Publicly Funded Artists Rise to the Challenge

“COLA: 1998-99 Individual Artists Grants” is the third exhibition of work by the dozen Los Angeles-based artists selected annually as grant recipients by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. (COLA is an acronym for City of L.A.) The $10,000 grants fund the production of new work by a variety of artists selected by peer panels on the basis of merit, while the required group show at the Municipal Art Gallery offers the public a chance to see what the artists have made.

This year’s show is a relatively strong installment, capped right at the entrance by a terrific two-part sculpture by Sam Durant. The component parts of “Partially Buried 1960s/1970s, Dystopia Revealed and Utopia Reflected” shuffle the decks of art and pop culture in provocative ways.

Two rectangular mirrors heaped with mounds of dirt are placed side by side on the floor, with telltale electrical cords emerging from beneath the piles. Muffled sounds gurgle up from inside the twin “graves.” On the utopia side, a crackly recording of Wavy Gravy extolling peace and love at the hippie music fest Woodstock is heard. On the dystopia side, it’s Mick Jagger making a plea for calm at the bloody Altamont concert.

Formally, Durant’s sculptures refer to Robert Smithson’s so-called non-sites and Earthworks, specifically “Partially Buried Woodshed,” whose location at Kent State University had its own inadvertent intersection with tragedy. Durant’s funereal piece, like his earlier sculptures of tattered, graffiti-scarred models of idealized Modernist houses, casts a jaundiced eye on the yoked binaries of utopia and dystopia that, even today, get recycled in categorical terms such as “sunshine and noir.”

Also exceptional is “Somnambulist,” Tim Hawkinson’s goofy riff on an 1884 sequence of Eadweard Muybridge photographs of a track-and-field hurdler, which Hawkinson evokes through his own eccentric test of athletic skill. Using a system of ropes and pulleys, the artist repeatedly lowered himself onto a bumpy, orthopedic mattress pad that was slathered with paint and laid atop large sheets of paper.

Sequential imprints--made where his body hit the pad--created the bigger picture, which shows a shadowy figure leaping over a hurdle. Blunt physicality is thus restored to an otherwise disembodied image.

Four of the 12 artists are photographers, while Alma Lopez and Karen Atkinson use photographic imagery in other contexts. Lopez employs a computer to make pleasant color inkjet prints whose formats are based on traditional Mexican devotional paintings--retablos and ex votos--although their distinctly personal subject matter gives them a soap-opera subtext. Atkinson’s effective installation, which crosses a theater with the interior of a bus, is centered on a CD-ROM projection utilizing documentary photographs of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the familiarity of the subject, though, dilutes the dramatic potency of the quasi-autobiographical narrative.

Most compelling among the photographs is a scenographic triptych by Sharon Lockhart and a group of sun-bleached landscape panoramas by Miles Coolidge. Recalling a filmstrip, Lockhart’s sequence shows a worker repairing a stone floor at Mexico City’s famous National Museum of Anthropology; his common labor, surrounded by artifacts from Monte Alban, is suddenly transformed into a resonant archeological dig of contemporary life. Coolidge’s distant panoramas of farming country in Central California are less than a foot high but more than 11 feet long, establishing seamless visual scans across the horizon that perform a surprising reversal: They pull you in close to scrutinize their quotidian depths.

The steely palette and mundane numbness recorded in Anthony Hernandez’s pictures taken while “Waiting in Line”--a security grate, a mail slot, a floor stain, a butt-filled cement ashtray, etc.--graft a forlorn emotive quality onto an otherwise cool Minimalist idiom. John Humble’s color-saturated typological photographs of vernacular L.A. architecture ratchet up the subject’s already abundant whimsy, sometimes yielding a sinister edge.

Both painters in the show build on the abstract hard-edge precedent of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold. Carlos Estrada-Vega assembles big paintings from scores of little square or rectangular ones, each painted as a discrete object that’s subsumed evenly within the larger whole. Yunhee Min’s trapezoid-shaped canvases are each painted in three wide, vertical bands of decidedly odd color; the unnameable hues seem visually expansive and vaguely threatening--sort of like smog.

John O’Brien’s sculptures, both free-standing and affixed to the wall, usually trip up on the unwieldy effort of melding ephemeral words with solid objects. The strongest is the one most physically adept: a collapsible stairway (to heaven?) that folds up into a steel cart.

Finally, Jacci Den Hartog is known for cantilevered abstract wall sculptures made from plaster and resin that suggest the imagery in Chinese landscape paintings; here she shows a lovely group of watercolor, gouache and ink drawings on paper or vellum, modestly pushpinned to the wall, in which the conventions of Chinese landscape painting merge with Western abstraction. The result is a variety of dreamy--and unexpectedly erotic--scenes.

* Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581, through June 20. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Admission: $1.50.