Hutton’s Emersonian Notion Can Lead to Daydreaming

Thanks to the digital revolution, we can now perform multiple tasks in ever skimpier slices of time. But thanks to that ease and speed in getting things accomplished, we’ve forgotten the value of disconnecting from the world of doing, and connecting to a quieter, more reflective state of simply being.

Do we remember how to daydream?

Consider Peter Hutton’s short, ravishing film now screening continuously at Shoshana Wayne Gallery a refresher course. Hutton, director of the film program at Bard College and a filmmaker since the late 1960s, titled the film “In Titan’s Goblet,” after a Thomas Cole landscape painting that he found wonderfully surreal. Hutton’s response is more sublime than surreal, and it owes much to the Emersonian notions of transcendental nature that were current with Cole (1801-1848) and his fellow Hudson River Valley painters.

The film, shot in grainy black and white, opens with an image of silhouetted hills beneath a thick bank of clouds back-lit by the moon. Scenes of a charred, smoking landscape (a burning landfill) follow, and then a sequence of views of clouds passing before the full moon. The imagery is simple, but numinous. The camera remains stationary for each shot, and a few moments of black leader separate the scenes, so that the whole reads as a series of nearly still stills--individual moments of reverie, linked by the beauty and intensity they have in common, but not by any narrative logic. It comes as no surprise that Hutton’s films have been compared to haiku; this one has the distinct, distilled elegance of poetry.

Hutton made “In Titan’s Goblet” in 1991 as a silent film. It plays here on DVD with a soundtrack composed last year by Margaret De Wy--a spare, effective score conjuring the sounds of meditational chant, animal cry and wind.

The artist’s fixation on clouds in this film harks back again to the painter Cole, who considered the sky “the soul of all scenery,” and whose notebooks are filled with detailed observations of cloud formations. The dramatic, high-contrast clouds of Albert Pinkham Ryder come immediately to mind as well, as do Alfred Stieglitz’s photographic cloud studies.

Hutton nestles into this art historical pantheon as a landscape artist whose work is rooted in the wondrous if humble moment. He has made a number of films as portraits of places (New York, Budapest, Boston), and this one too is grounded in a specific landscape--the Hudson River Valley, where Cole worked. But the real setting of this quietly rapturous film is the private, interior space within each of its viewers.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Oct. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Unsettling Images: Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs are exposures in every sense of the word: moments when the camera’s aperture opened, allowing light to expose the film within, and moments of vulnerability, candor and nakedness, when her subjects opened their lives enough for Mark and her camera to enter.

As the 30-year survey of her work at Fahey/Klein Gallery attests, Mark is an extraordinary image-maker. Each photograph in this 49-print show has a pungency, a dense and complex emotional resonance, beginning with the very first one, portraying a couple in rural Kentucky. The woman stands straight and tall, while her husband crouches in a tree beside her. The gun in one of his hands rests on his opposite arm, its barrel pointing directly at his wife’s head. Both stare intently forward, seeming to meet our gaze as we register shock at what seems to them a standard portrait.

Mark has photographed women in the maximum-security ward of a state hospital, street kids packing weapons in Seattle, a family living out of its car, KKK members raising a cross, protesters for and against the Vietnam War. Hers is an idiosyncratic chronicle of life in the U.S. these last few decades (she has photographed in other countries, but this show confines itself to American work). Its oddities match those of Diane Arbus, its incisive commentary is kin to Robert Frank’s. Its pathos is unparalleled.

Violence to the body and to the spirit is a visible theme coursing through Mark’s work. It manifests in the photograph of five young African American boys playing gangster, their bodies pressed against a wall like crime suspects. And in the picture of a little girl, sleeping cradled in the arms of her white supremacist father in the lush Idaho wilderness. Mark’s is the most humanistic sort of art, as tough as it is tender, at home in the margins as well as the mainstream, dark and truthful.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 934-2250, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Blood Oaths: Both the blood ties of family and the bloodlessness of electronic communication assert themselves in the recent paintings of Mariangeles Soto-Diaz at Ruth Bachofner Gallery. The color of blood itself dominates the canvases, which are intriguing but don’t consistently accelerate the pulse.

Stripes of various widths and reds divide the surfaces of the paintings, or tight grids of red squares pixelate them. Throughout, Soto-Diaz inserts fragments of e-mail letters exchanged with members of her family in Venezuela.

These are a tease rather than an invitation into the hearts of these writing women, for Soto-Diaz shrinks the Spanish text down to near-illegibility, then reverses it before incorporating it into her images. The text becomes symbolic of a certain form of communication without revealing anything of the nature of the messages. A modest friction results between the text’s public visibility and its private inaccessibility, and also between the aggressive sensuality of Soto-Diaz’s palette and the cool order of most of the compositions.

“Virtual Consanguinity XXXIV (e-mail mama)” is among the tightest of the works on view, which range from 6 feet per side to a size that would fit comfortably in the hand. This mid-sized diptych features the @ symbol forming out of (or dissolving into) a dense mosaic of e-mail-imbedded red squares, the color of lipstick, wine, blood. The symbol for “at” is a nugget of irony in the context of e-mail communication.

The Internet’s very placelessness serves as a vehicle for linking distant voices; it abounds in sites, origins and destinations, but there is no there there. Soto-Diaz likens that instability to the sense of dislocation she feels living outside of her native country. Her paintings don’t always catalyze such rich and affecting notions, but the passion of blood runs through them when they do.

* Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Title Wave: “The Contemporary Latino Masters” is an audaciously inclusive title for a show that misses more marks than it hits and whose best attribute is its earnestness. A dozen L.A. artists are represented in the Modern Art Gallery show, each by several works, but not necessarily their strongest. Visual cliches abound; flab outweighs muscle.

Gloria Longval’s paintings stand out for their intimacy and mystery. The figures moving within their ambiguous spaces hold clues to their intentions--a skull, a bird whistle, a mask--and narrative possibilities flourish. These are personal, powerful images driven by the complex interweavings of memory and tradition.

Muralist Judy Baca’s work, too, helps salvage the show from the threat of drab, prefab expression. Her oil stick and pastel drawings of strong, radiant women exude a refreshing clarity and sense of urgency.

The late Carlos Almaraz appears with a few middling images, as does Gilbert “Magu” Lujan and Dolores Guerrero-Torres. Roberto Gutierrez’s simplified cityscapes throw observations both sweet and tart into the mix, and Frank Romero’s energetically painted tabletop still-life with baby shoes and a small car adds a bit of verve.

Works by Ernesto de la Loza, Martin Garcia, Alejandro Zendejas, David Martinez and Monticello Miller (who organized the show) contribute little that is memorable. What’s most remarkable about an exhibition with such an ambitious name is its scarcity of ambitious art. The city is far richer with “contemporary Latino masters” than this show lets on.

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Modern Art Gallery, 3240 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200, (213) 487-2565, through Wednesday. Closed Sundays.