A Provocative Trek Into Pseudo-History

What could be more authentic than a good story well told? Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are terrific storytellers--both visual and verbal--whose spellbinding show at Paul Kopeikin Gallery tampers with the conventional boundaries between true and false. Tricksters of the most provocative sort, they have created a pseudo-historical document, in panoramic photographs and extensive text, that chronicles a fictional expedition to northeastern Siberia in the 1940s.

“The Circular River” consists of 60 photographs, each nearly 6 feet wide and less than a foot tall, bound with accompanying journal entries in a massive album. Selections from the series hang on the gallery walls. The story follows three members of the Royal Excavation Corps (a secret, pseudo-military British organization) on a mission to retrieve a German glider pilot lost somewhere in Siberia and to study the practices of indigenous tribal shamans in the area. After losing their way early in the game, the explorers are rescued by a shaman who stays with them as guide and translator. They experience a rich array of discoveries and adventures, and finally reach the circular river, “the navel of the world,” where the lost pilot, who had settled in with the native culture there as a shaman himself, is found floating in the bog.

With coy attention to detail, Kahn and Selesnick have modeled their photographs of the journey after 19th century expeditionary and ethnographic photographs. They’ve toned them sepia or cyan, stamped them with official-looking insignia, inscribed notations on them in faded script, buckled the surfaces with fold marks, and improvised other signs of wear and tear that give the images the patina of age. Yet not only are the photographs out of sync with our own time, they are curiously out of sync with themselves, since the processes that would produce images looking like these were obsolete by the 1940s, the period they pretend to date from.

Such anachronism is no accident--it’s the lifeblood of this elaborate theatrical enterprise. Kahn and Selesnick do stage a journey, all right, and it’s the convoluted path of our own responses as we register the artifice and gradually invest it with a certain credibility. The postmodern wave washed away, for those who still clung to them, all the old, predictable markers, the absolutes and hierarchies that used to give history such a tidy finish. Now, subjectivity is the only standard, memoir reads as history, and documents, stories and artworks like Kahn and Selesnick’s are as worthy of our faith as anything else out there, if not more.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-0765, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Tender Moments: Access to the family album of a family other than your own can be a burden--or a privilege. In the case of John Milisenda’s family pictures now at Stephen Cohen Gallery, it’s a small but stirring honor.

Milisenda has photographed his parents and developmentally disabled brother for 30 years, and the images here span all three decades but don’t depend on placement within any kind of narrative chronology. They are self-sufficient splices from the flow, tender glimpses of the family dynamic at play mostly in the cocoon of the family home.

From the plastic-covered furniture to the cement-paved patio, the Milisendas’ world reeks of middle-class suburbia. Lots of time is spent around the table eating, smoking, talking, and the television has been embraced as another member of the family, sometimes central to the life of the room, other times silent, but always nearby. Familiarity is part of what gives these photographs such appeal, but mostly it is Milisenda’s ability to channel his intimacy into crisp, lively form.

His sensitivity to the balletic potential of simple gestures makes an image of his mother changing the sheets into a dense poem of domesticity, as the billowing bedcover echoes the lightly rippling veil of a bride doll in the background. In another photograph, Milisenda’s brother stands outside, in profile, with an empty plastic cup in his hand, his grown-child demeanor made more pronounced by a bright patch of sunlight behind him. That same patch, in one of those magical moments of photographic suspension that Milisenda is so adept at capturing, tapers downward to look like a funnel of light pouring directly into his brother’s cup.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 937-5525, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Gray Matter: Perla Krauze refers to her sculptures, paintings and installations at Iturralde Gallery collectively as landscapes. They refer to the natural world and borrow several fundamental elements from it, such as water and stone, but the pulse of life has been diverted away from them in the interest of a more elegiac, intellectualized interpretation of nature.

Krauze’s monochrome repertoire of materials--lead, stone, slate, aluminum--lends a starkness to the work that borders on elegance but generally feels severe, barren of soul. In several works, the Mexican artist sets lead-covered panels on the floor, like tiles, with depressions in them that hold a shallow amount of water. In one installation, aluminum-cast twigs and flowers sit in the water, and in other works, the ghostly, desiccated branches stand alone. The simplest of Krauze’s works end up packing the most emotional and formal power. An ascending sequence of skinny twigs cast in aluminum leans against the wall in “Paisaje #18 (Landscape #18),” like frail, silvery strokes in a tender missive.

Two works with tall, skinny, metal ladder forms mounted on the wall are also quietly evocative. In one, wire-wrapped stones are affixed to the ladders, and in the other, bricks of cement, wax and clay. In both, a subtle alchemy is suggested, a transcending of matter. Krauze’s interest in the opposing notions of permanence and precariousness finds poetic outlet on a few such occasions here, but mostly the show is as gray in spirit as it is in tone.

* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through Nov. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Lost and Remembered: In a terrific double bill at Frumkin/Duval Gallery, Tanja Rector and Linda Ekstrom present recent work that resonates well together in shared space. Rector paints on wood and sheathes her images beneath a thick layer of wax, veiling them and simultaneously intensifying their iconic presence. One sequence of images features a pair of hands clasping and nesting in one another. Flowers and feathers float down the pale, periwinkle-blue skies of other panels.

The smallest, least obvious subjects are the most entrancing in Rector’s work--the back of a woman’s neck, for instance, graced by delicate wisps of brown hair. This attention to the subtle, precious fragment operates in a less intimate but equally engaging way in a series of panels that contain quoted fragments of other paintings, mainly by the 17th century Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch. Rector, who was born in the Netherlands, frames these quiet, luminous domestic interiors with a border the color of eggshell or a particularly warm moon, so that the painted fragments and the space around them gleam.

Ekstrom’s art too is an act of preservation, but her approach toward memory is more charged and complex, evoking experiences as intimate as menstruation and as dauntingly vast as the Holocaust. Exquisitely crafted, Ekstrom’s work using Bibles whose pages are shredded to suggest feathery wings or twisted into coils of rope cannily probe conditions of personal faith. Tiny birds’ wings dangle from the long, ribboned laces of baby shoes in one of several works to evoke spiritual transcendence through the image of flight.

Ekstrom memorializes the truncated lives of children lost in the Holocaust in a cluster of small pieces using photographic portraits printed on fine, translucent silk. Reminiscent of Boltanski’s powerful odes, Ekstrom’s have a hushed, loaded restraint to them. They compress beauty and pain, loss both collective and devastatingly private. Memory becomes material in them, even if it’s a materiality so delicate as to be almost ephemeral. Their potency attests not just to the necessity but to the sacredness of remembering.

* Frumkin/Duval Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through Nov. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.