Vivid Photo Collages Explore the Paradoxes of Brazil’s Amazon

David Hockney has so popularized a manner of photo collage--in which dozens or even hundreds of standard-size color prints are assembled into a shimmering, faceted whole--that those who practice the same method are assumed to be derivative, poachers on claimed territory. But for all the simple charm of his work, Hockney neither defined the medium of photo collage nor exhausted it. Christine Burrill’s show at SPARC, “Gathering Riches: Images From the Brazilian Amazon,” is glorious proof that a medium, however familiar, is exactly as fresh and compelling as the vision brought to it.

Burrill, a documentary filmmaker, first visited Brazil in 1968 and in 1971 edited a film on the state of torture there. She has been back more than 20 times since, both filming and making still photographs that, since the 1980s, she has assembled in vivid, jagged-edged collages.

The recent work here focuses on several indigenous tribes of the Amazon and on gold miners working the depleted vein of Serra Pelada (a subject also documented, stunningly, by photographer Sebastiao Salgado). It’s hard to say which gives Burrill’s work more power: the conscience and sensitivity driving it, or the richness and beauty of its form. Each emboldens the other, and the partnership yields a body of work with tremendous integrity.

Burrill makes the photographs for each collage over a period of 10 to 20 minutes, her notes explain, and her final images, while compact, convey a definite sense of time’s passage. Like short films whose entirety can be seen at once, they contain movement, shifting perspectives and narrative progression.

“Red River” traces the meandering flow of a rusty stream of water as it washes through a sluice box and snakes onward in the dirt. The river contains gold, but also mercury, which the miners add to amalgamate the gold dust. As a carrier of both promise and poison, the curving stripe of opaque liquid is mesmerizing.

In “The Celebration,” Burrill shows several members of the Arawete tribe preparing to mark a successful harvest. Repeated three times across the center of the collage is the image of a man, whose body has been smeared with the juice of red berries, having his hair dusted with downy white eagle feathers. Like so many of Burrill’s works, this image has both the intimacy of a close-up and the informational clarity of a more distanced view. Burrill works like an ethnographer, preserving images of ritual and culture, but also like a genre painter, intent on evoking the ambience, the colors and the textures that make up everyday life.

Beautiful and urgent, the work here ultimately contrasts two radically different approaches to survival, two distinct ways, as Burrill puts it, of gathering the Earth’s riches: on the Earth’s own terms, or on terms dictated by human need and greed.

* Social and Public Art Resource Center, 685 Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-9560, through Sunday.

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Liberated by Drawing: The year 1957 was fruitful for New York School sculptor David Smith, judging from his biography--he had a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art--and from the muscular beauty of the drawings from that year now at Margo Leavin Gallery. Smith started as a painter in the 1920s, gained renown as a sculptor of welded steel and sustained an ardent relationship with drawing throughout, until his death in 1965. He regarded drawing as an embodiment of freedom, a fundamental act of liberation. It might have been, he mused, “the first celebration of man with his secret self--even before song.”

Smith drew in paint, usually straight black mixed with egg yolk to enhance the translucence of the pigment. Somewhere between calligraphy and choreography, Smith’s drawings from 1957 are pure physical gesture, exhalations of energy across the page. They descend, visibly, from his more totemic, Surrealist-tinged work but don’t yet venture into the crisp geometry of subsequent years.

In their all-over occupation of the surface, their emblematic suggestiveness and deep inner significance for the artist, they are definitively Abstract Expressionist.

Dense loops, bursts of skittish line, taut, stretching streaks, knots of darkness and abrupt hooks turn these sheets of paper into fields of raw energy. The connection between line and body is insistent but never literal, much as in Japanese Zen brushwork, which clearly exerted quite a force on Smith, as on many of his peers in the 1950s. Kin to reductive Zen poem-paintings, Smith’s drawings unify language and image, symbol and presence. The initial force of the impact of brush upon paper carries meaning, and the drying-out of ink in the course of a stroke is part of a larger grammar of expression, referred to as “flying white,” in the Japanese tradition, for the way the underlying paper assumes a dynamic role in the image.

The catalog accompanying the show is fully illustrated and--more of a feat--sensitively written, for Smith was insistent that his work neither derived from a verbal source nor could be reduced to words. “Art,” he said, “is made from dreams, and visions, and things not known, and least of all from things that can be said. It comes from the inside of who you are, when you face yourself. It is an inner declaration of purpose.”

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A., (310) 273-0603, through Feb. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Eye Games: Ron Rizk’s seriously delightful paintings remind, through their reference to styles of the past, that gamesmanship in art was not a 20th century invention. Duchamp and his artistic progeny may have the monopoly on mind games, but eye games have been around far longer. Typically, they are more accessible and more appealing to a general audience. Rizk’s work certainly is.

His paintings at Koplin feel lived in, comfortable, familiar and slow-paced. Their flat, mellow colors elicit memories of old homes or public buildings. It’s all a self-conscious ploy, of course, but visual illusions--and especially these, enmeshed as they are in nostalgia--are an innocent enough pleasure to buy into.

Rizk, a longtime USC faculty member, borrows a number of strategies from 17th century Dutch still-life painters, as well as Americans like the extraordinary 19th century artist J.F. Peto. Rizk gives flat wooden panels the appearance of shallow shelves or shadowboxes, then arranges objects on their “ledges.” He transforms smooth, continuous surfaces into panels with a past--abraded, chipped and splintered, with stray nails and abandoned scraps of notes or photographs testifying to an earlier use.

The objects and images joined within each painting usually adhere to a single theme, as in the baseball-oriented “Farm Club” (2000), which combines an image of a scrubby “Field of Dreams”-style baseball diamond with portraits of players and an old-fashioned catcher’s mask hanging over it all. Resonating with these more overt themes is another that threads through all of the work: the congruency of work and play.

Toys and tools crop up everywhere as props in these symbol-laden narratives. Building blocks echo a formal, painted landscape in “The Bishop’s Folly” (1998), and other paintings feature masks, toy boats and cars, and a windup penguin.

Thanks to Rizk’s technical finesse, the objects in these paintings and the spaces they occupy appear convincing, but his depictions of technical defeat--the spinning top cracked open like an oyster in “Design Flaw” (1999), for instance--suggest the fragility of illusion. Disbelief can’t be suspended forever; the magic eventually wears off.

But Rizk is canny about art’s potential to amuse, and he exploits it beautifully. “Getting Some Fun Out of Life,” as one of his paintings is titled, takes both tools and toys. It’s not only admirable work, but commendable play.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through Feb. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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That Uncertain Feeling: Two side-by-side solo shows at Angles Gallery resonate marvelously with one another and serve as terrific introductions for both of the Glasgow, Scotland-based artists. Though their work bears no formal resemblance at all, Carol Rhodes and Louise Hopkins operate on a similar wavelength when it comes to addressing place. Both evoke systems of surveillance or mapping, but undermine any fixity associated with those forms and instead deliver images of compelling ambiguity and instability.

Rhodes paints demure-seeming aerial landscapes that leave a residue of uncertainty in the mind. The land forms and built structures she pictures are reduced to distilled abbreviations when seen from above, and the views verge on abstraction. Hillocks look vaguely bodily, lumpy, and the sea goes neutral, like a gray sheet. Reservoirs and piers look unusually stark, as if in uneasy alliance with the surrounding natural landscape.

The paintings, small and squarish, are each keyed to a single color, like tone poems, but the colors are insistently drab and flat--chalky green, pale asphalt, grayish mauve. Rhodes seems determined to strip any possible charm from these panels, yet they do linger in the memory as strangely beautiful.

Hopkins has a spunkier, more lighthearted take, but she’s less consistent. A few of her drawings and paintings atop maps and upholstery fabrics are keenly clever; others seem facile.

One of the most absorbing is an untitled map of North and South America whose information Hopkins has thwarted, amended and tweaked. Across parts of Canada and Brazil she’s laid fine streams of white that interrupt rivers and cancel out place names. And most adroitly, she’s made the surrounding oceans appear continuous with the land. They’re no longer blue, but the same neutral white as the landmasses, and similarly sectioned into parcels with names and faintly articulated geographic features. The image is captivating--a vicious satire and futuristic nightmare in one.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through March 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.