Entering a Dream State With Judith Barry’s Video Installations

Although Judith Barry has exhibited video installations in New York, Europe and Northern California for 25 years, she has never had a solo show in Los Angeles. At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, “The Terror and the Possibility of Things Unseen” makes up for lost time, filling every square inch of the space with four works whose soundtracks overlap.

Rather than diminishing the impact of any piece, however, the mumbling cacophony makes a viewer feel as if she has dozed off, only to awaken in someone else’s dream. Neither terrifying, like a child’s nightmare, nor sexually charged, like an adolescent’s fantasies, the fragmented narratives unfolding in the dimly lighted galleries are as mundane and measured as adult life is meant to be--and as quietly horrifying as it sometimes is.

In the entryway, a pair of free-standing sculptures combines Freud’s ideas about narcissism, the unconscious and repression with contemporary video games and traditional folklore. “Untitled (Hair)” is a nearly 5-foot-tall column of braided blond tresses that spins when viewers approach it. Embedded in its top is a video monitor showing a woman who wanders in circles and stares upward, as if from the bottom of a well. If Rapunzel had a sister who was too self-obsessed to even hope for a visit from a lover, this would be her, trapped in a serpentine tangle of hair.

To watch the video in “Untitled (Box),” viewers must lift the lid of a large wooden box that has been mounted on an industrial-strength spring. Here, a theatrical character who could be the evil twin of any of the forest spirits in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” recites a litany of dark desires.

The centerpiece of the show is “Voice off,” a two-channel video about a writer who can’t concentrate and an opera singer who has lost her voice. On each side of a wall that bisects the gallery, Barry has projected one of two 15-minute videos that run simultaneously.

In the first room, time passes slowly as a middle-aged man taps away at his keyboard, getting up often to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, read the paper and take a nap. Distracted by muffled noises and siren-like songs, he repeatedly opens the door of his studio to look up and down the hall. Finally, he dismantles a bookshelf and uses a golf club to whack a hole in the wall, which he steps through.

A scrim-covered doorway invites viewers to follow. Having broken through his studio’s wall, our frustrated hero finds nothing but mist and silence before the video fades to black.

When the tape loops back to the beginning, we watch as a dozen characters enact a dreamy drama in French and English. From this side of the wall, it becomes apparent that the voices distracting the writer are coming from inside his head--and that whatever he writes fails to keep this madness at bay.

Taking viewers to places we ordinarily wouldn’t visit, Barry’s multilayered piece of participatory theater suspends us in a queasy nether world, where memories distract and perception turns inward. In contrast, her fourth work consists entirely of rapidly panned landscapes that have been edited in a hyperkinetic fashion. Lacking psychological resonance, this five-channel display doesn’t get under your skin as effectively as Barry’s slower-paced pieces.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Dec. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Few New Curves: For the last four years or so, Kristin Leachman has made stripe paintings that look like old braided rugs. Combining a fidelity to the real world (via accurate illusionism) with a commitment to the rigors of formalist abstraction, the earliest of these vertically oriented pictures are configured symmetrically, with similarly colored bands flanking a central element. Likewise, each “stripe” consists of regularly repeated sequences of three similarly tinted colors--true to the way a real rug’s strands of fabric wrap around one another to form sturdy braids.

At Newspace Gallery, seven new oils on panel are more complicated and more ambitious. Gone is the bilateral symmetry. So too the sequential consistency of the color shifts within each spiraling strand.

In addition, the width of the bands varies more dramatically. With meandering contours that break away from the neatly squared geometry of an ideal grid, Leachman’s stripes curve more than before. So swollen are some that they resemble the silhouettes of snakes that have just swallowed whole animals.

While each painting’s swaying side-to-side movement increases, its illusionistic depth diminishes. The shading that gives Leachman’s earlier works their trompe l’oeil volume and reassuring familiarity has been eliminated. Now, each vaguely triangular section of every strand has the presence of a flat tile that makes up a mosaic’s fragmented surface.

The most significant transformation that has taken place involves Leachman’s treatment of light. Where previous works are illuminated by an even, all-over glow, the new ones include bright sections that recall the glare of improperly shot flash photographs.

These hot spots contrast dramatically with the deep shadows around them. Rather than evoking the comforts of home, Leachman’s increasingly shady paintings call to mind the dark side of domesticity, disturbing experiences often swept under the rug.

Historically, her works resurrect Photo-Realism, a short-lived style that flourished in the early 1970s before being buried by an avalanche of negative critical assessment. So despised is this style that few contemporary painters are willing to touch it with a 10-foot pole, much less to share its chilly embrace of artifice. Treading where few dare venture, Leachman weaves together aspects of photographic reproduction, abstract painting and typically feminine crafts--all the better to pull the rug out from under your feet.

* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 469-9353, through Jan. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Emptiness Redefined: Larry Bell’s new watercolors transform what we usually think of as emptiness into a concentrated force field of electrifying energy. At Off Main Gallery, 30 works on paper made over the last three years demonstrate that sometimes less is more, especially when Zen serendipity enters the picture.

Each of Bell’s lovely paintings occupies an approximately 2-by-2-inch section at the center of a sheet of white paper that measures 10 inches on a side. More important, each of these sections of dribbled, dabbled and blotted paint does not form a solid block of color. Instead, the Light and Space artist has limited his swift, flick-of-the-wrist brushwork to the left and right edges of each tiny square, leaving a relatively wide swath of negative space running vertically down its middle.

These blank spaces recall moonlight reflected on a lake’s choppy surface. As such, they appear to be the opposite of empty: shimmering glimpses of bright dancing light.

Bracketed by irregularly shaped blotches of powdery pigment, they complement these craggy components to form abstract landscapes whose small size is belied by their visual impact. Vast expanses seem to have been compressed into Bell’s watercolors, which combine the space-saving efficiency of microchips with the limitless tranquillity of traditional landscape paintings.

In the 1960s, Bell made a name for himself with variously sized cubes constructed from sheets of clear and treated glass. Following the same logic, his humble watercolors use apparent emptiness to highlight the fullness of those moments we tend to call transcendent.

* Off Main Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-0211, through Feb. 4. Closed Sundays.

Checkmate: Luscious color, geometric precision and frosting-like layers of paint come together in Albert Contreras’ modestly scaled acrylics on canvas at USC’s Fisher Gallery. This terrific selection of 23 eye-popping abstractions is the painter’s first solo show in 31 years. It reveals that the L.A.-based artist is a talent attuned to his times: Astonishingly fresh, his vivid paintings of checkerboard patterns and diagonal plaids link the idiosyncratic panels Alfred Jensen (1903-1981) made throughout his career to recent works by Linda Besemer, Wess Dahlberg, Jason Eoff and Linda Stark.

Like Jensen, Contreras piles the paint on without losing control and making a mess. Using a palette knife, he lays down a smooth, sometimes translucent layer of supersaturated color. Atop this shiny, wet-looking surface he adds dozens of rectangles and squares in up to three additional colors, all of which are opaque.

These geometric components form a variety of patterns, most of which recall woven fabrics or 1960s lawn furniture. The edges of each solid slab of paint have been sculpted so that they angle inward, causing them to resemble the bases of pyramids.

Like a number of younger painters working today, Contreras favors a synthetic palette. Silver, copper, gold, azure, emerald and rosy violet combine with the primaries and black and white to make for high-key contrasts that leap from the wall. Despite their optical punch, these crisp images maintain a sense of easygoing fluidity.

Born in Los Angeles in 1933, Contreras attended college here, in Mexico City and in Madrid. In 1960, he moved to Stockholm, where he exhibited regularly until 1969, when he moved to New York. A year later he returned to L.A. In 1972, he took a break from painting that lasted 25 years.

On one hand, Contreras’ career recalls the story of Rip Van Winkle. On the other hand, his works from 1997 to the present are too rooted in the moment to have come from someone who has been out of touch with the tempo of his times.

* USC Fisher Gallery, 823 Exposition Blvd., L.A., (213) 740-4561, through Feb. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.