Photos Dive Into Lives Bound by the Sea

Like much of his past work, Allan Sekula’s new series of photographs, “TITANIC’S wake,” focuses on communities that are bound to the sea and to maritime industry. Melvillian in both theme and scope, the work is fueled by an inexhaustible fascination with maritime life and a sharp eye for relevant detail.

The photographs at Christopher Grimes Gallery are not seascapes in the traditional sense, however. Sekula, like Herman Melville, tends to focus on social and economic details rather than pictorial generalities--on ships and workers rather than romantic cliffs and crashing waves. Like Melville’s novels, Sekula’s photographs are straightforward on the surface--they are perfectly crafted and accessible documentary images--and wondrously complex beneath the surface, dense with intertextual connections, historical allusions and social analysis.

One diptych offers a panoramic view of Bilbao, Spain. The left panel includes Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, a jarringly abstract addition to the city’s muted landscape; and the right panel exposes the rundown architecture adjacent to the glittering Guggenheim. In the language of contemporary art and architecture, the museum resembles a fish or a ship. Its stark contrast to the actual fishing community in which it is situated speaks volumes not only about contemporary art and its dislocation from the non-art world, but about America’s wealth, its relationship to industry, and its cultural and economic presence abroad.

Another photograph depicts a French fisherman’s hut made from the corrugated tin that Gehry is famous for self-consciously incorporating into his designs. Another depicts a long silver fish, identical in color and texture to the Guggenheim, held unceremoniously from the gills by a fisherman. This sort of cross-dialogue involving photographs, themes and localities weaves a rich network of meaning through all the works.

Also on view with the new photographs is an untitled slide sequence made by Sekula in 1972 that depicts workers leaving the day shift at an aerospace factory. The evocative piece exhibits many of the basic concerns of the newer work--concerns with industrial workers, the economic terms of production, the human ramifications of large-scale social and economic developments and the history that haunts contemporary life. The slide-piece also supplies useful career context.

Sekula’s work has only grown richer in the 30 years since its production. Today, it ranks among the best and most important in contemporary photography.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Jan. 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Tuned to the Beatles: “White Album,” organized by Jan Tumlir and on view at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, features a collection related to the Beatles’ famous “White Album” by 11 artists whose work incorporates the influence of pop or rock music. It is a curious endeavor, primarily because the record that came to be known as “The White Album” is such a curious cultural artifact: both pop and art, both obscure and mainstream, and a highly ambivalent production all around, containing some of the Beatles’ most endearing as well as some of their most strange, even hostile music.

What’s more, it is an album with a blank white cover. It comes with no clues for interpretation. The interplay between the ambiguity of the album and the act of personal interpretation it requires is clearly appealing to Tumlir and is reflected in the structure of the show itself: He presents the show as an array of interpretations of the album, but he provides few clues for the interpretation of those works themselves.

Most of the work is intriguing, if vague. Jessica Bronson and Dick Slessig’s installation “Around and About Dear Prudence” is a round, white carpet with a white monitor that plays fractured and abstracted footage of a jam session with a soundtrack of dreamy, melodic music; it’s a soothingly nostalgic and sensual piece. Francis Stark’s two large drawings--one consisting of a Beatles timeline, the other an intricate rendering of storefronts in Hamburg with signage reading “Beatles”--come across as abandoned but precious fragments of memory, floating delicately within their frames.

Though it occupies a significantly different relationship to the Beatles than the other work, the most individually powerful piece in the show is Yoko Ono’s 1969 film, “Rape,” in which a two-man camera crew follows an unsuspecting young woman through the streets of London and eventually into her apartment. It is a dauntingly, even frighteningly intense film, which exposes the violence of voyeurism and the potential of the camera as a weapon of assault. An interesting addition to the show, it alludes both to the underside of the Beatles’ unprecedented celebrity and to their link to the Conceptual art scene of the 1970s.

Most of the works in the show (Ono’s piece excluded) are explicit in their Beatles references but somewhat ambiguous in their own purposes. All in all, however, the show is greater than the sum of its parts, which is a credit to the curatorial concept and the beautiful installation emphasizing a peaceful flow between the works. The general whiteness of the work, combined with the gentle and unobtrusive music from Bronson and Slessig’s piece, makes for a serene and fitting tribute.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Feb. 3. Closed until Jan. 2, and Sunday and Monday.

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Disasters in the Making: Charles Gaines’ new work offers an analytical yet engrossing look at the disaster narrative, a staple of American film and television that remains relatively unexplored in fine art. Each of the works in his series “Absent Figures/Rainier: Version 2” tells the true story of a fatal or near-fatal disaster on Mt. Rainier through a cluster of found images and documents overlaid with narrative text. At Richard Heller Gallery, these works tell unsettling tales of the enormous power of nature and its indifferent, cyclical character.

Also on view is “Falling Rock,” a free-standing plexiglass tower containing a 65-pound piece of granite suspended by a steel cable from a motorized apparatus. Every 10 minutes, the rock drops suddenly to within an inch of a sheet of glass installed at the bottom of the tower, and at two random times during the day it is released just enough to shatter the glass. It is a loud and ominous contraption that evokes the real, tactile power of rock and glass (or ice), underscoring the random volatility of the mountain that appears so still and sublime in the photographs.

The disaster narrative is here a metaphor for the aesthetic experience: It overwhelms and mystifies as good art should. Gaines avoids sensationalism, however. The work is lurid but intellectual; it alludes to the sublime in nature but does not imitate it. It is a clear-headed and compelling sort of storytelling.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Dec. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Beginnings and Endings: As she relates in the textual prologue to her new video piece, “Prelude,” Gillian Wearing met the subject of the video, a young alcoholic woman named Lindsey, while filming a different project, and she became captivated by the woman’s dynamic and volatile energy. But Lindsey died from alcohol-related illness before Wearing could work with her again. For “Prelude,” a single-channel video projection at Regen Projects, Wearing combined footage of Lindsey the day they met with the voice of Lindsey’s twin sister discussing her sibling’s death and funeral.

The isolation of these three elements--one voice, one face and one projection--in the small, darkened space makes for an eerie intensity. During the short, poignant soliloquy of the sister’s unrehearsed account, Lindsey addresses the camera directly, though soundlessly, and the viewer recognizes the dynamism that Wearing describes seeing in her.

The image is black and white and beautifully grainy. Lindsey moves in a hazy slow motion that suits the slightly drunken quality of her gaze. At the very end of the loop, as her sister’s narration ends, her face bursts into a brief but brilliant smile that dissolves into an expression of perfect serenity and sanity. This expression is just one of many that drift across her face in the course of the video, and it remains for just a moment before the video ends, but it is terribly moving. “Prelude” is an eloquently simple, even Minimalist work and a haunting memorial.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.