Art that tests our openness

Seeing depends on optics, of course, and physiology. But the term “seeing” can also refer to other, more internal processes: understanding, feeling, believing. Marcos Ramirez makes explicit the connection between these two manners of seeing in new work at Iturralde Gallery that has both immediate impact and enduring resonance.

The first thing you encounter is a set of four eye charts, in the form of colored metal boxes on the wall. Each bears a statement in lines of declining size. A red stripe on the gallery floor prescribes the viewer’s proper distance. What these charts test, however, is not our eyesight but our receptivity to the wisdom of several sages, from Bob Dylan to Buddha. Dylan’s white panel quotes a lyric asserting that violence, rather than democracy, rules the world. Desmond Tutu, on a black panel, exhorts, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” A Native American proverb appears against red, and on a yellow panel, Buddha’s words speak of the power of love.

The “Skin Color” series warms us up to the proposition that seeing honestly and ethically requires more than just the eyes. Sometimes what the eyes communicate to the brain are visual differences (skin color, to start) that belie a greater underlying commonality. In two more eye charts, this time in light boxes, the message gets more complex.

One bears a quote by Martin Luther King Jr. about the need to settle conflict through love, rather than aggression. Atop the text is a photographic transparency of the blue eyes of a light-skinned young boy.

The neighboring work uses text from the Koran translated into Farsi and is topped by an image of a darker-skinned, darker-eyed girl. The assumption -- reinforced by the artist’s titling one work “West” and the other “East” -- is that this is a juxtaposition of American and Arab, but it turns out that both children are Mexican, like the artist, who lives in Tijuana.

Seeing, this exercise of Ramirez’s illustrates, never happens only in the visual sense. Sight sometimes suffers from the limitations of the mind and heart.

In the centerpiece of the show, Ramirez has enlarged versions of these last two eye charts (painted, heavy-handedly, in camouflage pattern) face off across a large room. A band of words in English and Spanish wraps around the walls, identifying those emotions that, in this time of impending war, impair our clear seeing: ignorance, ambition, despair, grief, disgrace.

In the center of the installation, Ramirez suspends missiles shaped of bread loaves over a miniature desert city made of rock and sand. “The Multiplication of Bread” carries associations with Christ’s legendary stretching of a meal and makes a tougher point about food aid and bombs both being dropped in the name of salvation.

Ramirez (who also goes by “Erre”) has, in numerous installations and exhibitions over the past decade, proved himself brilliant at crafting metaphors, especially about the U.S.-Mexico border. Here, too, he’s engaged with issues of cultural collision and the powerful forces at play in defining the nature of that contact. “The Multiplication of Bread” isn’t as subtle or open-ended as other, more poetic work of his, but the context of its creation perhaps begs for such directness. Ramirez’s urgent and stirring plea for peace rises to the pitch of the current blustery debate surrounding war.

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through March 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Some redemption in a dark show

Remember those school assignments to make collages using pictures cut out from magazines? The ones that left the household reading material in shreds? Amy Sarkisian’s collages of tattoo designs, at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, feel like throwbacks to those cut-and-paste schemes.

Each has a theme -- dragons, flowers, death -- and is made up of dozens of tattoo designs, tightly joined and mounted on black cardboard. They might rank as mega-cool in the classroom, but here, in the artist’s first solo show in L.A., they just look puerile.

There’s nothing but a passing formal intelligence guiding the glue. Sarkisian has made no attempt to interpret the imagery (largely of macho bravado) but remained content simply to organize it.

She calls her show “Valley of Unrest,” and her attraction to revulsion is nowhere more glaring than in a sculpture of Hitler, fashioned of foam, paint, sequins and beads and mounted on a wheeled stand. His grimacing head drips red beads from the eyes, mouth and neck. It’s a grisly, unredeemable sight.

Where Sarkisian does shine in this otherwise dark show is in her work using dried apples, like those used to make apple-head dolls. “The Jury” is a curious and captivating installation of around 200 such shrunken heads, aligned in tiered rows. They face us, smiling, grimacing, scowling.

Sarkisian’s carving and painting provide their expressions, but their unusual character, their creases and lumps and wrinkles, emerged during the fruit’s natural process of decay. While they appear like caricatures, there’s something compassionate about their display. They sit as if in judgment of us, yet their aged and distorted features presage our own.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-2117, through March 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Gate’s paintings elegantly crafted

Richard Gate’s absorbing new paintings at Ruth Bachofner Gallery mimic the collage-like nature of experience. We perceive the world and our place within it in multiple, simultaneous ways. Scientific inquiry overlaps with straightforward visual observation, which overlaps with understanding in terms of patterns and relationships. Gate’s paintings capture that rich simultaneity in a form that sparkles with clarity.

Each of the 4-foot-square paintings has a wide white border like that of a photographic slide, which wraps the vibrant interior in a neutral frame. The imagery inside ranges from Xerox transfers of photographs of the ocean and enlarged lace patterns to linear maps of the stars and diagrams of the structure of a canoe.

Oak leaves and morning glories, palm trees and lacewings are all pictured in the form of textbook illustrations or repeated ideographs. Astronomy meets astrology, physics neighbors natural history and maybe even autobiography.

Gate, who divides his time between Utah and rural Canada, treats the surface of each panel almost like a puzzle, interlocking modes of perception and, at the same time, modes of visualization. Abstract, geometric and representational all make their claims, with no one mode overwhelming the others.

Hard-edged shapes of opaque color (beautiful cobalt, persimmon, gold) echo areas where Gate has left the panel’s wood grain bare, dyed it a translucent hue or veiled it in delicate rice paper. Resonance abounds within the paintings, and after one studies each awhile, all the imagery coalesces into an orchestral tapestry of pattern, rhythm and directionality. These are elegant, tightly crafted works, entrancing for both the eye and mind.

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through March 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Trees tenderly photographed

Karen Halverson’s photographs of California trees at Rose Gallery combine the dignity of aristocratic portraiture with the intimacy of the lover’s snapshot. Halverson, who teaches at USC, works large, in color, with taxonomical care, labeling each image according to the tree’s type and location.

But she’s no member of the Bernd and Hilla Becher school of coolly dispassionate formalists. There’s a soul at work here, a radiant tenderness. In these pictures, Halverson revels in a beauty that she claims no credit for but embraces as fundamental.

The photographs (all mounted on aluminum and printed, effectively, edge to edge) fall loosely into two categories: majestic portraits of single trees, focused on form, color, gesture and texture; and images of trees in the context of human habitation.

In the latter, Halverson exercises a light hand, gracefully avoiding easy visual quips. Incongruities between the natural and the artificial play themselves out, sometimes with quiet humor but not with blanket condemnation of the human-made.

Often odd and interesting formal relationships emerge. An orange post planted next to a pistache tree looks like a color swatch held up to match the tree’s confetti of fiery foliage. Bright red mesh wraps like a bandage around the one healthy limb of a Joshua tree, while the other, truncated limb seems more in need of repair.

Rapturous color and light characterize all of the photographs. Halverson shoots in the fleeting warm glow preceding or just following a storm in her picture of a blue oak, the tree a wizened anchor against a sky of slate gray. In the neighboring image, light seems to emanate from the golden flowers of a Palo Verde tree blurring in the breeze.

In a stunning trio of photographs, Halverson presents individual portraits of the midsections of three tree trunks. The madrone, on the left, has bark of a soft rose color. The bluegum eucalyptus in the center is smooth as skin and a putty color, blue-gray in the shadows. At right, a valley oak is encrusted in a flaky shell of ocher. As sublime as painter Barnett Newman’s stripes, these trees evoke not just primary colors but a beauty of primary significance.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through Saturday.