Off the Digital Deep End With O’Neill

Acclaimed experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill is probably best known for his 1988 film “Water and Power,” a quirkily ambitious look at the history of Southern California’s water use. In a show titled “recent works, but not on film” at Gallery Luisotti, the L.A.-based filmmaker presents a new series of digitally manipulated Iris prints that prove to be as idiosyncratic as his movies, although not quite as fully engaging.

As a filmmaker, O’Neill does not rely on traditional narrative structures in which the plot progresses in a linear, shot-to-shot fashion. Instead, he utilizes what can be loosely described as a cut-and-paste approach to filmmaking. His latest film, “Trouble in the Image” (1996), is screened continuously in the gallery and in many ways provides viewers with a useful paradigm for approaching his visually dense Iris prints.

Each shot in the film contains manifold images taken from instructional films, Hollywood westerns and films noir, hand-drawn animation sequences and other found archival footage. Each element within this eclectic visual stew invites viewers to make potent connections between suggestively juxtaposed images. Audio tracks containing movie sound bites add yet another stratum of meaning to this complex orchestration of sight and sound.

O’Neill’s foray into digital photography is ultimately more of a parallel activity to his filmmaking than a step in an entirely new direction. His photographs, like his films, are built layer by layer from scanned images culled from a variety of sources: urban landscape photographs, illustrations and diagrams from old Popular Mechanics-type magazines, O’Neill’s own drawings and other appropriated images.

The best of O’Neill’s chaotic and at times perplexing photo collages are those that elegantly restate familiar urban ills, as in “The Three Sisters” (1999), in which a car, stripped, abandoned and covered in graffiti, sits at the center of a barren mountainous landscape that has been seamlessly morphed into that of an anonymous Los Angeles neighborhood.

The less successful of O’Neill’s prints, however, are so chock-a-block with imagery they seem merely self-indulgent and virtually illegible. But O’Neill’s bricolage approach to filmmaking makes him uniquely suited to the emerging medium of digital photography, which itself remains very much in the experimental stages.

* Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Tuesday.

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Pieces of History: In a provocative new solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Dinh Q. Le^ exhibits more of the stunning photo-weavings for which he is known, along with a new installation that decries the use of Agent Orange that resulted in a high rate of congenital birth defects in Vietnamese children.

Employing a traditional grass-mat weaving technique learned from his Vietnamese aunt, Le^ cuts several different photographs into long strips, weaves them together and burns the edges to create a border and sealant. The untitled photo-weavings from Le^’s 1998 “Cambodia” series, for example, depict the faces of anonymous victims of the Khmer Rouge staring out at viewers from within a series of battle scenes carved upon the walls of the ancient Angkor temple.

The interlaced strips collapse foreground and background, so that Le^’s images appear as abstractions when viewed up close, but as you move away from the works a complex collage of disparate images pops into focus. Le^’s technique formally embodies the idea that history is both past and present, inextricably bound up in one another.

“Lotusland,” a provocative, room-sized sculptural installation, contains several pairs of conjoined twins sitting upon large lotus leaves. The children’s hands are raised in prayerful poses that recall the multiple upraised arms of Hindu gods such as Shiva. Each child wears clothing emblazoned with logos for American companies that produce the chemical defoliant Agent Orange.

In less sensitive hands, this sort of material could have simply been gut-wrenching. Le^, however, never allows his justifiable sense of outrage to curdle the subtle, slow-building horror implied by his works.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through June 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Trapped in Time: To look at Michelle Lopez’s peculiarly resonant large-scale sculptures and color photographs at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) is to oscillate between literal and figurative modes of thought, to temporarily inhabit a space where the dots remain unconnected and final resolutions are always out of reach. In a new body of work she calls “The Untitled Thumb and Drape Project,” Lopez “drapes” (or encases) vehicles of motion, speed and travel with unusual materials that evoke gravitational pull and entropic decay.

With assistance from New York-based pastry chef and cake decorator Sarah Bernbach, Lopez festoons a wooden rowboat with thick flower vines that are sculpted entirely out of marzipan. The boat’s interior and exterior are also lined with a faintly sweet-scented sugar coating. To some degree, the substance suggests the texture of human skin when it begins to lose its youthful elasticity.

Across the room, Lopez wraps every inch of a small, broken-down automobile with fleshy folds of pink animal hide. As you peer into the car’s darkened, hollowed-out interior cavity, you observe that she has also carved anthropomorphic figures onto the ceiling panel, in a manner that recalls primitive cave drawings. A related group of gorgeous, color-saturated photographs from a 1999 series titled “Cradle” depicts toy figurines partially submerged in water. Liquid and solid forms appear equally insoluble within these entropic, womb-like interior landscapes: The toys seem to be embedded in the liquid’s glistening surface, while the unmoving pools of water assume the plastic materiality of the toy objects. Sealed within unchanging and claustrophobic environments, these strangely embryonic toys will experience neither growth nor decay, a chilling trade-off that brings to mind our cultural aversion to the aging process.

* LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 957-1777, through June 26. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Berlin Revisited: Stephen Prina has long been concerned with the ways in which works of art--and art history--are “framed,” so to speak, by the institutionalized value systems through which we create and shape meaning. In the past his rigorously executed, highly self-referential installations were filled with abstruse art-historical allusions and an at times maddening formal symmetry.

To some, his projects smacked of elitism. Yet Prina’s goals remain essentially populist in nature, although it’s the kind of populism that’s filtered through (and legitimized by) a range of institutional and academic establishments.

Prina’s latest exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery is titled “Push Comes to Love,” a name he’s also given to his just-released solo album of pop-folk music. Prina’s exhibition reframes and recontextualizes a retrospective of his own work, held at the DAAD Gallery in Berlin. In one room, 15 handsome, oak-framed diptychs overlaid with translucent gray or green scrims spell out the words “Retrospection,” “Under Duress” and “Duress, Reprise,” words that were used for the title of Prina’s 1996 exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery.

Each diptych contains a black-and-white installation shot of Prina’s Berlin retrospective paired with a floor plan of the DAAD Gallery, the latter framed in thick, black borders. The outlines of these floor plans reappear as faint brush traces in several otherwise unremarkable monochrome paintings, which hang in the main gallery space.

These are atypical installation shots in that you can barely perceive the actual artworks hanging on the walls. Instead, the images provide peripheral views of the DAAD Gallery’s interior architecture: ceiling track lights, door jambs, cornices and temporary walls. Five postcard-sized silver gelatin contact prints hung in another room re-present several of these same views in a more straightforward fashion.

Prina has always been more interested in highlighting the ways that viewers derive meaning from art and culture than in creating “great works” of his own. After years of cannibalizing his own work and that of others, however, Prina’s once-meaty ideas feel like they’ve been chewed over one too many times, sucked dry of any juice or flavor they once had.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through June 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.