‘Vacant’ Fills a Space in the History of Urban Sprawl

“Vacant: Recent Landscapes of Los Angeles,” a small but articulate exhibition of photographs curated by Chris Balaschak, is aptly titled. If any one theme dominates these and most photographs of our cityscape, it must be the nagging sense of vacancy that is generally thought to imbue it. In photography, an art form raised largely on the crowded streets of New York and Paris, urban sprawl is a relatively new subject; it threads through recent photographic history like the presence of a suspicious dinner guest. For some, it implies spaciousness, freedom and independence; for others it represents absence, loneliness and alienation.

Ed Ruscha’s early photographs are landmarks in the exploration of this new topography and they’re represented here by several of his more famous books, including “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” (1966), “34 Parking Lots” (1967), and “26 Gasoline Stations” (1962). Ruscha’s dry, unemotional style informs all of the show’s younger artists, who apply it in a surprising variety of ways.

Alex Slade’s quiet pictures of empty lots and raw hillsides around Los Angeles take a melancholy view, revealing a sense of barrenness and abandonment. Christina Fernandez’s photographs of sweatshop facades provide a sharp comeback: Though they appear as deserted as Slade’s empty lots, we know these downtown buildings are usually packed to a dangerous capacity, albeit with a population that many would prefer to consider invisible.

Karin Apollonia Muller evokes the presence of another invisible population in “Civitas” (1997), a sweeping, aerial view of a seemingly empty lot downtown, alongside the 110 Freeway. In the center of this lot are a makeshift shelter and what appears to be a makeshift bicycle shop, around which hundreds of bike parts are scattered in a strangely beautiful arc.

Steve Smith and David Kanegsberg find an appealing sort of geometry in the landscape of sprawl: Smith in the plowed earth of burgeoning suburban developments, which he conveys in a clean, if somewhat uncaptivating, black-and-white style; and Kanegsberg in abstracted fragments, such as a stretch of rippling, blue-black tarp that reads like a seascape in his eloquently minimal composition.

The only work in the show to contain a few rays of real sunlight (the dominant atmosphere is pale beige and white) is Kaucyila Brooke’s large, lovely picture of a Griffith Park hillside. This sunlight tickles the sparse shrubbery in the foreground and illuminates the rolling grass of the hill behind, reminding viewers that vacancy--space, openness, expanse--can also bring peace.

Gallery Luisotti, 2525 Michigan Ave. A2, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through March 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Close-Ups of the Corporate Aesthetic

In her third exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, M.A. Peers has taken a curious turn in subject matter from portraits of purebred dogs--which she paints onto fragments of found upholstery--to portraits of male corporate executives.

These new images are essentially head shots lifted from the pages of trade magazines and transcribed by Peers in blue-gray tones and in a flat, almost amateurish style. Some float freely on sheets of silver Mylar, as though temporarily suspended in some promising new corner of cyberspace. Others appear on large canvases against clumsy, corporate logo-like backdrops. Each wears the sort of smug, don’t-hate-me-because-I’m-rich grin that has come to characterize American wealth in the popular media. Their expressions are practiced and deliberately casual. “I’m just an ordinary guy,” they seem to want to assure us, “Let me tell you how I made my first million....”

Peers’ title for the series--the “Overcoming Excellence Collection”--epitomizes the peculiar balance of veneration and pity with which she treats these men. They are clearly icons of power and she gives them their due, identifying each by name and rank--”Alan Webber: Founding Editor, Fast Company Magazine (2001),” “Scott Bedbury: Senior VP, Brand Development, Starbucks Coffee (2001),” and the most infamous, “Ken Lay: Former CEO, Enron Corporation (2001-2)”--as well as basically honoring the terms of the corporate aesthetic to which they belong. But by refusing to indulge them with pull quotes, bar graphs or other concrete testaments of their personal distinction, she allows the bland and ultimately dehumanizing spirit of their imagery speak for itself.

It is this corporate aesthetic--a branch of visual culture, like pet portraiture, that sophisticated wings of the art world pride themselves on ignoring--that ultimately seems to be the focus here. And though the series is only getting off the ground with this show--it brims with the sort of awkward enthusiasms and unresolved curiosities that often characterize a new project--there’s clearly a future in it.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. B4, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through March 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Bennett Shows Her Less-Than-True Colors

Restraint can be an admirable quality in a work of art, but there’s nothing quite like a good, over-the-top blast of outrageous photographic color.

Bobbi Bennett’s current exhibition of saturated 30-by-40-inch prints offers such a blast, several times over. As though overcompensating for the pale banality of the everyday world, Bennett exploits her film for all it’s worth, eliciting greens, purples, reds, yellows and whites that have no natural counterpart.

They spread like liquid electricity across the pictures’ surfaces, often overwhelming the work’s ostensible subject matter.

Titled “Larger Than Life,” the exhibition explores issues of fantasy through the mode of performance. The majority of the works feature Bennett, but elaborate masks, costumes and sets, which she constructs, obscure her actual form. The most identifiable images--slick impersonations of Wonder Woman and Catwoman--are perhaps the least interesting of the lot: They’re a little too easy, a little too sexy. Far more intriguing are the nearly abstract images in the “Monster Series,” which use color to articulate specified emotions: “Stanley/Stress (2001)” is a hotbed of fuchsia and yellow marked by the glimpse of a black cat mask; “Untitled/Stagnation” is a swampy field of olive green and orange in which the figure is little more than a faint blur. In these images, as well as in an unsettling series featuring an ambiguous hospital scene (a web of clinical white), color consumes the very objects it would seem to describe, as though acting of its own free will.

It may be a reckless technique in the long run, but Bennett’s display of whole-hearted abandon is difficult to resist.

Fototeka, 1549 Echo Park Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 250-4686, through March 10. Closed Monday through Thursday.