Sculpting Stories Out of Light and Shadows

What is left out of a work of art can often command as much attention as what is put in. This is certainly the case in Deborah Lefkowitz’s work, which hinges on silence, absence and loss.

Lefkowitz, based in Riverside, has worked in documentary film, dance and installation, often directly engaging aspects of Holocaust history and legacy, but also diffusing the specificity of her imagery to negotiate space in a more abstract way, concentrating on how light reveals and shadow conceals. Her new installation at Chaffey College’s Wignall Museum/ Gallery is extremely spare yet marvelously rich.

It has no sound, no recognizable imagery, barely any form to speak of. Yet with the barest of means--fabric, light and darkness--Lefkowitz has staged a compelling experience, a sort of private, self-enacted theater.

In the large, squarish gallery space, she has hung 20 or so floor-to-ceiling panels of translucent netting and opaque white fabric. The panels hang singly and in angled pairs, spaced throughout the room like columns to be wandered among. Light sources in several different parts of the gallery shift on and off in a subtle cycle, intensifying and dimming, alternately spotlighting particular areas, falling in crisp streaks or softly flooding the whole. The fabric panels nearly disappear in the darkness, then gleam when light catches in their weave.

The effect is elegant, entrancing. Within a monochrome palette of warm whites and charcoal grays, Lefkowitz has created a perceptual massage, a vivid stillness within which the senses are fully engaged. Where they wander remains personal; Lefkowitz’s installation leaves ample room for meditation of both intimate and historical scope.

The least visible but most potent element Lefkowitz uses to structure the space and our experience of it is time. Time doesn’t just elapse here in an automatic, unconscious way. Lefkowitz uses light to frame its passage.

The light raking through the panels can speak one moment of dawn and promise, the next of nostalgia and sorrow. It illuminates the vacancy of the space and our transient movements within it.

Pointing to that quiet, charged intersection of light and time, Lefkowitz calls her installation “In the Shadow of the Hourglass.”

She has sculpted space here, as she writes in her statement for the show, and offered us a luminous opportunity to engage with the fullness of emptiness and the presence in silence.

Wignall Museum/Gallery, Chaffey College, 5885 Haven Ave., Rancho Cucamonga, (909) 941-2702, through Oct. 27. Closed Saturdays.

‘Diary’ Depicts the U.S. With Its Flags and Foibles

Posting the American flag on everything from car windows and storefronts to baby strollers and backpacks has become standard behavior since Sept. 11. The walls at Fahey/Klein Gallery walls are papered with flags, but not as a byproduct of knee-jerk patriotism.

The show, “Americana: A Diary,” touches on pride but also on the country’s shame. Through 50 vintage photographs from the New York Times Archives, the show chronicles moments in the last century that encapsulate major episodes in U.S. history. There are icons and idiosyncrasies, heroes and hostilities. Like any diary, it is by definition incomplete, but it is also unavoidably gripping.

Although the flag does appear in nearly all of the pictures on view, it dominates in just a few. In a 1937 image, bystanders look like tiny specks next to what was billed as the largest flag in the country, stretched out on a field by the side of the road. A poignant photograph made on Memorial Day 1945 shows Boy Scouts planting small flags on the graves at Brooklyn’s National Cemetery.

The flag is, indeed, this country’s most enduring symbol, and it’s been used and misused, raised aloft by parties with vastly different agendas. It waves, for instance, from a parade of thousands of hooded Ku Klux Klan members near the Capitol building in Washington in a picture from 1925. In another, from 1976, a white protester uses the flag on its pole as a spear to poke and prod a black bystander at an anti-busing demonstration.

Memorable somber moments--Jackie Kennedy and the kids at the funeral, no less--are leavened by images conveying a sense of America as one huge three-ring circus, always ready to spotlight a crazy antic. There’s a car crossing an Oregon river on a tightrope, an inventor wearing engine-powered roller skates. There’s Gerald Ford campaigning, raising his arms to acknowledge the crowd--or possibly to regain his balance.

Most of the pictures are credited generically to “Staff Photographer” at the New York Times or one of several picture agencies. A few familiar names--Chester Higgins Jr., Fred Conrad--are responsible for some of the more recent shots. This is a show that celebrates the power of the published photograph to galvanize public emotion, in its day and even much, much later.

Although it doesn’t examine the role of the photographer as reporter or editorialist, it does include one picture that serves as tender acknowledgment of their efforts. The 1927 photograph shows a row of news photographers lined up at a courthouse awaiting a trial verdict. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder, press cards tucked into hatbands, fingers on cable releases, smiling, as one of their own elevates them, for just an instant, to the status of news.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 934-2250, through Aug. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Thought-Provoking Ideas in a Crate of Dirt

Roman Vasseur offers the least to look at but by far the most to think about of the three artists in the Raid Projects show “Earth Works.” His installation consists simply of a large wooden crate on the floor and a sequence of texts and correspondence hung in a row on the wall. The first few pages lay out Vasseur’s plan: to transport 1 cubic meter of earth from the Borgo Pass in Transylvania to London, where the project was originally shown earlier this year, and ultimately to Los Angeles.

What seems at first both an absurd and banal act gathers tremendous metaphoric and political steam through the course of its implementation and documentation. Vasseur, who lives in London, describes his objectives soberly, including the purposely self-defeating intention to avoid, during the course of the transaction, any “direct reference to myths and fictions commonly associated with this region of Eastern Europe.” Dirt in a crate from the land of Dracula? Let’s not go there, he proclaims.

Then he goes there, letting the project’s paper trail spin a tale of political asylum and fear of cultural contamination. He remains so coyly straight-faced that it’s impossible to tell whether the entire project is a work of fiction and the crate just an empty prop. It doesn’t really matter. The concept is what counts here, and the cascade of questions and reconsiderations it generates.

Both Chris Tallon’s and Evan Sugerman’s contributions to the show take up far more space, but they feel slighter.

The L.A.-based Tallon has constructed a fallen forest out of cardboard and glue. “The Nature of Substitutions” consists of fat cylindrical stumps and slimmer curving logs illuminated by standing industrial fixtures. A path passes through the simulated landscape but takes us nowhere worth remembering.

Sugerman’s “Harvest Space” fills its own separate room with 7 tons of dirt, a water tank, tangles of hoses, a set of pumps and batteries, microphones, speakers and an oscilloscope.

It’s a pseudoscientific mess, curious and indulgent. Fine shoots of grass rise from the dirt in patches, water drips from a knot of “grass pods” and the speakers buzz with amplified vibrations of all the processes at work.

The unnaturalness of it all is striking, even a bit disturbing, and is part of the fleeting curatorial point of the show.

Vasseur, however, does make an enduring impression, and his work sends broad messages--that art is but a box we fill with our own projections. It’s a story that we choose either to believe or reject, and a smuggling act that calls for subversion, subtlety and surprise.

Raid Projects, 602 Moulton Ave., L.A., (323) 441-9593, through Aug. 31. Open Saturdays and by appointment.

Photos Distort Reality Without Probing It

Michael Childers, a successful commercial photographer for 30 years, wanted to stretch himself by producing a body of work generated more from within than by assignment. The result, “Distortions in My Mind,” at Louis Stern Fine Arts, is a stretch in the most literal sense, but not enough of one aesthetically.

The images are primarily of nudes that Childers has posed near curved mirrors that turn the bodies into pliable elastic. Photographing the reflections, Childers produces images that are all about stretching the familiar into disorienting, impossible shapes.

Bodies distend and collapse. Certain parts are multiplied and others eliminated, so that a body appears to have two sets of legs but no head, and another two heads but no legs. The human form becomes a fantastic, fluid sculpture in alabaster white against dense, velvety black.

What makes the pictures nearer neighbors to Childers’ celebrity portraiture than he might have had in mind is their slickness and superficiality.

The prints abound in visual acrobatics but stop short of emotional resonance. They depend solely on the gimmickry of the mirror, without penetrating into the murky psychological terrain such distortions might suggest.

Photographers Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) and Bill Brandt (1906-1983) both explored that territory provocatively in their own work with the distorted nude. In addition to Kertesz, Childers counts the painter Francis Bacon and the sculptor Henry Moore as influences, but he has assimilated only the externals of their style and none of its deeper meanings.

Although many of Childers’ photographs are compelling, at least momentarily, he’ll have to stretch a bit further if he wants to generate some actual feeling.

Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, through Sept. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.