A Simple Yet Powerful Vision of Nature

Given the way our culture has made a fetish of multi-tasking, it’s no wonder that Maya Lin has become a household name.

Since designing the stunningly effective Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., as an undergraduate student in architecture, Lin has created several other publicly sited artworks, fulfilled a number of notable architectural commissions, designed a line of furniture for Knoll and created a body of sculptural work.

The sculptures, made over the last two or three years, were featured in a traveling museum show that recently ended without making a Southern California stop. Several key works from the show (supplemented by a few others) can now be seen at Gagosian Gallery in a display that affirms Lin as a multi-tasker with a profoundly unified vision, an artist who matches nature’s own gift for efficient poetry.

The mesmerizing simplicity of Lin’s work asserts itself instantly in “Untitled (Topographic Landscape),” a 16-by-18-foot patch of undulating terrain fashioned from long, thick strips of particle board. Swelling and easing back, the rhythmic curves of the piece feel utterly natural, like earthly breathing, though they are constructed in the contrived fashion of architectural models, from joined flat surfaces with staggered contours.

For “Avalanche,” Lin has poured shards of glass into one corner of the gallery to form a broad crystalline wedge of suspended momentum. In “Phases of the Moon,” she tilts and torques five large beeswax disks mounted on the wall. Glowing as mysteriously as a lunar egg, the disks shift in proportion, one to the next, but each retains its integrity as absolutely whole.

Not all of Lin’s work here captivates equally, but it is consistent in its elegance and sensual, reductive beauty. The essential rhythms of water, earth and space that Lin taps into find an immediate echo in the body that translates into a nourishing, soul-satisfying sense of connection. Everyday multi-tasking has nothing on this kind of singular, concentrated power.

* Gagosian Gallery, 436 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Indelible ‘Numbers’: What to make of Beate Passow’s photographs of aged arms tattooed with concentration camp numbers? Passow’s approach at first feels too congruent with the depersonalizing motives of the Nazi functionaries who administered the identifying tattoos in the first place. The images are as stark as mug shots, the subjects reduced to marked arms against a blue felt background. They lack all context, and the subjects seem stripped of individual character, personality, significance. But are they?

These spare, repetitive images, installed throughout the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (at the Schindler House), coalesce into a complex memorial, daunting in its lack of sentimentality. Each arm does yield some clues about particular identity--a watch, wedding band, age spots, rippled flesh--but they are minimal. For the most part, the arms are symbols, synecdoches for the whole bodies to which they belong, as well as to the larger body of Holocaust survivors.

Passow, who lives and works in Munich, has addressed her country’s stained past in several other projects over the last 10 years. In each she seems to undermine expectations, to interrupt the seamless acceptability of the present to acknowledge the rupture of the Nazi era and its continuing status as an open wound. Seeing the fading ink of the tattooed numbers on healthy, living arms simply and abruptly asserts the ongoing urgency of this chapter of history, a chapter full of unanswerable questions and daunting ramifications.

Twenty-two (of more than 80) images from Passow’s “Numbers” series (1995-97) are hanging in the Schindler House, the arms laid out, vulnerable but enduring, as potent a mnemonic trigger as the more familiar image of upraised arms forming the Nazi salute. They set a rhythm--muted but insistent--that permeates the house’s vacant rooms.

* MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, (323) 651-1510, through Jan. 16. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Deep Impact: “Tears Distillery,” one of a dozen new works by Claudia Matzko at Angles Gallery, is itself a distillation of qualities characteristic of the artist. Elegant in form, if not a touch austere, the work enacts a change, a translation of properties from one form to another. A glass bulb nesting in a square heating element contains a small amount of saline solution (“tears”), which, when heated, vaporizes, traveling up a connecting glass tube and down again, newly distilled and purified, to drip into a separate beaker.

Applying scientific procedures to emotional phenomena, Matzko’s work functions like a mild earthquake, unsettling categories with a gentle, rumbling power whose impact lingers long after the event has passed. In another work, Matzko presents video stills of her own vocal cords, pinning a material form to the individual and seemingly ineffable human voice. Her approach suggests alchemy in reverse, a neutralization of the mystery and magic of something singular; but part of what Matzko does is demonstrate that beauty, song or grief can’t be explained away. They exist in multiple, equally viable forms--as language, chemistry and idea at once.

The simultaneity and variability of experience permeate all of this work, charging it with a quietly provocative edge. Things continually vacillate from one state to another--or rather, one’s perception of them shifts. Two floor-to-ceiling columns of delicate glass capillary tubes have a glorious, spiritual luminosity without ever sacrificing their reference to medical procedures and the conveyance of blood. A set of mechanical bells within a table-sized compartment emits a grand sound suggestive of communal warning or celebration, but one can only hear it in privacy, through headphones, while seated in a hard metal chair as if one were the subject or the facilitator of a scientific experiment. Matzko’s work hinges on contradictions that ultimately reveal themselves to be confluences. Vibrating with the tension that exists between sensing, knowing and naming, it invites equal embrace of all three.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Nov. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Surface Exoticism: It hardly matters that Barbara Kasten has now shifted her attention to live models after 20 years of photographing abstract studio setups, architectural sites and sacred spaces of the Southwest. Her work is a matter of style over substance, and, with the help of mirrors and colored gels, she can usually turn out a mildly interesting image. In her new work at Gallery Luisotti, Kasten attempts to delve deeper but manages only to reveal, yet again, how limited she is to surface appearances.

Inspired by seeing a museum exhibition of primitive Mexican masks, Kasten staged a series of photographs of masked nudes, both men and women. Singly and in pairs, they pose with arms crossed or hands under chin, the colored gels soaking them in intense red, blue and violet light. Kasten sabotages her own effort to play soft, natural skin against the harder, artificial contours of the masks--to contrast the naked and the concealed--by applying soft focus throughout. The uniformity of the blur, the uniformity of Kasten’s distance from her subjects and the predictability of their poses make for a repetitive, tiresome set of pictures.

Concealed identities, the multiplicity of individual identity and the practice of masquerade have been explored in photography for well over a century, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s romantic, literary fictions to the more edgy psychic ploys of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s masked characters and the overtly artificial dramas of Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura. Kasten’s souped-up exoticism adds nothing but a dusting of saccharine to this already rich tradition. She calls these “Mythical Figures,” but the only mythologizing going on here is of the artist’s own reputation through the promotion of this absolutely vacant work.

* Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Nov. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.