Every picture tells a story
An attractive, middle-aged woman stands naked in a motel bathroom. A small amount of blood drips from between her legs to the tile floor, and it seems to have caught her by surprise. She stands frozen in place, as if internally weighing the ramifications.
The scene is staged in one of Gregory Crewdson’s densely narrative, large color photographs at Gagosian Gallery. A sense of chromatic order extends from the bathroom, where periwinkle shower curtain and bath mat harmonize with the green floor tile, into the bedroom. A blue nightie hangs from the handle of the closet door, whose full-length mirror reflects the bathroom’s green toilet. On the closet’s top shelf gleams a folded, rusty red blanket.
In the motel bedroom, however, compositional balance competes with a tone of hastiness, disarray. The woman’s cosmetics case sits open on the bed, nail polish jostling against medicine bottles. Shoes, lingerie and a purse lay scattered on the musty carpet. On the bedside table sits a grimy telephone and a clock indicating that it’s just a few minutes before midnight. Underneath the requisite telephone book in the nightstand appears something far less common in a rented room, but which acts as Crewdson’s subtle signature: a box labeled “Perfect Picture Puzzle.”
Crewdson’s photographs are exactly that -- tableaux composed of individual clue-like parts that fit together with a snug sense of physical rightness. Crewdson staged these scenes on location in several small towns and on studio sets, withholding just enough pieces of the puzzle to invest the images with uncertainty and tension. Is the woman in the bathroom in flight from something or someone? Why does she appear so startled and alone?
Other images in the show suggest a similar kind of imbalance, as if conditions have just shifted and the characters involved are reconfiguring their inner lives to adapt. A car is stopped in the middle of an intersection on a misty morning, perhaps just before daybreak. The driver’s door is swung open, but the driver is gone, or slumped down in the seat, toward which a young woman in the passenger seat stares.
In Crewdson’s pictures, cars come to a halt at odd angles, people stand expectantly in unexpected places. Streets are always wet, the air is always misty, disorientation is the norm, blood happens.
In some pictures, however, the disturbance feels quotidian, chronic. Mother and son sit anxiously at the dinner table, cheese sauce congealing over the broccoli, roast beef bleeding over its platter, as the two remaining seats stay conspicuously vacant.
In another image, a couple prepares for bed. He’s in pajamas, his arsenal -- book, water, watch, crossword puzzle and pain pills -- at the ready on the bedside table. She stands before her dressing table in bra and half-slip, pondering a little bird that’s sneaked into the room and perched next to her nightly dose of Percocet.
Crewdson’s world is Ozzie and Harriet on the outside, Ozzy and Sharon within. Ennui, loneliness and desperation course through these scenes the way they flood the paintings of Edward Hopper. Crewdson liberally tosses in allusions to chemical dependency to bring his quaintly outdated suburban settings into the anxious present.
Scale matters here. It’s not used gratuitously, to earn spectacle status solely by virtue of the images’ bloated dimensions. Crewdson, a professor at Yale, prints large (roughly 5 feet by 8 feet) and uses every inch of the image to tell its story. His methods mimic those of filmmakers -- down to the long list of credits printed in the show’s brochure.
Framed in flat white with no glass, the photographs physically approximate small movie screens or large, flat-screen TVs. Vividly detailed and emotionally charged, they invite a type of immersion common to the screen arts. They’re not all cinematic marvels -- the characters often feel stiff as props, and the scenarios can sometimes drip with melodrama -- but Crewdson is an artful and affecting storyteller, setting up each tale with enough meticulous detail to be convincing and enough ambiguity to remain compelling.
Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through July 1. Closed Sunday and Monday.
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A great triple bill
Just two days remain to catch a terrific triple bill at Craig Krull Gallery. The three artists balance one another the way the points of an equilateral triangle contribute to a stable, harmonious shape. The photographer John Swope observes reality and crisply frames it, Frederick Sommer takes found representations of the real and rearranges them, and Hilary Brace re-imagines reality altogether.
Swope (1908-1979), who produced an insider’s chronicle of Hollywood in the 1930s and followed it up with an insider’s report on pilot training in the 1940s, is represented by a selection of photographs of New York spanning four decades. Swope did a lot of celebrity portraiture, and here the star is the city itself, shown with humor, intimacy, tenderness and candor. Through acute juxtapositions of near and distant subjects, elevated views that transpose the architecture and bustle of urban life into elegant, flat patterns, and consistently tight and lively compositions, Swope’s portrait reveals a city as fresh and full of character as its chronicler.
The “interconnectedness of things” drove Sommer’s poetic experimentations in photographic media and found captivating expression as well in collages he made in his final years. In the 15 collages on view, Sommer (1905-1999) cut and recombined 19th century medical illustrations to create fantastic reinventions of the architecture of the body and mind. Renderings of vessels, sinews, bones, membranes and lobes are joined with surgical precision in these fanciful explorations of forms of being.
The Santa Barbara-based Brace has shown her mesmerizing pastels and charcoal drawings several times at Krull, and she now presents images of similar ambiguity and ethereality -- but in a new medium, photography. The new images conjure the same sublime realm of atmospheric space as the drawings, but are photographs taken of models built by the artist.
A distant light often beckons from the depths of these luminous scapes of soft stalactites and puffy ripples. Brace intentionally leaves her sculptural materials unidentified (cotton? dry ice? fiberglass?). It would be easy to fixate on her technical finesse, but more wondrous even is the way the images cause breath to deepen and spirit to expand.
Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Saturday.
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Banners and wedding cakes
In many of her recent paintings at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Ruth Grace Jervis employs a device that serves as a trumpet fanfare, a call to attention. It’s a painted banner that usually supports some text and traditionally would act as a painting’s caption, identifying the subject being commemorated. In Jervis’ work, the banner is a free agent. It stretches, wordless as a blank marquee across the top of one painting. In another, it fills the vast sky over a sailing ship with several of the more poetic terms for multiples of birds: “a murder of crows, a siege of herons, an exaltation of larks.”
In every case, the banner complicates the spatial illusion, pointing out the artificiality of this paint-on-canvas window to the world and nodding to a history of others practicing the canny craft. Inness and the American Luminists make their influence felt, 19th century marine painters are quoted, and the work resonates too with that of the quirky contemporary historicist Julie Heffernan.
Some of Jervis’ images hold together tightly, and others go slack. Her trio of wedding cake paintings are the most delectably painted of the group and the most curious, for all their seeming directness.
Each cake is centered like an icon against a dark background. A pair of sparrows blends in among the iced flora of one cake. A woman’s face, painted with Renaissance-era style and solemnity, stares out from the second layer of another, this one frosted pink. The cakes are simultaneously ceremonial and memorial, loaded symbols of threshold.
Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through July 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.
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Mind-bending illusions
Lela Shields’ stream of consciousness flows unobstructed in her recent paintings and drawings at Mandarin. Humans transmute into animals, dimensional beings flatten into stencil patterns, waking reality morphs into a vague, groundless dream. Fluidity is the operative force at play in the work and ultimately the source of its vigor.
Scale shifts seamlessly in these composite visions. Gravity is moot. In the two-panel “Orange Ravine,” vertebrae rise from a figure’s neck and assume the shape of a craggy cliff over which a waterfall tumbles.
A few animals tread on and meld with the rock wall, which ends up crowning the human head long lost from its neck below.
Horses, in stencil silhouette, gallop through one painting, off the panel’s edge and across the wall. Smudges of paint engender inked-in images of birds and trees in a suite of 6-inch square panels, exercises in teasing out inspiration from unremarkable, Rorschach stains.
Shields, based in New York and having her first L.A. show, draws and paints well enough, but not distinctively. It’s her imagination that boasts a wide range, from sweet to gothic, and is best exploited near the compelling extremes.
Mandarin, 970 N. Broadway, Suite 213, (213) 687-4107, through July 9. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.