Treacherous Fragments of Everyday Life Emerge in Pierson’s Contradictory Works

The first thing to confront the viewer in Jack Pierson’s current exhibition at Regen Projects is a startlingly visceral and intimate accusation, scrawled on a wall in angry black paint: “I left all the love I had for you in a locker at the Hollywood Greyhound Station hacked up in a plastic bag.” Evoking an image that is difficult to put out of the mind, the phrase embodies the exhibition’s peculiar balance of tenderness and sordidness.

It reminds us that the psychological landscape of Pierson’s work, although filled with sparkling objects and alluring insinuations, is not the sort of place where an art tourist would be advised to linger too long. While there is delight to be found in the luscious color of his photographs or the cleverness of his sculptural wordplay, the shadows lurking beneath his shimmering surfaces are treacherous.

Unlike the sordid landscapes of Nan Goldin or Larry Clark, which rely on exotically marginalized subjects to provoke the voyeuristic interest of the viewer, Pierson’s work positions the viewer at the center of its landscape, not outside it. His works are not windows into a world so much as fragments of it. They emanate with an uncomfortably tangible array of contradictory sensations: banality, desire, despondency, anger, excitement, emptiness, danger, pleasure and longing.

Rather than presenting desirable images, his photographs envelop the viewer in the experience of desire itself. The three largest photographs in the show (which are printed onto canvas in a pixilated form) are fragmented glimpses of women’s bodies: a jeweled hand hovering around a sparkling necklace, a collarbone skirted with blond hair, a disembodied pair of lips. Their monumental scale seems to mimic the way the mind expands treasured fragments of visual memory to larger-than-life proportions.

Elsewhere, a series of five modestly sized portraits depicts a shirtless and achingly handsome young man against a dizzyingly lush backdrop of blue and green. The images are all nearly identical, as though replicated spontaneously through the irrational impulse of desire--through the need to literally surround oneself with such a dazzling image, to look at it again and again.

The fragments of old signage that make up Pierson’s word sculptures--decontextualized scraps of failed language--express a very physical sort of despondency. Arranged into random but loaded words--heroin, ghosts, actress--the chaotically mismatched letters seem the embodiment of the doomed human need to piece indifferent fragments of the physical world into a reliable structure of meaning.

Between the photographs and the sculptures, the exhibition is an unsettling interaction of glitter and grime. In the end, however, its darkest shadow is its persistent undercurrent of banality, the quietly lurking possibility that its fragments and sensations, however real, are entirely ordinary.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through May 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Cartoonish Dark Side: It is not entirely clear whether Philip Knoll’s large cartoonish paintings, on view at Paul Kopeikin Gallery, are meant to come across as celebratory, humorous, satirical, vulgar, gross or angry. The paintings are disarmingly pleasant at first glance, rendered in creamy spring colors and filled with familiar, comic-book-style imagery. But, upon closer examination, they betray the imprint of a decidedly darker imagination.

The iconography that fills each work varies from the childishly sweet to the contentiously irreverent; indeed, the two mingle almost seamlessly. In one painting, a cowboy stranded on a rock in the middle of an ocean sings woefully to an audience of appreciative dolphins. In another, a chipmunk chews through the base of a wooden cross, which then falls and crushes him into a bloody pile. In another, a man gazes into his pants while lightning bolts issue from his crotch.

Each painting is a dizzying patchwork of images floating loosely in a field of soft color. Some of the images stand out against this field, while others seem to dissolve into it. Some cover large stretches of the field, and others only a square inch. Certain images, such as that of a naked Superman, repeat throughout the work.

Several dozen small drawings also on display depict a single image each, most with an exquisitely spare sense of composition. The technique in all the works is impeccable.

Without the elements of narrative or character that traditionally give meaning to comic-book imagery, the works offer little in the way of an interpretive road map, which makes it difficult to sort through their conflicting attitudes. Knoll’s imagery seems needlessly juvenile in some places and irrelevant in others.

Just as often, however, it is funny, charming and thought-provoking. Ultimately, the apparent conflicts are less disabling than they are disorienting, which might not be such a bad thing. The sheer visual delight of the works goes a long way.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 937-0765, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Seeing Past the Obvious: The aesthetic codes of the common snapshot were inscribed into the history of photography at a relatively early stage, by photographers like Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand in the 1950s and ‘60s. Their contribution was arguably one of the best and worst things ever to happen to the medium in its short life span.

On the one hand, it opened up the bounds of photography, expanded its visual vocabulary, and brought it into a whole new realm of optical poetics. On the other hand, it suggested that anything in the world could be made into an art photograph with the simple press of a button. While these early street photographers themselves had a remarkably astute and calculated instinct for composition and tone, their images projected an illusion of ease that has since sent countless young (and not so young) photographers into fruitless trysts with banality.

The two photographers on view now at the Pink Gallery--Mollie Culligan and Walter Williams (both of whom are otherwise employed in film and television)--seem to be two such photographers. Their exhibition, titled “Shrapnel,” is intended to convey the pieces of everyday life that “are so familiar you are no longer able to notice them.”

It’s a nice concept, but it assumes that the everyday objects we come to overlook are intrinsically interesting, which they need not be--not unless they’re pointed out to us in a compelling new light. Unfortunately, most of the images in the show are not particularly compelling: familiar signs, chain-link fences, urban underpasses and common objects like wheels and tools.

Admittedly, there are a few gems in the lot: a close-up shot by Williams of a tarred bucket and tools that is tinged with an intriguing shade of orange, for example, or a nighttime sidewalk scene by Culligan, filled with blurry neon colors. One wishes, however, that Williams and Culligan had looked just a little deeper into the world they wandered through to take these pictures. There is profundity to the detritus of daily life, but the casual click of a camera shutter is rarely enough to reveal it.

* The Pink Gallery, 1555 Echo Park Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 977-8839, through Saturday.

Geographical Shapes: An eloquently understated group exhibition at Goldman Tevis Gallery offers a compelling vision of the contemporary urban landscape in which traditionally opposed elements of specificity and abstraction mingle fluidly.

The first of the three large works on display is a computer-generated, photo-based print by Tom Baldwin depicting a quiet street scene that seems directly transposed from some locale just beyond the walls of the Chinatown gallery. The major shapes in the unpeopled landscape have been abstracted into a collage-like arrangement of solid blocks and rendered primarily in shades of pink and orange. It is a pleasantly unassuming work with a delicious palette.

The second work, a sculptural piece by Paris-based artist Jean-Marc Bustamante, conveys a sense of urban geography through shape, form and line rather than image. A jumble of vague notations resembling a city map is painted in green on a sheet of Plexiglas studded with holes. The Plexiglas is thick and cut in sharp, clean lines that suggest the urban framework of technology and industry.

Although it is a directly representational photograph, the third piece, by Swiss artist Beat Streuli, also plays with abstraction by cropping its image of a cluttered sidewalk scene so tightly as to render it nearly indecipherable. The shot includes fragments of cars, storefronts, banners and signs that bear shreds of several languages, all rendered on the same plane without a sense of depth or perspective. The image is lit with brilliant white sunlight, which amplifies the tangle of plastic colors.

This poetic selection of works lends an interesting spin to the traditional urban landscape.

* Goldman Tevis Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-8217, through May 12. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.