Photos That Get Under the Skin, With Utmost Dignity

Pat York’s recent photographs at Ace Gallery are brutally honest images of a subject that most prefer to see in a more polite, superficial manner: the human body. York has worked for decades as a celebrity portraitist, shooting exteriors primed for the camera. The easy allure of the fashion shot meets its sober counterpoint here, in these demanding and strangely disquieting works.

York photographs cadavers, in various modes of disassembly from dissections. Several in the “Epidermal Veneer” series show the skin of a man’s upper body, detached and pliable, like a leathery pelt. In one of the images, the skin is splayed flat the way illustrations of spherical Earth are distorted to conform to the two-dimensional page. The image is edge-to-edge skin, vacant and yet not lacking in individuality. In another photograph from the series, the figure’s head appears as well, the eye sockets uncannily dark and the lips pursed as if in mid-sentence.

“Inside/Outside II (LA)” allows us the privilege of comparing the familiar features of a face and its radically exposed under-layers. A woman’s head has been sliced down the middle, straight through the nose, one half left as is, and the skin of the other peeled back to reveal fibrous, scrappy flesh and an eyeball unrelenting in its un-lidded stare.

Sensationalism is an ever-present risk when working with material of such limited access--similar, perhaps, to working with celebrities. York could easily exploit our worst voyeuristic instincts, but the work sustains a high level of dignity throughout (with the exception of one puerile montage). York avoids the urge toward gothic narrative, a territory well trampled by Joel-Peter Witkin, and she also resists putting the body in a medical context, as Max Aguilera Hellweg has done in his staggering photographs of surgery.

York keeps the subject pure, presenting bodies and body parts against neutral darkness, like icons, sculptures, precious objects. A view inside the skull takes on the marvelous silvery sheen of fish scales; a spinal column, isolated against black, is at once a botanical specimen, a spiny sea creature and the quiet engine driving our nervous system.

The theater of the body is itself dramatic, but unaccustomed as we are to pulling aside the curtain, these views can seem threatening. They can shock and disarm. But the shock can--and ought to--be one of clarity, recognition and wonder at the marvel of these organic machines we call home.

Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 935-4411, through Dec. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The Space of Dreams: In the early 1970s, the photographer-cum-philosopher Frederick Sommer published a little book on aesthetics, in which he wrote: “Life is the most durable fiction that matter has yet come up with, and art is the structure of matter as life’s most durable fiction.”

Sommer’s conception of reality as a set of convincing fictional overlays serves as a useful touch-point in considering the work of Stephen Aldrich and Walton Mendelson, now at Craig Krull Gallery. The two, both musicians, worked with Sommer for many years, and they collaborate now to make “collographs”--collages, photographed--that play along the seams, stitching desire to illusion, one reality to another, discontinuous with the first. Their work is visually entrancing and riffs eloquently on what Sommer termed “poetic logic.”

Aldrich does the cutting and pasting, fusing fragments from old engravings--technical and botanical diagrams, illustrations of stories, myths, exotic journeys. He massages their different scales, spatial orders and original functions into visually continuous scenes that retain the authority of the antique originals. Mendelson photographs the collages, manipulating light and tone to enhance the continuity of the new hybrid image.

The space of the resulting prints is the space of dreams, poetry and fantasy. In “The City Rises,” dozens of stately buildings, colonnades and clock towers pack together to make a megalopolis of unnatural density. Yet for all of its accretion and architectural miscegenation, the place has the cohesive integrity of a bird’s nest, thanks to the artists’ extraordinary technical facility.

“Tetrad” is to the machine what “The City Rises” is to architecture--an intense in-gathering, an orderly but exuberant celebration. Gears, pipes, wheels, bolts and levers fill every speck of the picture plane, cleanly connected and calibrated as if engineering something logical and practical. This is mechanical power in all of its analog splendor.

Collage and montage emerged as particularly potent artistic strategies among the Dadaists and Surrealists, and it’s from their era, the 1920s and ‘30s, that inspiration for Aldrich and Mendelson’s work seems to derive. Their city scene, for instance, has roots in Paul Citroen’s “Metropolis” montages, which evoke the power and speed and intense disjunction of modern life. The pace of everyday life and the amount of disjunction that factors into it have both reached even more daunting levels since Citroen’s work of the ‘20s.

Rather than mirror the frenetic energy of the present, Aldrich and Mendelson channel it into scenes of lush poetry and exquisite fantasy, dense with mystery and humor. Their work is a temporal retreat, fit to be savored with the quiet deliberation of an earlier age.

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Jan. 12. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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C’mon, Get Happy: Sitting around a campfire, have you ever wondered how that marshmallow feels to be skewered and hovering over the flames? Or to be plunked into a mug of steaming hot chocolate, to bob and melt away?

Abbie Baron Morganstein gives those sugar puffs a human face and functioning psyche in a wry little selection of paintings in a group show at Acuna-Hansen Gallery. Looking at her marshmallows’ worried eyes actually kick-starts some empathy, embarrassingly enough, and also some comic relief.

Reprieve from the weighty concerns of the day is the “Slap Happy” show’s raison d’etre. Its six artists, all but one from the L.A. area, fill the gallery with simple diversions that trade on goofy innocence as well as the visual, physical humor of cartoons.

Michael Arata turns domestic pets into wide-eyed hunting trophies in his kitty and puppy throw rugs. His “Chicken Footballs” scamper in a flock on the floor, just begging to be kicked.

Sweet nostalgia drives the sculptures of Julia Latane, making us all kids in a candy shop again, and on a dreamlike scale. Her cast-resin Lemonheads and Red Hots sit on a countertop gleaming like precious jewels. Her huge Dum Dum suckers in grape and blueberry resin rest on the floor and lean against the wall--daunting temptations.

Tao Urban sets us up in an immersive environment where we are free to regress into fantasy worlds of our own, resting on cushions that look like snow-capped mountains, and listening to music coming out of waist-high Alice in Wonderland blossoms in orange and blue. It’s a safe zone of synthetic perfection, a nursery for the overstressed.

Joey Slaughter’s wall and floor drawings also conjure an artificial environment of manufactured slickness, but more bland and nondescript.

“Slap Happy” tries to keep things light in these heavy times, but frustration and dismay creep in nonetheless. The implied violence in Arata’s animal sculptures and Morganstein’s tragicomic marshmallow portraits are still easy laughs compared with paintings here by Frank Liu. In “Goodbye Kitty,” the saccharine-sweet “Hello Kitty” character gets a cannonball in the nose. In a sequence of watercolors, “Sesame Street” characters Bert and Ernie flash their trademark, dopey smiles beneath the derogatory labels of “Fag” and “Chink,” terms that Liu himself feels victimized by. “Sesame Street’s” tolerant utopia just doesn’t translate to the mean streets of the real world, and there’s not much to laugh about in that.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through Dec. 22. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Altering Nature’s Course: Every one of Toshio Shibata’s photographs frames an epic confrontation between natural and built worlds. Working primarily in his native Japan, Shibata has dwelt for nearly 20 years on that single idea and its myriad manifestations. What does it look like to alter nature’s course? His images answer that question over and over with extraordinary elegance, while leaving to us the deeper, more complex issue of what those interventions mean.

Shibata avoids polemics, but within each image is the seed of a prickly debate over engineering practice and environmental protection. The current selection at Gallery Luisotti is not the stunner that a Shibata show can be, but it does contain several wondrous images and hints at the beauty and integrity of the photographer’s project.

In most of the pictures, concrete is a defining force, shaping the flow of water in a dam or acting as a barrier against eroding earth. In one image (all are titled with place names), Shibata shoots down onto a large pool of water studded with concrete cubes. Their edges faceted, the cubes look decidedly inorganic, bobbing in that inky sea, and yet they also suggest crystalline structures, the microscopic building blocks of organic life.

In another image, shot at a Colorado dam, Shibata fills his frame with a dark, craggy mountainside that’s been netted, presumably to stem erosion. Square bolts--seeming to hold the rock in or fastening the net to the rock--flicker against the shadowy wall like drizzling confetti.

In several photographs, water conforms to the distilled geometry of dam construction and falls in clean sheets, tightly framed by Shibata to minimize context and intensify the abstract beauty of the meeting between fluid and concrete forms. That collision of nature and culture feels sometimes like collusion; adaptation, compromise and contradiction are always part of the equation.

But Shibata’s outlook never feels critical. In fact, it seems just the opposite--always able to find the graceful within the clumsy, to focus on the intimate within the daunting and to extract the lyrical from the practical.

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Jan. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.