Playing around with pictures

Despite the ubiquity of photographs in art galleries during the last decade or more, it’s rare to encounter deeply poetic works that resonate simultaneously on multiple levels -- as social documents, aesthetic objects and political expression. The exceptional suite of 10 new and two older Cibachrome prints by David Askevold at Mandarin Gallery does exactly that. This quiet, surreptitious exhibition is slow to reveal itself; when it does, it’s at once rigorous and chilling, informed and informative, visually challenging and finally revelatory.

Askevold, who lived and taught in Southern California in the late 1970s and early 1980s but who has long worked in Nova Scotia, emerged with the generation of Post-Minimal artists. He mixed compelling photographs with illuminating texts, but the images and words usually behaved like oil and water: Attractive on the surface, they were profoundly incompatible at a fundamental level. This salutary quality of Askevold’s art -- its capacity to befuddle and perturb by upending conventional assumption -- remains, but now it operates in a different way.

The terrific photographs at Mandarin have no text, yet the intimation of narrative is strong. Think of them as creating a kind of pulp fiction -- dark, seductive, vaguely paranoid, decidedly oracular and even just plain weird.

Each of the new pictures, all made this year, is 30 by 40 inches and framed in black. Two works from 1996, identically framed, are 10 inches larger on a side; they stand out from the rest through size and the complexity of their imagery. (In fact, they were the inspiration for the others.)

“Pit #1” shows a suburban backyard gathering, seen from above. Assorted men and women stand or sit on the ground in a casually arrayed circle. It’s difficult to see exactly what’s going on -- a picnic perhaps, or a party -- because the color is washed out and the image is overexposed. Askevold plays against art photography’s fetish for exquisite prints.

Splotchy patches of mottled black further obscure the action. These patches, which hover on the surface like an ominous cloud, recall the burns created when a film gets stuck in a movie projector. As much as the camera is a modern machine hailed for its capacity to reveal the world, Askevold recognizes that it is also a tool that can obliterate perception.

His work shares this disorienting quality with that of artists as diverse as Edmund Teske and Sigmar Polke. Cameras distort, alter context and isolate -- traits historically associated with painting. Photography’s false naturalism is a casual deceit. Therein lies an unexpected possibility for extravagant beauty.

In “Pit #1” it’s hard to avoid the subject’s reference to a modern painterly tradition -- namely, the “luncheon on the grass.” Manet turned that aristocratic archetype of Arcadian bliss on its head; likewise, Askevold makes any sense of idyllic natural freedom turn sour. The black splotches and the queasy coloring intrude; ominous details start to emerge.

Most notably, a medical-style bag stands open at one side. You strain to see through the photographic blemishes to uncover what is happening. An accident? A crime? The bucolic scene makes a sudden U-turn into something inexplicable yet forbidding. The pastoral aura evaporates.

“Pit #2” operates similarly, except here a dancing flame erupts in the middle of a bleak autumnal image of an aging suburban street. Reading from left to right around the room, two new pictures precede this pair of 1996 photographs, while seven more come after. The narrative Askevold creates goes forward and backward in time. A final photograph is tucked around the corner in the gallery’s back room, as if the saga’s conclusion is hidden -- and possibly to be continued in the artist’s future work.

The 10 new photographs are all landscapes. Most seem to have been shot at night, perhaps with a strobe flash.

In one you can’t see the forest for the tree trunk, which looms in the foreground, its mottled birch bark dissolving into scabs or blisters. Elsewhere the underbrush glows red. Highlighted spots of desert scrub are picked out from the surrounding darkness, as if from a helicopter’s surveillance spotlight.

These last works are titled “Shot in the Dark,” which at once describes the way they were made, the pervasive violence of contemporary life and our groping for comprehension.

One landscape image appears twice -- first in bleached-out mode, later irradiated in crimson. The penultimate landscape is apocalyptic, a fiery sunrise (or sunset?) that evokes a nuclear blast. The final picture, the one hidden around the corner, shows a close-up of matted weeds against a crumbling cement foundation.

Bleak yet fascinating, Askevold’s dreamlike suite is titled “The Burning Bush, the Burned Bush, the Bush Trap.” In this charred narrative, the mystical covenant between God and Moses promising human salvation seems nowhere near fulfillment. Nor can the inescapable reference to the current American president be seen as anything but desolate -- if oddly predictable, given a political culture that has mastered the camera’s capacity for debilitating deceit. Askevold’s retort is to make beguiling camera images that cut the tether of manipulation, allowing the mind to take its own shots in the dark.

Mandarin Gallery, 970 N. Broadway, Chinatown, (213) 687-4107, through April 2. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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So familiar, yet disorienting

Six strange and beautiful new collages by Ginny Bishton recall the way digital information is organized on a television or computer screen. Scan lines are an organizing principle for this work, although the artist turns them toward surprising organic ends.

At Richard Telles Fine Art, Bishton’s collages are made from long, skinny strips of close-up landscape photographs. (Each strip is perhaps 1/8 inch wide and longer than the spread of your hand.) The strips, clustered by color and tonal value, are lined up edge to edge in undulating waves, curved shapes and rounded patterns.

Bishton’s collages are large -- the biggest is about 5 1/2 feet wide -- so the miniature glimpses of plants within the photographic strips spread out to become a kind of proliferating garden. Many of these strips dangle off the edge of the paper, creating an eccentric pictorial “fringe”; it animates what might otherwise be a static composition.

Visually, these landscapes slip and slide. Your eye follows the skinny strip, scanning the landscape vegetation in linear threads -- bits of lamb’s ear, fescue, ice plant, hawthorn, cactus, etc. -- but the thread is impossible to follow. Because the strips are narrow and clustered by color, the linear scan inevitably tumbles across the page.

Plein-air painters a century ago were guided by pictorial landscape conventions. Likewise, Bishton’s collages negotiate a distinctly contemporary experience of mediated landscape.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 965-5578, through March 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Women in a vulnerable state

Chicago-based artist Laura Mosquera is one of a number of young figurative painters who turn moderate, sometimes even clumsy drawing skills to unusually effective ends. Her L.A. solo debut at sixspace shows mostly women in abstract environments, seemingly in a state of suspended animation.

Mosquera paints or draws the environments and clothing as flat, linear patterns. A reclining figure in a blue-striped shirt has no actual lower body, just a lime-green shape that fills in the blank. A woman at a window clasps awkwardly drawn hands that, rather than being hidden by an artist aware of her technical limitations, are emphasized by “jungle-red” spots of crimson nail polish. Another woman is shown reclining on a bed, the wiggly blue dots and lines on the pillow behind her rising like bubbles from a scuba diver’s air-tank.

About three dozen figures populate the show’s five latex and acrylic paintings and nine ink or graphite drawings. Almost all the women are depicted looking away from us, or else their eyes are closed, downcast or averted.

This compositional device is cinematic, used in movies to suggest intimacy between a singular subject and a mass audience. It transforms a viewer into an odd type of voyeur -- the self-conscious observer of situations that, in Mosquera’s case, are neither sordid nor sensational but refreshingly vulnerable.

sixspace, 549 W. 23rd St., L.A., (213) 765-0248, through March 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The deft look of delftware

At Carl Berg Gallery, eight fine recent works by Tony de los Reyes perform an almost elegiac meditation on painting. With 17th and 18th century Dutch delftware as an inspiration, this work considers the ramifications of art in a culture awash in genuine copies of fake traditions.

De los Reyes uses blue-and-white alkyd, a durable synthetic resin, to make glossy paintings with tactile surfaces that typically show buccaneer sailing ships and luxurious floral motifs. The imagery is drawn in the wet resin with a stick, not painted with brushes, so the fluid colors do not blend or mix. Exquisite and icy, filled with lush baroque imagery, each painting has the look of a luxury souvenir.

Delftware was a Dutch imitation of Chinese Wan Li porcelain from the Ming Dynasty. Today it’s a staple of the tourist market. The pillaging galleons and robust blossoms dotted with insects, which warn of life’s inevitable decay, serve to link De los Reyes’ work to an artistic history of globalization.

No good can come of this, these paintings suggest -- except, perhaps, for the paintings themselves.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through March 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.