Confronting Perception, Memory and Imagination

At the entry to Margo Leavin Gallery, Mungo Thomson has installed “Six foot ruler(Prototype),” a sculpture made of anodized aluminum that appears to be exactly what its title says: a standard measuring stick 6 feet in length, which the artist has left leaning casually against the wall. Silk-screened in black ink on its 2-inch-wide surface are the words “Johnson Level & Tool Mfg. Co. Inc.,” together with the usual small calibrations adding up to inches, starting at 1 and ending at 72.

Standing next to the sculpture, though, discomfort soon arises. How come the ruler seems a couple inches too short? It says 72 inches, but relationally it doesn’t feel like 72 inches.

Is it a perceptual trick, akin to the ones in a Sylvia Mangold painting from the 1970s, wherein the actual 6-foot length feels shorter because the ruler is tilted at an angle against the wall, while a viewer stands erect? Or, have we been duped by a collision between artifice and expectation, since this ruler is actually a sculpture handmade by an artist, and not the product of a manufacturing company whose accuracy we’re automatically prepared to assume?

Thomson’s wryly engaging show, his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is characterized by this sort of gentle discord, in which perception, memory and imagination compete. At a time when technologies for reproduction are ubiquitous, from CDs to sheep, his chosen playing field is apt.

The center gallery is filled with homemade wind chimes, constructed from simple lengths of copper pipe and plastic fishing wire, which hang inside a room where no breeze will ever rustle to make music. Should you touch one? Blow on it? Wave your hands to make the random music? Or take one home to hang on your porch? And if you did, wouldn’t the tinkling sound mostly arouse memories of cinematic cliches for portentous events, like a whispered Rosebud?

The show also includes three dozen pencil drawings on translucent sheets, which gives them the appearance of tracings. A rock band, a dance around a bonfire, an airplane crash, a domestic still life--each scene features an empty thought-balloon, where you fill in the blanks. A nearby pile of cheaply printed booklets reproduces the seemingly unrelated drawings, but here the thought-balloons include a linear text, which unfolds a meditation on the creative predicament of 21st century artists.

A side gallery features Thomson’s poetic, quietly powerful recording of the collected live recordings of Bob Dylan, played from white speakers mounted on a white wall. Everything on the original album has been erased, though--save for recurring waves of audience applause punctuated by snippets of guitar-chord plus a Dylan syllable or two. With volume turned down low, the mournful sound of disappearing art amid fading adoration seems to reverberate from very far away--from a place in some remote past, perhaps, where the juxtaposition of “live” and “recording” once made perfect sense.

Built on precedents as diverse as the work of Stephen Prina, Jim Shaw and Dave Muller, Thomson’s art puts its finger exactly on an elusive yet defining quality of current experience. It’s a subtle and compelling debut.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Exuberant Spirit: In her abstract computerized video projections, Jennifer Steinkamp starts with the gee-whiz wonderment and loopy spiritualism of traditional Light and Space art, then pumps it up. Next, she pumps it up some more. At its best, the result is like a late 1960s or early 1970s James Turrell light projection, but with all the exaggerated solemnity drained out and replaced by an infusion of sheer bodily joy.

At ACME gallery, Steinkamp’s new projection (with gifted longtime collaborator, composer Jimmy Johnson) is among the most viscerally exuberant works she’s made since she began to exhibit her work about a decade ago. Visually, it’s also one of the simplest. The simplicity and the power might well be related.

Titled “They Eat Their Wounded,” the piece employs four video projectors, three gallery walls and six audio speakers to utterly transform your perception of its enclosed architectural environment. The imagery is neat and clean: a linked and crisply calibrated sequence of tumbling cubes or frustums (pyramids with the top sliced off), which dance along the U-shaped sequence of walls.

Drawn from colored light as linear shapes, the tumbling images read as flat geometries that periodically burst into three dimensions and then recede again. Playing off the actual volume of the room in which a visitor stands, the elusive imagery conducts a chatty visual conversation with the static form of the physical environment. Space becomes agitated.

The agitation is enhanced by the electrified appearance of Steinkamp’s jagged, linear designs. The changing colors of her cubes and frustums pulse in tandem with the driving beat of the work’s hypnotic, techno music score. Soon, the whole environment begins to seem like a charged, dynamic organism that’s plugged right into your own internal rhythms.

The rear gallery at ACME displays studies for six Steinkamp projections designed and executed since 1995, including “They Eat Their Wounded” and another work currently on view down the street at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Like carefully charted maps or diagrams, the precise drawings possess a technical clarity that affirms rational thought as integral to the sensory delirium of the projections. Light and Space art gets reborn.

* ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5864, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Power Grids: In a dusty lot behind the recycling center at the California Institute of Technology, sculptor Ken Ehrlich has erected a schematic model that articulates aspects of the school’s energy distribution system. While thoughtful and concise, the site-specific work is finally too staid and reserved for its otherwise ambitious purposes.

Titled “two planes, intersecting lines/Campus Power Distribution Model/spatial container for the infinite,” the sculpture looks a bit like a kid’s backyard jungle gym. Twenty sturdy metal poles, each perhaps 15 feet tall, are laid out on a grid whose irregular shape plots a map of the university campus. High overhead, two linear networks are strung out among the poles.

One, made of wire, derives from a 1939 electrical diagram for the school’s clocks and bell, the earliest power-system diagram Ehrlich was able to locate in the campus archive. The second, made of plastic, is based on a 1990s blueprint of the current system of power distribution on campus. The fairly simple wire layout of the earlier diagram is overlaid with the far bigger and more complicated plastic plan of the current diagram.

Electricity is obviously meant as a metaphor for various kinds of social power here, but the sculpture itself feels disconcertingly inert. Even the potentially enlivening allusion to play, which comes from the sculpture’s inescapable visual association with a jungle gym, quickly falls away. Its looming size limits physical interaction to a simple walk-around.

As a perceptual system the configuration of poles and wires relies heavily on text, helpfully provided on nearby signage. Indeed, the most potent aspects of the work come from exploration of its physical surroundings--the context provided by the recycling center adjacent, some telephone poles and transformers rising through nearby trees, crisscrossing pathways of pedestrian traffic that skirt the site and even the vaunted scientific edifice of Caltech itself.

The installation acts as a cue to these otherwise invisible systems of energetic ebb and flow in the surroundings, but it’s rather too subtle to be heard in any but the most generalizing way. Ehrlich’s sculpture points toward power, but it’s shy about acknowledging that it could--or should--have some power of its own.

* Caltech Outdoor Art Space, 300 E. Holliston Ave., Pasadena, (626) 395-6803, through Dec. 17. Open daily.

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Fragments: You can dip in and out of a painting by Michelle Fierro, not unlike the way you can skip here and there through a book of aphorisms or short meditations. While the canvas as a whole never seems incomplete, neither does it read as a fully self-contained exercise.

Fierro’s new paintings at Roberts & Tilton Gallery continue this fragmented yet fully satisfying direction. The meander of a pencil line across an off-white field of paint might lead you to a small mountain of pigment, which doesn’t lie flat against the canvas but stands out vertiginously at right angles from it. Over here a thick puddle of assorted colors, over there some stuff that seems to have been swept up from the studio floor and out by the edge, more.

Like Cy Twombly (without the grandiosity), Fierro approaches the busy intersection between painting and writing in her art, while also giving it a material armature more commonly associated with architecture. Her paintings feel built. This new group is titled “Babel’s Tower,” and from the tumult comes a lovely confusion.

* Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.