Puzzling Landscapes Happily Lost in Space

Artists who use found photographs in their work often find them in musty attics, forgotten albums, junk shops or other out-of-the-way places, and they employ them precisely for this heightened sense of loss and passage. By contrast, Bay Area artist Michael Light uses found photographs that are extremely contemporary and widely scrutinized, usually with scientific care. “Full Moon,” his compelling exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, deploys photographs taken between 1967 and 1972 by Apollo astronauts on lunar missions, about 32,000 of which are archived at NASA.

Some of the show’s 42 photographs are simply arresting images, either for historical reasons or for their injection of human feeling into scientific process. One picture shows the Earth rising over the moon’s horizon, recording the first time that event was witnessed by human eyes. Another shows a family snapshot that includes the wife and two sons of astronaut Charles Duke, sealed in a laminated sleeve and placed on lunar soil amid a smudge of busy footprints and tire tracks; playful yet profoundly lonesome, the picture explodes the travel cliche “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.”

Light’s work, however, is more than a professional presentation of photographs taken by amateurs. The selection of individual images as well as the many composites made by printing multiple negatives on a single sheet speak of an interpretive sense indebted to old-fashioned connoisseurship.

One photograph shows what looks like a puddle-sized ditch in the moon’s barren, rocky soil--until, that is, you notice at the left the doll-sized figure of an astronaut and his lunar rover. The ditch suddenly yawns into an immense chasm, perhaps created by a meteor’s ancient impact.

Given the absence of earthly atmosphere, spatial distance collapses in these photographs, and scale becomes a puzzle. The result is a strange visual disorientation, which will be familiar to anyone who has traveled in high desert regions, such as northern New Mexico. A distant horizon looks absurdly close, while familiar questions of scale dissolve into wholly unexpected relationships among objects in space.

Another montage--this one a diptych perhaps 12 or 13 feet wide--is flanked at each end by pictures of the same astronaut in two different places doing two different tasks. The dozen photographs in between seamlessly link them, unfolding a 360-degree panorama in which time, space and change are visually fused. The dual sense of scientific reality and science fiction possibility is exhilarating.

Light’s insightful selection of individual images and immensely sophisticated photo-montages do what great landscape art always does. Here, though, the articulation of landscape space in the new medium of space photography adds a layer of vibrancy that can make your head spin.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, through Aug. 12. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Color and Wit: It might seem odd to cross-fertilize the ethereal abstraction of Light and Space art with the wit and glamour of Pop. Yet, in his five new paintings at Mark Moore Gallery, the young Las Vegas-based artist Yek draws from these two venerable traditions to make paintings of unusual luxuriousness.

Each painting is square and bows out from the wall at all four corners. (Think of a square section sliced from a sphere.) The result is a gently curved surface plane, which subtly seems to locate a viewer within a sheltering embrace.

The form is unobtrusively seductive. Yek makes these panels by soaking plywood and pressing it into a curved mold, then applying gesso and sanding the surface to smooth and refine it. Atmospheric color is applied with a spray gun. The acute, handcrafted glamour of the paintings emphasizes their status as physical objects, rather than illusionistic windows, recalling such 1960s work as Billy Al Bengston’s hammered-and-lacquered metal “dentos,” Larry Bell’s optically disorienting glass cubes and Craig Kauffman’s vacuum-formed plastic “bubbles.”

In “Smooth” (the show’s title piece), the bottom edge starts at fluorescent orange; by the time your eye has risen to the top edge, the color has shifted into lime-yellow. “Drift” seems to pick up where “Smooth” left off, sliding into screaming green. “Funk” is more subdued, with pale yellow going even paler. “Lies” plays with dense blues, while “Bleed” melts hot red-orange into rich sable-brown.

The perimeter of each square is marked by the repetition of a linear shape reminiscent of a shark’s fin. Its curved point aims toward the center of the atmospheric field, while anywhere from six to 10 points ring each painting. Baby blue, orange, bright pink--the color of these linear designs contrasts with the atmospheric hue of the curved plane, so that they seem to float in front of the visual space. A carefully calibrated visual tension is thus established, as the paintings’ bowed corners pull out from the wall while the curved points pull inward.

Yek’s colors are unabashedly synthetic, but the curved surface echoes nature’s universe as seen from the vast openness of the desert. Precedents for such a mix would include the perceptual environments of James Turrell and the smoggy paintings of Edward Ruscha--not to mention the neon glow of the Vegas Strip melting into sunrise.

Indeed, it’s Ruscha’s sexy graphic wit that seems most to inform the work of the younger artist. Most recently, Ruscha has been revered for his savvy use of language in painting and the Conceptual orientation of his photo-books. But Yek builds on something larger and--today--less expected in Ruscha’s precedent. Extreme sensuous appeal makes for a smart and satisfying body of paintings.

* Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica (310) 453-3031, through Aug. 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Seeing Things: Fat and felt are materials associated with the dramatic wartime exploits of German Conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. However, James Gobel reels in those materials for more domestic--and peculiar--purposes. His small show in the Projects gallery at the UCLA/Hammer Museum is wonderfully strange.

The least interesting feature of Gobel’s paintings is their subject matter, which focuses on the established gay subculture of “bears” and “cubs.” The mainstream stereotype of homosexual male beauty is built around shaved musculature--a visual mix of youthfulness and strength--but here it’s traded in for furry portliness, or a nurturing image of manly domesticity. Gobel deftly minimizes the theatrical voyeurism inherent in subculture display by basing these works on casual photographic snapshots--portraits, vacation scenes, men at home--which gives them a welcome air of utter ordinariness.

What’s not ordinary is the medium Gobel chooses for the imagery: His paintings of fat guys are assembled from brightly colored felt, with yarn, enamel and acrylic paint applied as necessary. Blending hobby craft with the moralizing overtones of Sunday school, where familiar Bible stories are told with felt cutouts, he makes familiar genre scenes whose plain and simplified contours contradict their visually fuzzy softness. The felt seems to absorb your vision, making you strain to see the picture clearly. Therein lies their singular resonance.

* UCLA/Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through Sept. 17. Closed Monday.

Pop-Culture Spin: “Lazy Susan,” the video projection at Iturralde Gallery by Mexico City-based artist Silvia Gruner, is a music video of a different order. Pop culture’s penchant for hipness and sentimentality is at once mimicked and upended.

The music is Burt Bacharach’s perky but cynical pop ballad, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” A hit in the early 1970s, the song most recently returned as a wry anthem for the retro-movie “Austin Powers.” Gruner brings it inside the chic space of the contemporary art gallery, where video projection is the height of fashion today.

Her camera focuses on a Formica lazy Susan in the center of a dinner table at a Chinese restaurant, fully set for eight absent people. Two glasses of water are set on the lazy Susan, which gaily spins in circles. Sometimes one glass is centered and the other whirls around it; sometimes they’re both slightly off-center, and it’s hard to tell which glass is chasing which. Given the relentless music and lyrics, the shifting relationship between them becomes a courtship dance--at once witty, silly and even oddly poignant.

Because the whirling lazy Susan also recalls a record turntable or a spinning CD, the seemingly cyclical rhythm of technological newness and oblivion also enters the picture--an implication wryly underscored by the video-projection format. Slight yet savvy, instantly appealing yet slow to reveal itself, Gruner’s video is a small gem.

* Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 937-4267, through Aug. 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.