Teens stripped of their veneer

Mixed up, messed up, high-spending and sexually precocious -- the public image of teenagers these days is not a pretty sight. But it’s a sight the media can’t seem to get enough of. Now that 12- to 18-year-olds have been tagged as a marketer’s dream demographic, both the screen and the page are full of them and products aimed at them. The navel of the pop culture world is tanned, pierced and 15.

What we -- parents of teens as well as the wider public -- don’t have as much access to is the private selves of these liminal beings. Kim McCarty’s new watercolors at Cherry de los Reyes hint at what lies beneath the brash and sassy veneers: tenderness, tenuousness, vulnerability. Putting a sociological spin on these portraits of adolescent boys and girls needn’t weigh them down excessively. They are images and not propositions, but they do convey -- delicately, persuasively -- a sense of the adolescent condition.

They do this primarily through a style of painting that resonates harmoniously with the subjects. McCarty uses watercolor’s fluidity to portray identities that are themselves fluid. She paints mostly wet into wet, so her colors (muted rust, sapphire, pumpkin) bleed and diffuse. She then adds some details (the arc of an eyebrow, for instance) when the surface has dried.

The balance between ambiguity and clarity is perfectly keyed. As with the kids, the general contours are determined; the contents are still up for grabs.

McCarty shows these boys and girls naked against the white of the paper. They appear exposed but not exploited, slightly fragile, with uncalculated expressions of curiosity on their faces. Their heads appear a bit too large for their bodies, as in infancy -- that first phase of identity formation, physical disproportion and phenomenal change.

There is another set of paintings here too, in oil on raw linen, but they command less attention than the watercolors, whose vagueness is more engaging. The oils show boys and girls of a similar age, Anglo beauties all, clothed in bold, solid-color tops. Painted unremarkably well, they follow too closely the conventions of the school portrait.

The expressions of the kids aren’t quite canned, but neither are they as raw and searching as in the watercolors. In those, McCarty embraces both the awkward and the accidental, truly capturing something of the liquid nature of (not just adolescent) identity.

Cherry de los Reyes Gallery, 12611 Venice Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 398-7404, through Feb. 16. Open Saturday and Sunday and by appointment.

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Layers of meaning, all on the surface

The dividing line between precious and pretentious has blurred in recent art, particularly in the glut of dispassionate color photography being championed by galleries and museums alike (think Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and even Uta Barth). Much of it simply elevates the random, putting enough technical gloss on it to imply significance.

At its best, such work can raise our consciousness of the beauty of the overlooked and ordinary. Regrettably, its more noticeable impact is to lower our expectations of art itself and to confuse vision with mere ambition.

Liza Ryan’s photography in the past 10 years has landed on both sides of the divide, sometimes poetic and sometimes banal. Her new work at Griffin Contemporary is both affecting and assured. It is precious in the best senses of the word -- refined and exquisite.

All of the works in the show are titled “Surface,” bluntly reminding us of what photography does best: record the world’s outermost skin. The titles suggest the question, though, of what lies beneath, and how much surface appearance suggests to us of inner life or spirit.

The color photographs here all show parts of bodies partially submerged in water -- a hand dipping into the dark and wet, a neck wearing the waterline like a necklace. Most of the works consist of sequences of images montaged into long vertical or horizontal panoramas. Spare and potent, the work is saved by its own understatement.

A three-channel video installation, wall-mounted on small, flat screens, fares less well. In spite of having the technological upper hand, it lacks the sensuousness and emotional texture of the prints.

Ryan’s black-and-white photographs are lush as well. They are slightly more prosaic, showing rippling sheets and bodies in bed, but they read as velvety rich explorations of light and shadow, the photographic equivalent of a painter’s drapery study. Here, surface implies little else -- and is more than sufficient.

Griffin Contemporary, 55 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 578-2280, through Feb. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Haunted by the ghosts of history

Stephen Wilkes’ photographs of an abandoned section of Ellis Island are significant documents of a historical site. Strange as it may sound, they also succeed as spirit photographs, records of absent souls. The desolate corridors and vacant rooms in Wilkes’ pictures are indeed haunted -- and not just by any ghosts, but by our ghosts, the ghosts of our ancestors.

Wilkes, a Connecticut commercial photographer, was shooting on Ellis Island about five years ago when he became curious about some unrestored structures off the tourist track. He spent part of the next three years photographing the South Island sites, which had been used as contagious disease wards and isolation areas for new immigrants.

Wilkes brought his commercial skills to the task -- the images are large, seductive and in gorgeous color -- but exercised thoughtful restraint, largely allowing the dramatic ruins to speak for themselves. The spaces reek of fear, trauma and displacement.

Originally, the rooms must have exuded a clinical sense of order. But now windows are shattered, vines push through from outside, floors are thick with dirt and leaves. On a table in an office sits a single shoe, its stiff leather toe upturned as if in mid-step.

These spaces feel charged with the poignant narratives that have been played out within them. Wilkes shoots them as such, usually looking straight into a room or hallway so that it opens out toward us. While the spaces feel fully available to us, we view them from the periphery, just offstage.

That Wilkes used only natural light to make these pictures is remarkable, for their atmospheres and tonalities are intense enough to verge on the symbolic. In one image of a long corridor tinted green with ivy and perhaps a hint of mold, there glows at the far end a beckoning and mysterious orange light. In a photograph of administrative quarters, paint flaking off the ceiling and walls created unusual, mottled surfaces of blue, white and ocher.

In part as a result of Wilkes’ work, Congress granted $6 million to preserve South Island as a “living ruin.” These photographs do the same, elegantly.

Apex Fine Art, 152 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 634-7887, through Feb. 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A few themes, too many variations

“Charles Arnoldi: Works on Paper: A Thirty-Year Survey, 1972-2002” is a big, dense, uneven show. Curated by art historian and dealer Fred Hoffman for Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, the show samples Arnoldi’s work in pastel, gouache, monotype, lithograph, woodblock and charcoal. In the 70-plus works here, Arnoldi riffs on just a few recurring motifs -- linear webs (relating to his signature stick paintings), plant-like forms and flat discs set against shifting planes.

On occasion Arnoldi’s work sneaks into another artists’ territory: A 1974 drawing looks like a Craig Kauffman, for instance. But Arnoldi’s more obvious weakness is making work that is derivative of his own.

A wall filled with his linear work begins with images of bracing simplicity and integrity. A 1975 drawing presents a taut scaffolding of lines, a field of pure energy, Jackson Pollock’s skeins pulled tight. Shadowy erasures echo the firmer lines, creating a sense of depth and space.

By the late 1980s, however, Arnoldi has quoted his linear theme to death, and the immediacy of the decade before has turned clumsy and labored.

The work does falter, but it never stops exuding an air of discovery. Arnoldi -- who is well established as a painter and sculptor -- shifts between media, as if testing several languages to hear their different music. His newest works, gouache paintings on collaged paper, partner colors in stunning combinations: crimson and gold, violet and orange. They play with interrupted shapes and syncopated rhythms, and prove that, even when Arnoldi exhausts himself in one area, he rises phoenix-like in another.

Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-0640, through March 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.