Cutting to (and Cutting Up) the Chase in ‘World Picture’

“World Picture,” the provocative new video installation by Jessica Bronson at the Museum of Contemporary Art, suggests how the ubiquitous freeway car chase--and the kinetic flow of televised images in which it is situated--may provide us with unexpected avenues of pleasure. The 1998 recipient of MOCA’s Emerging Artist Award (co-sponsored by Citibank Private Bank), Bronson offers an intriguing premise that hinges upon the viewer’s ability to become completely immersed in the installation.

Two large, curved screens are positioned side by side to form a backward “S” shape. Projected onto each screen is freeway surveillance footage of automobiles and high-speed car chases, culled from stock and found tape as well as recorded television broadcasts.

Bronson intercuts footage from varying perspectives, to disorienting effect. A helicopter’s omniscient, bird’s-eye view of the freeway is spliced with stop-action shots and distorted close-ups of a police car’s revolving red light. When projected onto screens of this size, the aerial footage appears to cascade vertically, like a waterfall in slow-motion. An accompanying audio track blasts a cacophonous medley of zooming race cars, honking horns and the deafening sounds of a car crash, at which point the screens temporarily go blank.

Bronson’s video installation is routed through Structuralist films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of which explored what might be termed the poetics of duration. Bronson, however, is more interested in the latter-day poetics of video’s affect, which she describes as “dynamic distraction.” You are at once attentive to--and distracted by--the bombarding influx of mass-media images.

The result is hypnotic reverie--what the layman calls “zoning out”--which Bronson sees as meditative and quite possibly transcendent. To simulate (or stimulate) this enraptured condition, Bronson constructs an all-enveloping, almost primal environment, in which her twin curvilinear screens seem to reach out and embrace you.

What keeps “World Picture” from becoming some sort of high-tech road map to vegetative bliss, however, is Bronson’s insistence upon self-awareness. To this end, she short-circuits her own devices by making it extremely difficult for us to become completely absorbed by the piece. Those prone to motion sickness might actually feel nauseated by its dizzying stream of images.

There are apocalyptic overtones here, too, although they’re more Road Runner than “Blade Runner.” Bronson’s circuitous installation smashes a number of governing mythologies, not the least of which is that of the open road, which finds its ironic rejoinder in the endless loops of Southern California’s sprawling freeway system.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Feb. 21. Closed Mondays.

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Interactions: At Tasende Gallery, Phil Borges’ sepia-tinted portraits of indigenous people threatened with extinction could very easily have been precious and condescending, overtly exoticized or covertly eroticized. Yet, they are none of the above. Instead, Borges’ intimately scaled images are a revelation, pure and simple--and not only to their viewers.

Sponsored by Amnesty International and accompanied by an attractive, intelligently essayed catalog, the compelling photographs in Borges’ “Enduring Spirit” are predicated upon certain types of exchanges--between self and other, certainly, but, more important, between the photographer and his subjects.

Most people gaze directly at the camera (one Mursi warrior looks downward, believing that if he stares at the lens he’ll go blind). Memorable images are plentiful: the wild-haired, 8-year-old Tibetan girl carrying her infant sister on her back; the 43-year-old Dani tribes-woman, who cut off a finger each time someone close to her died; the two Loni warriors, who hurried to dress themselves in ceremonial attire when they saw Borges handing out Polaroids.

Quite a few of Borges’ subjects had never seen a photograph of themselves before Borges presented them with a snapshot. Their reactions upon seeing themselves as someone “other” ranged from laughter to shock, suggesting that no matter how lifelike, a photographic portrait is always partly fictional, especially for its subject.

Borges has also taken the unusual step of matting out the background landscapes and adding a sepia toner to the bodies of his subjects, achieving remarkably accurate skin tones, along with a collage-like dissonance between figure and background. What really fleshes out these remarkable photographs, however, are the informative (and absolutely essential) text captions that accompany each picture. (See accompanying box, above.)

* Tasende Gallery, 8808 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-8686, through Jan. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Buried Bodies: For Emilio Cruz, the act of painting is also one of building, layer by layer. It is equally a form of uncovering, where physical and metaphorical acts of scraping away and carving out can reveal sedimentary truths that have accrued over time.

The process sounds sculptural--even archeological--and in Cruz’s assured hands, it is both. At the newly inaugurated Molly Barnes Gallery, the New York-based Cruz has made six slim figurative paintings that look like crystallized human fossils embedded deep within the earth’s folds.

Wedged within the narrow confines of 8-foot-tall maple plywood boards whose widths range from 1 1/2 to 2 feet, the six nude and imprisoned men and women in Cruz’s “Homo Sapiens” series appear at once pathetic and elegiac. Some are almost skeletal, others look as if they’ve been carved out of the tar-like grounds, composed of thickly encrusted strata of umber, rust, sapphire and ebony oil paint (to which Cruz sometimes adds sand, ground obsidian and other grainy materials).

Cruz first makes a charcoal drawing of the figure (whose racial and ethnic attributes remain indistinct) and then seals it with boiling beeswax, which hardens into a golden, translucent skin, through which the figure’s bones, tendons, muscles and vertebrae are clearly visible. He breaks away from anatomical realism in rendering the spine, which sometimes looks like a screwdriver twisting through the torso, other times like a rigid bamboo shoot.

These sepulchral figures remain unmistakably isolated from one another, as do the hapless men in Cruz’s pastel drawings. The latter works are more difficult to appreciate, perhaps because they portray human suffering as ignominious rather than tragic.

* Molly Barnes Gallery, 1414 6th St., Santa Monica, (310) 395-4404, through Jan. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Scenarios: In his first solo gallery exhibition at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, British commercial photographer David Stewart evinces little desire to break free from the conventions of print advertising. Rather than box him into a corner, however, Stewart’s reliance upon advertising’s false cheer and stagy setups allows him to gently lampoon the pretensions and follies of ordinary people.

Stewart’s cleverly staged “scenelets” depict various British types engaging in absurd activities. Solid rectangular backgrounds in royal purple, cabbage green, acid yellow and cotton-candy pink become abstract backdrops for a topsy-turvy universe that obeys no laws other than Stewart’s own.

These irreverent, visually concise images zero in on their punch lines with the single-minded accuracy of a cruise missile. Bayonet at the ready, a straight-faced Buckingham Palace guardsman keeps watch over a sand castle; three elderly men chat while seated around the grassy perimeter of an open grave, their legs dangling casually over its freshly dug depths.

Clever visual puns abound. A paper-wrapped human cigarette lies limp against the edge of a giant silver ashtray, the bottoms of his feet blackened with soot. A dough-faced “Buoy Boy” wearing goggles, a red and white striped sleeveless shirt and a dome-shaped cap with a gold bell on top stands expressionless before an ocean-blue background.

What makes this reverse anthropomorphism work is Stewart’s gifted eye for odd-looking character actors whose idiosyncratic features tell half the story. Stewart’s imaginative set designs display a savvy sense of visual metonymy: Costumes, color schemes and props all point to something other than what they are. Relying upon advertising’s highly coded sign-systems to bring absurdist scenarios to life, Stewart’s droll photographs become meta-commentaries on the ad world’s half-truths, fantasies and myriad guilty pleasures.

* G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-5558, through Jan. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.