Mississippi’s ‘Garden’: From Here to Eternity
“The Garden of Time,” a marvelous installation by Connie Mississippi at the Brand Library, is everything a garden should be. It’s a place of wonder, meditation and beauty. To meander through the large, open gallery “planted” with Mississippi’s sculpture is to take a journey of the senses, and to marvel equally at the ingenuity of the hand and the miracles of the earth.
Mississippi works almost exclusively in wood, making lathe-turned forms of tremendous elegance, with seductively smooth surfaces that beg to be stroked. She marks the semiformal entrance to her garden with two human-scaled pillars whose buttery skins edge up against areas of raw, craggy bark to striking effect.
Just beyond the entry guardians stands “Time Pool,” a broad, tiled dish of water raised on a base of iron rods. The tiles around the rim of the bowl bear the names of female sculptors whom Mississippi admires, such as Eva Hesse, Louise Nevelson, Niki de Saint Phalle, Betye Saar and Viola Frey. Though Mississippi also shows the influence of David Nash, and embraces the legacy of Brancusi (one work here pays open tribute to him) she calls special attention to female sculptors, whose relatively young lineage she is consciously extending.
Mississippi’s acute awareness of continuity infuses all her work. The sculptures themselves embody the way time’s rhythms become palpable in space through organic form as well as human action. Mississippi visualizes “A Ribbon of Time” as a sinuous question mark that loops back on itself several times before dripping into a sphere of turned birch plywood.
She conjures up the notion of inter-generational continuity in a family of three ash sculptures on tall pedestals. With delicately carved areas neighboring crude gouges, smooth curves interrupted by raw fissures, each object represents an exquisite confluence of chance and control. Other works echo the quiet weight of stones, the perfect spiral of the nautilus shell and the mysterious depths of black holes in space.
“The Garden of Time” has three benches crafted by Mississippi and several stands of trees, each dedicated to another artist, including Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager and Barbara Hepworth. The turned wood trunks assume a variety of shapes, from bulbous columns to tapered cones, and each sprouts springy limbs of steel dangling brightly painted fruits. Hybrids of natural and mechanical forms, the fruits add color and lighthearted whimsy to the garden, while diluting somewhat its overall grace. “The Garden of Time” is a magical place, where Mississippi embraces the literal and also gleefully abandons it, where she muses on eternity and revels in the here and now. Her work inspires us to do the same.
* Brand Library Art Gallery, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale, (818) 548-2051, through March 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
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Presence and Absence: Guillermo Kuitca’s work has an emotional density informed by (but not restricted to) issues that have touched his life directly: diaspora (his grandparents were Russian Jews who emigrated to Argentina to flee pogroms early this century); absence (the military dictatorship that raged in his youth and created legions of “disappeared”); and tenuous belonging (as a Jew in a predominantly non-Jewish culture, and an artist living on the periphery of the art world’s radar screen). In his new paintings at L.A. Louver, Kuitca’s imagery is as intense and potent as ever, but it has become increasingly spare, less anchored in the familiar.
A sense of place has been central to Kuitca’s work, but he has not opposed presence and absence, home and exile in a conventional way. Instead, his paintings of beds and the floor plans of houses and other buildings have seeped with loss, and his maps suggested placelessness.
In three of the works here, Kuitca paints the architectural floor plans of large public buildings (all unidentified and untitled) with skeletal simplicity in white against flat gray, crimson or blood orange. Occupants of the spaces have only a whispered presence. (In an image of a theater, all is static but for the fan-like arc of seats, which stutters and blurs.) In the most jarring of the three, Kuitca has traced a faint but fevered path through the building--a hotel, perhaps--in thin, ghostly white. The path seems desperate. It streaks straight through walls, bypassing doors and circling around the space as if trapped in a maze.
The same sense of hushed futility pervades three mesmerizing paintings whose patterns derive from the concentric rows of seats in large stadiums. Painting in black on white, or white on dark green, Kuitca shreds the orderly rows of bleachers into fragmented strands that skew and overlap as they trace the vaguely oval shape of an arena. He recasts the orderly rhythm and mechanical uniformity of the seating plan into an agitated, interrupted path, a sort of nervous, private pacing.
More subtly--but also more pungently--than those with explicit political agendas, Kuitca deflates the authoritative power of maps and plans, undermining their claims to definitive understanding or, by implication, possession of a place. In Kuitca’s quietly troubling art, maps and plans are no longer reassurances of where one stands, but manifestations of anxiety about where one belongs.
* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
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Views of Everyday Life: Photographer Mario Algaze crystallizes experience as deftly as a poet. His photographs are remarkable for their concentrated richness, exquisite timing and finely tuned sense of rhythm, pattern and texture. Born in Cuba in 1947 and based in Miami since the ‘60s, Algaze has traveled and photographed throughout Latin America for more than 20 years.
A selection of mostly recent images at Peter Fetterman Gallery shows him equally adept at distilling the pure, natural landscape as the social, built environment, but his most charged pictures show people and place in concert. “Cuesta Arriba, Salvador, Brazil” (1997), for instance, is a tight gem of contrasts. A gentle diagonal slices the image in two, with a shadowed cobblestone street occupying the bottom half and sun-drenched facades of homes rising from it. The raw texture of the street meets the more refined articulation of the houses--with their iron tracery balconies and syncopated doorways--with all the symbolic power of the horizontal earthly plane confronting the vertically built human realm. Lynchpins of the photograph, in its very center, are two long-legged boys striding up the sloping street.
Algaze’s are genre pictures, precious stills from the continuum of everyday life, as sensual at times as Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s, and as poignant as Andre Kertesz’s. Sacred rituals of church worship figure as prominently as secular rituals, such as visits to the barber shop.
The images don’t aspire to overt political commentary, but Algaze tends to focus on the working class, suffusing his pictures with a fundamental humanism that grants everyone within the frame an equal share of dignity. Many of the images have a filmic feel, ripe with narrative possibility.
In “Club La Paz, La Paz, Bolivia” (1989), we perceive (or project) in a glance the poignancy of a missed encounter. An unbussed cafe table in the foreground registers absence, the recent abandonment of its lone occupant. Just behind, in the opaque glass of the doorway, we note through shadow an impending arrival. Reflections in mirrors and water, the found poetry of graffiti and handbills, and shadows that imply presence without revealing it make Algaze’s photographs breathe with emotional vitality.
* Peter Fetterman Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-6463, through Feb. 28. Closed Mondays.
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Man and Nature: Ruth Weisberg’s recent paintings, drawings and prints at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts hinge on situations of tenuous equilibrium. One group features women submerged in water, and another, natural history museum displays of monkeys and deer. (A third series, preparatory drawings and prints for a mural to be exhibited this fall at the Huntington Library, is also on view, but is a less coherent, compelling lot.)
Weisberg has long explored the strange dance of bodies underwater. Faces down, arms stretched out in front of them, the women seen here might be swimming, but frozen mid-stroke, their postures appear odd and ambiguous. The friction between weight and buoyancy becomes palpable, a tangible tension between the formidable powers of gravity, water and the women themselves. With terrific sensuousness and immediacy, these images demonstrate Weisberg’s own power to render the impact of light on water, and water on flesh. Water causes flesh to dissolve--or so it appears--and light unravels the continuity of water.
Though the settings for the other body of work, inspired by visits to Vienna’s natural history museum, imply that the animals she depicts are taxidermied, they appear very much alive and aware, stoically bearing their fate behind glass. Such images of freeze-dried nature need only be one remove from the real thing to act as powerful indictments, mirrors of our own insecurity in the face of the wild beyond, rather than our superiority over it. Weisberg wisely understates the case, painting clusters of deer and communities of monkeys with such luminosity that awe surfaces even before shame.
Last week, Weisberg, dean of the School of Fine Arts at USC, was honored at the College Art Assn.’s annual conference with an award for her distinguished teaching career. In her “Natural Histories” work, she manages to make humble students of us all.
* Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-0577, through March 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.