London’s Photos Depict Teen Dreams, Fantasies

“Rock Star Moments,” Laura London’s new series of photographs on view at Works on Paper Inc., is a tour though the literal and psychological costume trunk of a 13-year-old girl named Clancy. The first five of the 10 photographs in the series feature Clancy in the guise of Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love and other rock stars, complete with wigs, makeup, jewelry, padded breasts and a guitar. If it weren’t for the clear markings of a teenage girl’s bedroom, the images would be surprisingly convincing.

Clancy conveys all the trappings of contemporary glamour with ease: the adolescent indifference, the sultry posture, the detached gaze, the cool sexuality. She wears the costumes not as clothes but as psychological states, as though she’s internalized their logic. But there is nothing schizophrenic about Clancy’s performances in these pictures; rather, her ease in role playing is conveyed as a form of mastery.

The sixth photograph in the series takes us behind the scenes. In this image, Clancy sits on the floor of her room, holding a red wig in one hand and sorting through piles of clothes with the other, out of character and not paying attention to the camera. It’s a charming and powerful moment in the series, not because it exposes a “real” Clancy underneath the adult disguises--it doesn’t--but because it exposes her as the clearheaded author of her own image.

The remaining four photographs also depict Clancy out of character, in various states of costume. In the last image, she appears as a regular 13-year-old girl in blue jeans and a tank top, although we are given no reason to believe that it is any truer an image than any of the others.

It is to London’s credit that Clancy’s talent for shape-shifting is not presented as a sign of capriciousness or soulessness but as a gesture of power. London centers Clancy in every image, shooting from eye level or near eye level. Clancy gazes directly (and dauntingly) into the camera in most of the shots, and in no case does she seem to have been caught unaware. London has not attempted to seize more than Clancy wants to give to the camera. The resulting effect is a charming camaraderie between the two, a sense of respectful cooperation that seems to have brought out the best in both of them.

* Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 964-9675, through Dec. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Multiple Views: Simultaneously vivid and banal, eerie and familiar, magical and ordinary, David Hilliard’s multi-paneled photographs at Mark Moore Gallery present mystical slices of contemporary life. Each work consists of three to seven panels conveying a panoramic view (horizontal or vertical) of a self-consciously posed scene. In one, a young man kneels to pick up a coin in a long alleyway; in another a man browses through seven panels of breakfast cereal in a supermarket. They are lonely and poetic images, which present fractured but expansive views of everyday intimacy.

In “Tobey Pond” (2000), for example, three horizontal panels convey what seems to be a family’s day at a lake. A woman, a man and a little girl are each situated in different panels at different depths, with another man left out of focus to the far right. The characters are bound together in a tight compositional triangle, yet separated by the slightly skewed viewpoint of each panel. They are further pulled apart by their own gazes, which are each fixed in opposing directions outside the triangle.

Hilliard’s vision embraces the playful aspects of contemporary life as readily as its pathos. He seems to take particular delight in the aggressive color and sensual plasticity of the consumer experience, as can be seen in “The A to Z of Taxonomy” (2000), which features seven panels of fake flowers in a hobby store. The flowers occupy the extreme foreground in thick bunches and brilliant arrays of color, with two shop girls in flowered uniforms peering through with blank expressions. It’s a truly delightful image.

* Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Dec. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Dream World: Seth Dickerman’s ethereal photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery are landscapes only insofar as they depict identifiable images of hills, trees, beaches and skies. They have very little to do with place. Their images are blurry and geographically unrecognizable, abstracted by soft focus, extended exposure, grainy film and the movement of the camera. They are landscapes, therefore, of color and light rather than geography--impressionistic meditations on the experience of landscape, rather than on its visual details.

While a number of these images are predictable, even a bit trite, the best of them are magical and captivating. Deeply saturated colors evoke an appealing otherworldliness in the images, with hills the color of green apple candy, crashing waves like blue cake icing, and sunsets in a spectrum of nail polish pinks. The colors animate the simultaneous embrace and struggle of one element of the landscape with another: the wrestling of earth with sky, ocean with earth, sky with cloud.

The most entrancing of the images--”Hawi Moon” (2000) and “Fountain” (1998)--are the most abstract and depict no land at all, just fields of intense indigo sky and poetic shreds of white clouds. They’re eloquent landscapes, it seems, from a dream world just parallel to our own.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 937-0765, through Tuesday. Closed Sunday and Monday.