Relationships at play in the physical world

After three years of art-world couch surfing, the annual C.O.L.A. exhibition -- mounted to showcase the year’s recipients of the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowships -- has returned to its original location in the newly refurbished Municipal Art Gallery. With all the uncertainty plaguing public arts programs today, it’s no doubt a happy homecoming. Perched high above Hollywood on the freshly manicured grounds of the Barnsdall Art Park, the gallery feels safely removed from the threats of city life, whether physical or bureaucratic, while remaining graciously accessible and close to the heart of the community.

Now in its seventh year, the exhibition has become a satisfying civic ritual, providing a barometer of the local climate that reflects the mood in the galleries but isn’t limited by it. The grants reward not grad students or hotshots, but artists with work under their belts, who are encouraged to use the money for the development of a new project. Past recipients include some of the best and brightest working in L.A. today, including Robbie Conal, Meg Cranston, Tom Knechtel, Jennifer Steinkamp, Ingrid Calame, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Sharon Lockhart and Jorge Pardo.

There are eight recipients in the visual arts category this year (as well as five in performing arts and two in design, chosen by separate committees), and the roster doesn’t disappoint. Although the quality of specific works varies, there is a consistent degree of intelligence behind them, and a convincing sense of focus to each project.

There is no stated theme to the selection, but similar concerns do echo throughout, making for a smooth installation. Most notably, all of the artists seem to be concerned in one way or another with space and the experience of the physical world, specifically in regard to nature and architecture.

Christiane Robbins and Connie Samaras, for example, both photograph buildings. The former, in a series titled “Blue Screen-Moto,” focuses on the Walt Disney Concert Hall, exaggerating its sci-fi connotations by creating fractured, spatially confusing compositions, blowing up the images to 9 feet tall and digitally tinting them apocalyptic shades of orange, red and, in one case, purple. (The catalog refers to an interactive “gaming element” intended to accompany this work -- something involving L.A. landmarks and text messaging -- but the nature of the development is unclear, as is its present status.)

Samaras evokes a similarly surreal quality without digital manipulation in her large-scale photographs of Las Vegas casinos, which read as jumbled juxtapositions of various architectural planes, most brightly colored or highly reflective. While eye-catching, however, both bodies of work have a synthetic quality (inherent to the digital nature of Robbins’ work, simulated in Samaras’) that keeps them from being as all-absorbing as their size would seem to demand.

Andrea Bowers explores the clash of urban and natural space in her documentary “Vieja Gloria” (2003), which chronicles a community’s fight to save a 400-year-old tree -- “Old Glory” -- from the path of developers in Santa Clarita. Although stylistically unexceptional, the video tells a compelling story, which Bowers supplements with a display case full of memorabilia and books of documents and press clippings related to the campaign.

On a more personal scale, Norman Yonemoto’s small, Joseph Cornell-style dioramas touch on the relationship of space to time, each incorporating several symbolic artifacts and a clock, the face of which is visible only in a mirror reflection or on a tiny LCD screen. Unfortunately, while intriguing in their connotations, these feel rather hastily put together and fall disappointingly short of their poetic potential.

Susan Silton’s work explores more subjective aspects of space and time, focusing primarily on the perception of motion. Three lovely large-scale photographs depict what was probably a landscape of some sort but that is blurred beyond recognition and exists only in streaks of vivid color, suggesting dizzying movement. The sensation is intensified in a nearby video installation that pairs bright, jostling images of a roller-coaster ride, played on an LCD monitor and accompanied by the jumbled sound of children’s voices, with a projected series of ominous gray tornado clouds (which are actually whirlpools of water in a jar but could easily pass as the real thing).

Lothar Schmitz, who is a physicist as well as an artist, plays with the boundaries between interior and exterior, nature and technology in his very cool “Biotopia” (2003), a predominantly (and deliciously) green room-sized installation that combines a carpet of Astroturf, sour apple-colored furniture, fake plants and video projections of the sky and sea to suggest a futuristic living room.

Pae White and Deborah Aschheim also explore the dynamics of interior space. White’s contribution is the enigmatically titled “August Bye-Bye” (2003), an understated but ultimately quite beautiful installation of blown-glass bricks that, thanks to the addition of mercury, have a glistening, mirrored quality. Arranged in low piles around the edges of the gallery floor, they shift through delicate shades of silver, blue and green, suggesting water. Although clearly too fragile for any practical use, the bricks would make wonderful building materials, and it’s lovely to imagine the sort of rooms they might create.

Aschheim’s “Neural Architecture” (2003) -- another installation and perhaps the most exciting work in the show -- is an Eva Hesse-like snarl of clear vinyl tubing and incandescent lightbulbs, each ensconced in a cone-shaped shell of transparent but textured plastic. Hanging from the ceiling of a small back room, it looks like a school of enormous jellyfish, most hovering around eye level. When you move through the room, sensors installed along the walls activate the lights around you, turning them on or off depending on the location of your body. The concept is simple but the effect is magical, conveying a sense of the space as living and eagerly responsive.

There are, curiously, no painters among this year’s selection (excluding the designer Garland Kirkpatrick, who is represented here by several dozen motifs executed in black tempera). The omission will no doubt irk those who have tended to greet the proliferation of photography and new media with skepticism -- and it’s true that the addition of paintings or drawings might have softened the exhibition somewhat, lending an element of sensuality that is admittedly lacking. But if the concerns at play here are, as suggested, the relationship of the individual to the physical world, then it’s fitting that photography, video and installation should dominate, as they embody the terms of that relationship directly.

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Group Show: 2003 C.O.L.A.

Where: Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park,

4800 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Ends: July 27

Contact: (213) 473-8452