Earthy Materials Add Element of Power to Dillbohner’s Work

Christel Dillbohner traces the origins of her richly textured show at Ellen Kim Murphy Gallery to a lifelong interest in “primitive” cultures and, more specifically, to two work residencies in Australia in 1998-99. Aboriginal bark paintings intrigued her there, and she furthered her research into the integration of native peoples and their environment.

Born in Germany and now living in Northern California, Dillbohner is hardly alone in her fascination with cultures maintaining a profound connection to the Earth. Rituals everywhere attempt to order experience and endow it with meaning, but in aboriginal cultures especially, art--whether it goes by that name or not--is deeply important to the process, far more than it is given credit for in our place and time. Dillbohner’s achievement is to create work that assumes that same essential role for itself, and realizes it in its own physically powerful terms.

Natural materials such as beeswax, charcoal and plant matter are primary to Dillbohner’s installations, paintings and assemblages. The work ranges widely in scale and scope but seems always to be grounded in the fundamental search for order and meaning, particularly with regard to place. “Kensington Gardens,” one of the first pieces encountered in the gallery, does this most explicitly and helps set the stage for some of the more abstract works to come.

Several dozen paper pouches filled with sprigs of plants, seeds and clippings are pinned to the wall in a mosaic grid. A wooden case on the floor beneath contains more such envelopes, a glass jar and some small trays of plant material. The box suggests a field kit of sorts, and the envelopes a taxonomic gathering of specimens. The scientific impulse, however, is stripped of its specificity--nothing is labeled or even clearly identifiable--and pushed back in time, the case coated in a dark varnish, the envelopes yellowed.

Dillbohner’s tender, almost nostalgic tone in “Kensington Gardens” also pervades her series of wall-mounted box assemblages made from wooden drawers, each filled with a single, precious wonder from the natural world: a wasp’s nest or pair of dried tulip petals. She turns from the intimate to a more distanced study of place in an absorbing sequence of aerial landscape photographs, pigmented and sheathed in wax. Though the imagery is vague (bushes can be made out, and possibly a serpentine river), the effect of these fiery orange, lunar-like landscapes is dramatic.

They have a primal intensity that Dillbohner’s paintings here can’t match. Her installations fall short as well, though elements of them are transcendent, such as the crater-like fired clay bowls in one piece, and the intoxicating beeswax scent of another. The power of place is an inexhaustible theme, and Dillbohner mines it deeply and thoughtfully, creating numerous works that are themselves places invested with power.

* Ellen Kim Murphy Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7976, through June 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Lush Colors: JeeHee Paik’s beautiful new paintings bring to mind luscious Monet waterlilies--as filtered through the hip sensibility of contemporary L.A. They are meditative and sensuous, but ever cool. Botanical and biological references creep in, but Paik doesn’t push the allusions. She concentrates more on the familial bonds between colors and the ethereal effects of non-referential, gravity-free space.

All of the works at Cruz L.A. feature continuous fields of flat, overlapping circles or ovals floating in shallow space. In one of the images, the disks appear blurred, as if they were moving in a hurry. Elsewhere their edges stay crisp and they hover, suspended in slow-motion reverie.

“Lush” is a chorus of greens--mint, emerald, forest, olive, teal--and “Lips” an ode to crimson and red. Paik plays effectively with translucence in “Self-Made,” setting a palpable, grape-like cluster of deep red disks against veils of larger, sheer white circles. “Tangy” lives up to its name, with its jaunty pairing of persimmon and chartreuse ovals, packs of them outlined in neon green like cartoon puddles or flowers.

For all of their chromatic effervescence, Paik’s paintings feel serene and often introspective. At their best, they mesmerize like dappled light on water--warm partnering with cool in a fluid, shifting realm devoid of tension.

* Cruz L.A. Gallery, 211 Windward Ave., Venice, (310) 664-9811, through June 24. Open by appointment only.

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Poetry in Pictures: Several solo shows over the past few years have identified Enrique Martinez Celaya as an artist of formidable intelligence and great poetic capacity. This show of recent photographs at Griffin Contemporary only reinforces the impression. Both the large-scale photographs made in a beautiful birch forest and the modest preparatory sketches and notes extend Celaya’s soulful inquiry into the workings of memory--how it resides in the body, what shapes it takes, what associations it triggers, how it partners time and loss in a slow, melancholic dance.

The artist’s own naked back dominates a large color photograph titled “Traces and marks (the river).” Celaya stained his skin with a brick red pigment, then drew a simple diagram across his back, labeling three places with arrows and the words “estrella” (star), “cicatriz” (scar) and “10 anos” (10 years). The enterprise of “mapping the body” has become something of an art-world cliche, and the eyes can easily glaze over when talk turns to the human form as contested terrain, the site of gender wars and race squabbles. With penetrating simplicity, Celaya returns us to the immediacy and pungency of individual experience, to the scars, wishes and memories that we wear like skin.

Celaya uses language as deftly as he does a wide range of visual media. Words catalyze meaning in his stripped-down images here. They act as signposts, touch points.

In a page of notes he has written, “Photos--to make believe--to point,” and in that scrap of a definition he identifies the fundamental duplicity of the medium of photography. The veracity of the photograph compels belief, but its partiality destines it to remain a fiction, a work of make-believe.

Celaya’s work, both visual and verbal, abounds with slow-release nuggets like this. It doesn’t just grapple with the notion of memory, it gives the memory something precious to embrace.

* Griffin Contemporary, 915 Electric Ave., Venice, (310) 452-1014, through June 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Vinyl, Vision: Turn the corner from one of ACME’s galleries into the other and you will have swerved from the ridiculous to the sublime. The larger of the two spaces holds the sometimes ludicrous, sometimes touching antics of Dario Robleto, and the smaller gallery the luminous treasures of Michael Norton.

It’s a law of physics that matter is neither created nor destroyed, and Robleto extends the principle to music in his sculptures made from melted-down record albums. The LPs stand in for the music itself, and in acts of reverse alchemy, Robleto turns the soulful sounds of Billie Holiday into a nondescript handful of buttons, or recasts Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album as a heap of pyrite, commonly known as fool’s gold.

There are plenty of clunkers here, like the set of inert black-box recorders made from melted records, resin, concrete and paint, but a few pieces truly sing. Process, performance and pithy content come together sweetly in a little untitled spool of thread with needle attached, the thread being an exquisitely thin slice of Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.”

Robleto’s fun house gives way to Norton’s sanctuary. Norton’s intimately scaled paintings (some rectangular, some oval, none more than 2 feet per side) are made using one of the oldest known painting techniques--egg tempera on wood panel. Loose correspondences to the conventions of the landscape genre--a horizon line, however diffuse, and earthen colors toward the lower half of each image, more airy, sky-like hues above--cause the paintings to register immediately as evocations of a place, either imagined or remembered.

Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and the more ephemeral works of the American Luminists all come to mind and connect Norton to a long tradition of transcendent image-making. Norton’s thin layers of paint accrete, pool and sometimes drip, yielding a deep atmospheric space that is rapturous and seductive. A luminous brightness at the center of each painting tantalizes, urging the eye to linger and the soul to settle.

* ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Saturday.