Santiago Creates Visceral Works With Own Blood

The work of Paula Santiago has an uneasy beauty. It’s intimate beyond the level of comfort--viscerally intimate. For the last few years, she has been making images and objects using her own blood and hair. Her previous show at Iturralde Gallery featured tiny, tragic garments fashioned of blood-soaked rice paper, trimmed and embroidered with hair. In her current show, she continues to draw upon her own body for source material, though in different ways, some more sober and medically-oriented, some more abstract.

Shortly after her 1999 show here, Santiago, who lives in Guadalajara, was diagnosed with melanoma. Blood, already a potent element in her work, takes on new meaning now, not just as a carrier of life, but also of danger, disease. Microscopic photographs of her tumor cells line the walls of one room in the gallery, whose centerpiece is a glass-enclosed reliquary containing the artist’s own lab samples, bloodied dabs embedded in wax.

A lovely series of drawings based on the shape of the cells takes a refreshing step back from scientific scrutiny toward more aesthetic interpretation. Using beeswax on paper, blood and charcoal on silk, Santiago literally visualizes her own internal structure, her biomorphic doodles corresponding profoundly to a personal, lived condition.

Santiago’s cellular drawings are uncharacteristically subdued, inward-looking without fetishizing the visceral. Elsewhere, the intensely autobiographical strain in her work can verge on the self-indulgent, as in a group of shadowboxes here. A series of relic-like sculptures is more engaging, though also somewhat overwrought. Made of wax on rice paper, augmented by blood, crystal, silk, seeds, stone and cinnamon, they read as bone or cartilage, fragments excerpted from bodies human, animal or perhaps vegetable. Santiago coaxes a marvelous range of textures from the wax; its translucence, sometimes tinted with blood, suggests something like bodily memory, a retention of prior action and form.

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through Feb. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Exquisite Portraits

on 20-Franc Notes

Peggy Preheim’s stunning show at Works on Paper, Inc. is a whispered elegy, a tender, exacting tribute to things past. For each of the dozen pieces on view, Preheim has taken a 20-franc note as her drawing surface. Most of the bill she leaves untouched: the elegant script, the repeated serial number, the muted color portrait of Claude Debussy before a tempestuous sea. Along the left side of the note, sandwiched between the words “Banque de France” above and “Vingt Francs” below, is a watermark, atop which Preheim has drawn an exquisitely precise portrait.

The first shows a full-cheeked infant, pushing up on meaty little arms. The next is a toddler with sandy, tousled hair and a bright, direct gaze. The sequencing suggests that we are witnessing a life’s progression, for the child evolves in the course of the drawings into an adolescent with bobbed hair, a string of pearls and a slightly sardonic smile, and onward into young womanhood, growing ever more mature and refined. It becomes clear through styles of dress and hair that these are not contemporary subjects, but faces from an earlier era.

Preheim, who lives in Paris, drew these faces based on old photographs she scavenged from flea markets. She’s kept the feel of the formal, black-and-white portraits in her pencil renderings, so delicate and convincing that the gallery makes a magnifying glass available for closer scrutiny.

Poignant enough in themselves, these youthful faces from the remote past become doubly charged when paired with the franc notes, crisp bills no longer in circulation because of the recent introduction of the euro. Both the faces and the bills are fresh, yet obsolete. Preheim has fused their fates as objects of nostalgia. Relics of material culture personalized with ghosts of the deceased, these drawings are powerful odes to a kind of currency beyond exchange rates and chronology--a currency of the soul, the hand and individual memory.

Works on Paper, Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 964-9675, through Feb 23. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Memorable Images

of Emerging Japan

Shigeichi Nagano chronicled Japan during the postwar years the way Robert Frank captured his adopted United States in the 1950s--with an acute balance of tenderness and criticality, born of an intense concern for the condition of the nation’s soul. Nagano has worked since the 1940s as a photojournalist and freelance documentary photographer, primarily in his native Japan. For his first U.S. show, White Room is featuring a selection of his incisive photographs dating from Japan’s surrender in World War II through the beginnings of the country’s economic boom in the 1960s.

Like nearly a century before, when Commodore Perry opened Japan to the West after a long period of isolation, the years following Japan’s defeat in the war were defined by radical change and the assimilation of foreign influence. American occupation forces spread themselves, their language and their influence across the battle-scarred landscape, infiltrating everything from popular culture to politics. A new constitution, written by Americans, took force, and the emperor’s status dropped from divine to fallibly human.

In Nagano’s photographs, inauspicious moments summarize the tenor of the day. Small incidents read as broad prognoses. In one stark image, graffiti adds insult to injury as the words “Joan {heart} Frenchy” are scraped into the raw wall of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb dome. In another, an English-language street sign planted at a busy Tokyo intersection reads like a territorial flag, a claim as palpable as the huge American car gliding like a cruise ship alongside a humble pushcart. Intersections, layers and disjunctions season these photographs with pungent social commentary.

Nagano’s humanistic vision blossomed during fertile years for documentary photography. Illustrated magazines enjoyed a golden age in postwar Japan, and internationally, such landmark events as the publication of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment,” the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Family of Man” exhibition, and the publication of Frank’s “The Americans” (all in the 1950s) affirmed the centrality--and poetry--of everyday human experience.

Nagano’s photographs, while less mannered and less dark than the work of Daido Moriyama, Eiko Hosoe and the generation of Japanese photographers breaking out in the late 1950s and 1960s, nevertheless rarely feel simple or benign. They are edgy, while quiet; searing and yet straightforward. Nagano tells us through the title of one image that a child, bound in rope and glancing over his shoulder at us as if in appeal, is actually playing. Yet standing alone on a street crusted with snow, his arms roped to his sides, the boy looks trapped, his face an icon of victimhood.

Japan’s economic recovery surfaces in Nagano’s work, but so does its social, physical and environmental costs. He shows public housing in all its pathetic splendor; he shows the anonymous, numbed faces of salary men on a street corner, waiting en masse for the light to change; and, most disarmingly, he shows two young men, stripped to underclothes, luxuriating in a sandbank that borders a debris-strewn landfill. Frame by frame, Nagano shows us his country struggling to redefine itself, to expand beyond its traditional parameters. So does his work compel us to expand, by one, the pantheon of great humanistic photographers.

White Room Gallery, 8810 Melrose Ave., (310) 859-2402, through Feb. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Slawson’s Vital Work

Is in the Back Room

Persist past the photographs and a set of totemic white sculptures to the back of Gallery 2211 and the real treasures of Dunnieghe Slawson’s expansive imagination. The work up front is hers as well, but it feels flaccid, in spite of its larger size and splashier format. The photographs show groves of tendril forms that the Venice-based Slawson has fashioned from wax and dressed up with beads and netting. The free-standing sculptures sprout clusters of lumpy tubers off of supporting poles. Neither group of work has the formal integrity and emotional concentration that make the smaller sculptures and drawings in the back so intriguing.

Like all of Slawson’s work, they are odd amalgamations of the biological and the botanical. They extrapolate from familiar forms--shells, snails, plants, breasts and phalluses--to occupy a realm of insistently physical fantasy.

One wax and fiberglass piece (all are an eggshell white) rises in an arch like a thick slug inching forward. Breast-like mounds, some with pearl bead nipples, ridge across its back, flattening and spreading as they progress down the slope until coming under the wraps of a honeycomb wax sheath that seals up the creature’s tapered end. It’s an exuberant gesture--naked, voluptuous and slightly grotesque.

The other small sculptures have a similar charm. They oscillate between the recognizable and the pulpy, fleshy, vaguely deviant. Their mix of playfulness and latent sexuality hints at the influence of Louise Bourgeois.Slawson’s drawings, which sometimes incorporate photographic fragments, also feel accretive, ripe, metamorphic. Drawn in blacks, whites and grays on vellum, they articulate an evolving dynamism, a consortium of energies, a process more than a set of fixed forms. Their uncontainable vitality is irresistible.

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Gallery 2211, 2211 N. Broadway, L.A., (323) 276-9662, through Feb. 25. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday.