Inspiring Links Between Art and Science

Over the past generation, the idea that artists are godlike creators has given way to the notion that they are freethinking inventors, resourceful experimenters whose pragmatism and cleverness allow them to get the job done--often in unexpected ways.

At Angles Gallery, a 17-artist show drives this point home, sometimes belaboring it into a cliche and, at other times, pushing it to the next level. Organized by guest curator Nowell J. Karten, “Inventional” never lets you forget that art and science are equally creative endeavors, each capable of producing results that are best described in terms of how inspired or uninspired they are.

The most captivating works bring a sense of the inexplicable down to earth. Accompanied by a four-page, frame-by-frame analysis, Jno Cook’s four-second film of a puppy playing with two scraps of cardboard is a piece of image-and-text Conceptualism that is as moving as it is goofy. Looped through a homemade device that the artist has cobbled together from an old-fashioned film splicer, a VCR motor and a pair of manually operated switches, “Rollodog” transforms an ordinary slice of life into a marvelous stop-action dance that demonstrates just how extraordinary mundane things can be.

Tom LaDuke’s diorama of emergency broadcasting antennae perched atop a steep rounded hill appeals to the imagination in a similarly satisfying manner. When you walk around the accurately scaled model, you detect a tiny beacon of light flashing from the tip of the tallest antenna. You also notice that the hill resembles a bent knee--into which acupuncture needles have been pushed. Cast from that part of the artist’s leg that sticks out of the water when he slouches in his bathtub, LaDuke’s knee-shaped hill pays homage to the fact that our best ideas often come to us unexpectedly, during moments of relaxation.

Cockeyed idiosyncrasy animates Martin Kersels’ ungainly noisemakers, Tim Hawkinson’s inorganic tree limbs and Chris Finley’s Tupperware bowls jampacked with plastic odds-and-ends. Obsessiveness takes compelling shape in Agnes Denes’ drawing of a pyramid that appears to be twisting in the wind and in Tom Friedman’s sketchbook page covered with variously sized dots, each made by placing the tip of a magic marker on the paper and letting the pen run dry.

The least engaging works fail to elicit a sense of wonder. In juxtaposing a videotape of silkworms weaving cocoons with the actual cocoons, Xu Bing leaves too little room for the imagination. In contrast, Claudia Matzko’s “Tears Distillery” asks the imagination to do all the work. Filled with gallons of bottled water instead of salty tears, her elaborate glass contraption is an empty conceptual exercise that prefers the clarity and directness of symbolic meaning to the unpredictability of the real thing. In art, as in science, there’s no substitute for inspiration, which always marches to the beat of its own drum.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Sept. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Look Closer: Merijn Bolink is a young Amsterdam-based sculptor who treats objects as if they were words. Making visual riddles out of ordinary things, the eight labor-intensive pieces in his first solo show on the West Coast are the sculptural equivalent of the Heisenberg principle: The more closely you look at them, the less certain you are about what you’re seeing.

At Post Gallery, the centerpiece of the show is “Open Door,” an old wooden door that Bolink has carefully disassembled, cut into thin strips and reassembled so that the free-standing door “opens” to reveal its widest possible cross-section (cut lengthwise and side to side).

When you think about it, we speak of doors being open or closed only in relation to their surroundings: Without a door frame and at least one wall, it doesn’t make sense to describe a door as open or closed, or to differentiate between interior and exterior spaces. But Bolink turns the ordinary world inside out. Folding a door’s immediate environment into the object itself, he demonstrates that art does not derive its meaning from its context as much as it acts upon its surroundings, transforming our thoughts about the world in which we live.

Other works play similar games, following the logic of puns to create pleasantly disorienting conundrums. In one, Bolink uses strips of film (from a famous Dutch porno movie) to make a life-size sculpture of a nude woman. In another, a fire hose and a bucket become metaphors for a story about a snake and its prey. And in “Portrait of a Portrait,” a small painting by his grandfather serves as the basis for a full-length picture.

Despite the relentless inventiveness that animates all of his works, none escapes the sense of melancholy that pervades the show as a whole. In contrast to similarly recycled sculptures by Luciano Perna and Tim Hawkinson--which are generally giddy about their capacity to remake the world--Bolink’s wistful pieces savor the losses that take shape whenever one meaning displaces another.

* Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 622-8580, through Aug. 31. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

Look Closer Again: To see Lucas Blok’s geometric abstractions, you have to shift gears. At first, these crisp, graphic abstractions at SPF:a Gallery seem to move at warp speed. It only takes a split-second for you to take in their often symmetrical arrangements of lime green, electric yellow and sizzling magenta rectangles set with larger rectangles of cool aqua, hot pink and deep purple.

But then curious things begin to happen. The optical buzz that takes place when your eye glides from one colored rectangle to another stops generating the visual turbulence typical of much Op Art and hard-edged abstraction. By the time you realize that nearly half of Blok’s rectangles have soft edges--as if they’ve been sprayed with an airbrush--you’re no longer scanning his large, sometimes mural-scale works in the manner of street signs. Immediate legibility gives way to slow-motion scrutiny.

Blok’s best paintings are neither the simplest nor the most complex but those that balance a limited number of shapes against a similarly restricted slice of the spectrum. One uses reds, blues and purples to set up a surprisingly expansive arrangement of thin vertical bars. A louder, more gregarious canvas pits a range of olive greens and bright yellows against one another by laying out horizontal elements within vertical ones.

At once crisp and supple, Blok’s uncanny abstractions combine the concentric structure of Josef Albers’ color studies with the wacky palette of Karl Benjamin’s groovy paintings and the stimulating serenity of John McLaughlin’s off-balanced canvases. Peter Halley’s Day-Glo pictures of stylized cells also figure into the mix, confirming that Blok’s seemingly straightforward paintings are filled with more twists and turns than immediately meets the eye.

* SPF:a Gallery, 3384 Robertson Place, (310) 558-0902, through Sept. 2. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.

Lightness of Imagination: Although Tim Doyle’s untitled sculpture occupies most of the large, high-ceilinged space of INMO Gallery, it is remarkably light on its feet. Touching the floor at only three points, the L.A.-based artist’s unpainted abstraction has the presence of one of those helium-filled balloons that bob through the air as the Rose Bowl float to which it’s tethered parades down the street.

Part of this impression is due to the fact Doyle’s piece has been carved from big chunks of Styrofoam that have been glued together before being coated with a smooth layer of plaster. But most of his work’s evident lightness is indebted to the swooping curves, streamlined contours and bulbous protrusions that give it its playful profile.

Like a cloud in the sky, Doyle’s towering form invites viewers to use their imaginations to discover what they can see in it. From various points of view, his slippery sculpture resembles a cartoon tooth, a mutant red blood cell or the fin of a stout and swollen surfboard. However, none of these vague family resemblances adequately captures the oddness embodied by the artist’s idiosyncratic abstraction.

In the rear gallery, four similarly configured sculptures rest on a tabletop. Cast in bronze that has been polished to a fine sheen, these small works look like crosses between sculptures by Henry Moore and long, skinny balloons that have been twisted into the shapes of lumpy puppies. Like Doyle’s larger work, their struggle against gravity goes hand in glove with their capacity to set your imagination adrift.

* INMO Gallery, 971 Chung King Road, Chinatown Plaza West, (213) 626-4225, through Aug. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.