The Art of Disorientation

Fog, as amorphous as it is, exerts tremendous power. In diffusing borders, it sharpens our attention. It heightens our consciousness and compels us to keep alert. In heavy fog, we may need to navigate by feel, by body awareness more than by eye.

That state of amplified physical awareness is alluded to--and moderately well achieved--in Yunhee Min’s installation in the Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A. The air inside the gallery is as clear as air in L.A. gets, and the contours of Min’s two gargantuan paintings are visibly crisp, yet “Events in Dense Fog” generates exactly that, a sense of occurrence under compromised conditions.

Min, a young L.A. artist who’s shown extensively since the mid-’90s, makes gallery-scaled canvases and architecturally-sited installations. Both hinge on deviation, tension born of irregularity. Her paintings, no matter the scale, consist of vertical bands of color whose edges veer off from right angles, yielding quirky quadrilaterals.

Her “in-between” colors, individually rich in character and lined up in an orderly manner, refuse to harmonize, and instead bristle against their neighbors like members of one big dysfunctional family. Even when staged on a smaller, more domestic scale, these dissonances make for intriguing disorientation. On the massive scale of the installation at the Luckman, the stakes are even higher, but the degree of destabilization remains subtle.

Min’s two paintings face off from opposite corners of the large rectangular room. Each spans from floor to ceiling, but angles out from the wall, as if propped or wedged into its corner. One, measuring roughly 15 feet by 32 feet, is nestled into a setback at the far end of the gallery, a niche with a slightly lowered ceiling. The other, at nearly 19 feet by 31 feet, leans more steeply against the wall near the gallery’s entrance, so that one of its edges and the wedge of darkness between it and the wall are exposed.

Painted in matte house paint on drywall, the paintings double as walls and discrete objects. One bears wide stripes the color of dried blood, damp earth, emerald and acid yellow-green; the other a less severe array of steely blue, crimson, khaki and mauve.

Parallel to the paintings, a white wall constructed to bisect the gallery space, makes it difficult, but not impossible, to experience both paintings at once. The gracelessness of the wall itself, with its exposed metal supports, makes it more an encumbrance than a catalyst, however.

Without it, one would navigate the gallery’s vast central space using only bare, perimeter walls and the off-kilter paintings to get one’s bearings. The slight pressure exerted on that interior space by the paintings, angling inward and creating a charged diagonal axis to the room, would be more palpable without the wall, more destabilizing and more acutely felt. As it is, the forward slope of the paintings does generate a quiver of tension, a friendlier, far more benign version of the intimidation wielded by Richard Serra’s stark, tilted walls. Min has calculated the angles and dimensions here to tease and gently confound, but not to threaten.

As you move about the space, the angles seem to shift, and what reads as parallel from one position now appears torqued. The relationship between wall and painting oscillates so that even these massive panels become ambiguous. Moving around and between these sly hybrids of hard-edged painting and sculpture-in-the-round, our perceptions waver. The event that Min has staged is our own encounter with immersive color and physical uncertainty, with Minimalism’s dour verities turned inside out.

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Luckman Gallery, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive; (323) 343-6610, through March 2. Closed Friday and Sunday.