of mirror, where it encounters two Baroque ceramic plumes that themselves double as threatening whirlpools and decorative accessories of dubious taste. Thaddeus Strode makes model-railroad-style tableaux that push monster comics one step closer to being real--that is, into being miniature stage sets.

Kathleen Johnson doesn’t find organic shapes, animals or Stieglitz-like equivalents in her photographs of fluffy cloud formations; instead, she injects into the sky mysteriously floating, geometric plinths of light. Brad Spence’s sprayed acrylic image of a brain floating in a tank of fluid turns disembodied Conceptual art into a sly B-movie riff.

A nine-minute unfinished fairy tale filmed by Kevin Sullivan and Laura Howe attempts to cross-pollinate the magic of Jean Cocteau with the spectacle of Matthew Barney, albeit in the blessedly low-budget, do-it-yourself medium of Super-8. Susan Lutz’s sequential stereographic photos of the recent blossoming of the Huntington Botanical Gardens’ Amorphallus titanum--a.k.a. the big stinky flower--pop into suitably silly three dimensions when viewed through a plastic lens. (What, no scratch ‘n’ sniff?)

Through small-scale or softened focus, all of these works engage perceptual faculties in order to draw you in for closer inspection. Familiarity fades, estrangement looms and the daydreaming begins.

* George’s, 1766 N. Vermont Ave., (323) 666-9447, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Computer ‘Angels’: In more than two dozen new digital prints and a few larger collages, Willie Robert Middlebrook uses a computer montage technique to fuse suggestions of biblical narrative with African American genre imagery. Protestant iconoclasm is swept away by Baroque exuberance, though, in allusive pictures that sometimes generate a good deal of visual tension.

“Black Angels,” as the suite is titled, is installed at the Cecil Fergerson Gallery of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee Center. Most pictures are presided over by an individual winged presence, whose ethereality is enhanced by the montage technique. People, urban landscape, blocks of flat color and abstract gestures are fragmentary, layered, transparent. Middlebrook’s packed Expressionist icons insist that nothing exists independently of anything else.

In “Michael,” a torso stands before a neighborhood market with head bowed, the upswept curves of his wings doubling as flames licking the sky. Through the wings you glimpse an anonymous figure gazing back from an upstairs window.

In “The Burden” the wings of a boxer in a ring enfold the fighter like an erotic flower. In “Freedom” the figure’s wings stretch elastically, suggesting wind blowing through a carnival Ferris wheel and merging seamlessly into flowing locks of hair.

Sometimes the montage gets away from the artist, devolving into tangled puddles of mottled color that are difficult to read. The large collages, by contrast, tend to meander.

Most often, though, the montage technique acts as a sensuous prism to condense fluid visual experience--the profile of a forehead sliding into the swelling red mound of an old woman’s robe that becomes transparent as its pattern is transformed into a saw-tooth wing. Middlebrook’s prints of modern angels in an urban “paradise lost” locate spiritual redemption not in nature, which is the traditional source for Protestant faith. Instead his touching, often sexy pictures find it in life’s fragile but resilient connective social tissue.

* Cecil Fergerson Gallery, Watts Labor Community Action Committee Center, 10950 S. Central Ave., (323) 563-5639, through Sept. 25. Closed Sundays.

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Body ‘Gestures’: The richly sepia-toned, soft-focus images of hands, feet and limbs made by largely self-taught photographer Han Nguyen merge the delicacy of pastel drawings with the sturdy impenetrability of bronze reliefs. That the San Diego-based artist has turned the camera on his own body infuses their dual sense of transient fragility and ancient mystery with an introspective aura.

Nguyen calls his show of 26 pictures at Stephen Cohen Gallery “Gestures.” Dated 1997 to 1999, they display fragmentary limbs isolated against blank backgrounds in a wide variety of poses. Hands hang limply, clasp one another, grasp air. Feet point, rest corpse-like on heels, stand formally in profile.

In a few pictures a hand grasps an ankle, joining two extremities that bring the absent, unseen body between them squarely into the mind’s eye. One especially lyrical work shows the soft inner length of an arm, cascading like a stream from the upper right to the lower left in a gentle display of vulnerability and exposure.

These physical gestures are poignantly mute, though, eschewing the legibility of sign language. Instead, it’s Nguyen’s camera that gestures, situating photography alongside older forms of art. The formal resemblance to drawing and bronze relief is compounded with quiet allusions to everything from the gesticulating hands in Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling to Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe and Asian carvings of Buddha.

Nguyen, whose work is also currently the subject of a survey at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, organized by the Museum of Photographic Arts there, employs a format that’s highly reflective: Behind glass, the rich bronze tones create a mirror-like finish in which the inescapable reflection of your own inquiring face and body intermingles with the gestures.

The two most recent photographs show a slight shift. These pictures’ color, cyan instead of bronze, recalls architectural blueprints. It’s too soon to tell where Nguyen is headed with this change, but on the evidence of the earlier photographs it will be worth watching.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (323) 937-5525, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Journalism as Art: “I don’t read art journalism,” writes guest curator Laurence A. Rickles in the flier that accompanies his thematic group show “Art/Journalism” at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Rickles, a teacher in the department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic studies at UC Santa Barbara, uses the next 25 paragraphs to declaim his belief that all journalism, not just art journalism, is adolescent trivia.

Candor is a virtue. Here, the admission of experiential ignorance also might explain why the show is so thin. What it doesn’t explain is why, if journalism is junk, it’s also worth the attention and effort of artists, a gallery and prospective audiences.

Thirteen artists are included. Among their 18 works, two recent ones stand out. Both have digital roots.

Set to a driving techno-pop soundtrack, Jessica Bronson’s 1998 laserdisc “First and Last Strike” is a hypnotic compilation of stock TV weather footage showing lightning. Digitally doubled, the lightning bursts meld horror-movie melodrama with electronic Rorschach blots, onto which your own imaginative perceptions are projected.

Blocks of type suggestive of The Times’ masthead are digitally fabricated as chunky stone tablets in Larry Johnson’s new photograph, “------------, Untitled (Times).”. Recalling a “B.C.” comic strip panel, the simple but nuanced image is simultaneously suggestive of monolithic walls, functional building materials and archeological ruins.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.