Photos Like a Day at the Beach: Playful, Dangerous

If you’re having a hard time making it out to the beach as often as you’d like this summer, Michael O’Brien’s exhibition of photographs at Lemon Sky Projects might be the next best thing. In fact, depending on how cautious you are in the water, it might be even better.

An avid surfer as well as a photographer, O’Brien takes viewers into the very heart of the action. In these pictures there is no shore, no dock, no boats or life preservers. There is only the wave.

Sometimes it’s in your face: a loud and violent assault of white foam. Other times it’s arching gracefully over your head, like a dome of stained glass, or just rolling quietly, gathering speed, several yards ahead.

No doubt more than a few enthusiastic young surfers have set out with waterproof cameras over the years to capture that mysterious thrill that lures people into the waves--and have come home with less than thrilling prints. O’Brien’s photographs--refined and often strikingly beautiful--fall into a different category, one that transcends the traditional aesthetics of surf culture without necessarily disregarding them. The difference seems to be a matter of practice and of intelligent editing.

It’s clear, for one thing, that O’Brien really knows the water. These pictures obviously stem from years of experience and patient observation. As a result, he is sensitive to the subtleties of color and form that might elude a more casual eye, and procures from the water a surprisingly broad emotional range.

In some pictures, it’s playful and enthusiastic; in others, angry and dangerous; in others, sublimely peaceful. In one particularly memorable image--a low swirl of cold, foamy gray--it has a brooding presence.

It’s hard to say just how much further O’Brien can take this work without eventually becoming repetitive. (This show certainly profits from its modest size and careful selection.) But considering the diversity of form, color, mood and expression he’s found in the water already--greater than many are able to produce with a complete spectrum of paints--it probably wouldn’t hurt to go on looking.

Lemon Sky Projects & Editions, 5367 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 931-6664. Through Sept. 7. Closed Sunday and Monday. (Summertime hours may vary; call ahead.)

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Turning Impulses

Into Works of Art

In dealing with the difficulties of daily life, everyone resorts to fantasy from time to time. On the freeway, perhaps you imagine a super car that could sprout jets and whisk you out of congested traffic. At work, you refashion a difficult boss into your personal assistant. In a long grocery store line, you invent a dark secret life for the clerk at the register.

“Das Spyder-Man,” a group exhibition organized by LACE director Irene Tsatsos, looks at how a number of artists have translated these sorts of fantastical impulses into art. The result is a curious opportunity to glimpse the familiar--common objects, local landscapes and ordinary circumstances--through the lens of another’s imagination. (The exhibition’s title--the relevance of which isn’t exactly clear to me--is said to be a conflated reference to a pair of summer blockbusters: the movie “Spider-Man” and the German art fair Documenta.)

It is an interesting collection of work. Several of the most memorable pieces elaborate on elements of the natural world: Violet Hopkins’ intricate, vaguely Gothic colored pencil drawings of cave interiors; Brian O’Dell’s videos of apparently organic but entirely unidentifiable and somewhat grotesque surfaces; and Patrick Lakey’s “Fragments from an unlikely narrative” (1997-2001), an evocative series of photographs taken in a nondescript wooded area.

Other artists work from personal history. David Miller’s eerie, constellation-like photograms, apparently made from the cremated ash of deceased acquaintances, posit a life after death in both metaphoric and material terms. The dozen or so architectural-style drawings in Alexander Morrison’s stirring “Every House I’ve Ever Lived in Drawn From Memory” (1999-2002) read like blueprints of the artist’s past. Dane Picard’s “Portraits, IDs, 2nd Snapshots #2” (2000)--a video in which a chronological series of photographs depicting the artist from infancy to the present morph into one another at a rapid speed--is like a magically animated photo album.

Equally fascinating is Picard’s “Sunset Utopia” (2000), another video in which a drive down Sunset Boulevard breaks down into hallucinogenic fragmentation. Also set in a familiar region of the city is Greg Kucera’s delightful three-channel video “Line and Flight” (2001), which drags the viewer, led by a flock of animated birds, away from a pedestrian crosswalk downtown on a wild, upside-down ride through the streets of L.A. As with many of the objects and places represented in this show, you will probably never think of that crosswalk the same way again.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. Through Aug. 24. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Veiled Reflections From

Around the World

Judging from this exhibition, Hiroshi Watanabe is an avid traveler: His photographs come from all over the world. Rather than capturing the important monuments, sweeping vistas and other obvious splendors of a place, however, he finds poetry in its details--a pair of butterflies perched momentarily on a window screen in Japan; a Che Guevara T-shirt hanging on a clothes line in Ecuador; the mirror on a makeshift barber shop on a sidewalk in India; or an enormous soap bubble undulating through ocean air at the Santa Monica Pier.

They’re lovely photographs--beautifully composed and expertly printed. Watanabe’s style is traditional but elegant. Like the Modernists he clearly emulates, he’s drawn to interesting forms and surfaces, and builds his images around unusual juxtapositions of texture.

One photograph taken in Ecuador, for example, depicts a fur-lined, plate-glass-covered, shoe store window display adjacent to a chipping stucco wall. Another depicts a grid of rickety wood cages covered with disintegrating mesh, through which one sees the faint, feathery outlines of chickens.

The majority of the photographs in the show, which is appropriately titled “Veiled Observations and Reflections,” involve some element of transparency or reflection. The viewer is continually looking through screens, mesh, veils, glass, water or mirrors.

One of the most beautiful images depicts a swath of netting over the photographer’s head, onto which a small flock of birds has temporarily landed. Seen through this translucent ceiling, the birds appear only as overlapping fragments of delicate shadow, an effect that transforms the photograph into a nearly abstract, wonderfully striking composition. With a sharp, unassuming eye and an impeccable aesthetic sense, Watanabe makes a perfect travel companion, if only for an afternoon.

White Room Gallery, 8810 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 859-2402. Through Aug. 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A Shallow View of

L.A. and Celebrity

Mexican-born, New York-based artist Alex Hank prints photographic images onto encaustic-covered boards, the surfaces of which are heavily textured with loose, frenetic brushstrokes. The color is dry and thin, as though applied in a fine mist, and the palette is similar to that of an old picture postcard.

The images in this exhibition, Hank’s first in Los Angeles, were apparently taken locally and seem to have been assembled in a spirit of homage to this city. In one picture, a male Gucci model stares coolly down from a billboard overlooking Beverly Hills. In another, a scantily clad woman in stringy high heels sips from a can of soda on a rooftop, as though in a commercial. In another, an airplane ascends behind the familiar sight of an In-N-Out Burger sign.

This is a tourist’s portrait of L.A., and a shallow one at that. Hank seems to have come looking for traces of celebrity, consumerism, glamour--issues at play elsewhere in his work--and of course he finds them. But so have many before him. This is not new ground. His particular spin--a posture that seems to want to qualify as both critical and celebratory--brings little insight.

Perhaps more important, the images themselves just aren’t very interesting. The cityscapes, all familiar views taken from street level, betray a patronizing lack of effort, while the portraits--mostly attractive women, two of whom (in two different photographs) are inexplicably topless--are little more than decent snapshots. It’s not clear, furthermore, what the encaustic texturing is meant to bring to the images, except to serve as a sort of trademark. At best, the effect is neutral; at worst, distracting.

On the whole, the work feels quite young--a quality that may, admittedly, be fitting to its subject. Still, one can’t help but think that with a little more experience in this city, Hank may discover there are many more interesting angles to be found.

Chac Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 550-6792. Through Sept. 7. Closed Sunday and Monday.