Burning it is part of the art

Katsushige Nakahashi’s “Zero Project” is a multifaceted, participatory act of storytelling. It involves ritual and performance, creation and destruction. It breaks down History with a capital H into its constituent parts: individual actions with human consequences. Considered in its entirety, the project carries tremendous emotional, intellectual and spiritual weight. Elements on view at Sherry Frumkin Gallery are fascinating fragments of that larger whole.

The Zero was an agile, long-range fighter plane used by the Japanese navy during World War II. The plane became symbolic of Japanese military superiority in the air in the early ‘40s and legendary for its use in kamikaze (suicide) missions later in the war. Nakahashi, born 10 years after the war’s end, started building plastic model planes as a child. For the Zero Project, ongoing since 2000, he revisits the craft. This time around, model-building is just the starting point for something physically and conceptually much larger, and the action is informed by deeper understanding of the repercussions of the war on his family, his generation and his nation.

For each installment of the project, Nakahashi builds a 1/32 scale version of one of the Zeros in plastic, using a commercially available kit or creating the parts himself. When finished, he photographs the sea-green model methodically, in 2-millimeter sections. The images (roughly 15,000 of them per plane) are printed in snapshot size and taped together by volunteers to re-create the form of the plane in its actual size.

Each quilting bee-like assembly is designed to be a cross-generational affair, military veterans sharing their stories with students as they build together. The planes, when completed, look intentionally handmade. Irregular, glossy and slightly lumpy, they’re less precious than the similarly taped-together photocollages of the Starn twins, more politically charged than the Pop soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, which they bring to mind.

Nakahashi keys each project to the story of a particular plane, its pilot and its fate. When the paper plane is complete, it’s brought to a location pertinent to its story. On a date also chosen for its relevance, the plane is ceremonially burned. Photographs in the Frumkin show (poignantly, across the street from the Santa Monica Airport), of projects in Australia, Japan and the U.S., depict different stages of the process: the carrying of a plane, the sculpture in flames, the scorched silhouettes branded into the earth. Nakahashi’s first Zero plane didn’t fully burn, and sections of it are on view in the gallery as well. A wing, one edge singed, is propped in the corner like a heavy pelt.

Nakahashi is soliciting volunteers for a project he hopes to bring to fruition in 2007, with a burning in San Diego, linked to Southern California’s role in the Zero’s history. In 1942, a plane, its pilot dead, was found by American naval scouts in the Aleutian Islands and brought to San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station for examination. What American crews learned about the plane helped deflate the Zero’s mystique and better equip Americans charged with bringing them down.

Nakahashi’s father served on the maintenance crew for Zero planes at a base near Nagasaki during the war. If the Zero Project is the artist’s way to process a chapter in his family history, it’s also an opportunity for those who encounter the work to draw their own connections to places and events that Nakahashi foregrounds. Itinerant memorial, history lesson, burnt offering -- the Zero Project engages on multiple levels. Images of the burning planes evoke a visceral unease, akin to witnessing the wreckage of a crash landing. Yet the fire has intentionality. It’s sacrificial, purifying. It releases the spirits of the dead. It clears the ground of myth and legend, allowing for more immediate perspectives on the experience of war and its aftermath.

Normally, burning photographs would seem a way of extinguishing memory. Here, however, burning activates memory, the way forest fires catalyze new growth. Nakahashi may be destroying something symbolic, but in the process he brings real, potent understanding to life.

Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 3026 Airport Ave., Studio 21, Santa Monica, (310) 397-7493, through Oct. 15. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Video installation provides an earful

If one of the key functions of art is to wake us up to unnoticed wonders, consider Takehito Koganezawa’s video installation at Christopher Grimes a most effective, delightful alarm clock.

If you were to walk into the gallery with eyes closed, you’d hear music of sorts, rhythms and textures, spunky passages of syncopation, framed silences. Upon opening your eyes, you’d see that each of the sounds was produced by a small action exerted upon a common domestic object: stretching a rubber band, tapping the edge of a heavy stockpot, popping bubble wrap, jiggling ice cubes in a glass of water, crushing eggshells, cracking a walnut, releasing air from a balloon.

The actions are performed with lab-like neutrality by the Tokyo-born, Berlin-based artist and projected on three gallery walls in short, staccato snippets. The scenes and their sounds repeat in unpredictable patterns, the thrums and screeches and tings weaving together in ever-fresh combinations. Koganezawa’s collection of motion-sounds (297 of them) plays on random shuffle, so the piece, called “Dancing in Your Head,” continuously creates itself anew. John Cage let loose in the kitchen couldn’t have cooked up anything more beautifully surprising. It’s an ear-opener, the soundtrack of our lives that we never hear.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Oct. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Youthful radiance captured in paint

It should come as no surprise that the conditions of adolescence and young adulthood are the focus of so much art these days. Youth culture rules on nearly every expressive front. Artists plucked fresh from grad school by enterprising galleries might very well turn to their own recent evolution into adulthood for inspiration. For emotional drama, few phases in life can compete. It’s a time of shifting definitions, fertile disequilibrium, stretching and pushing.

Rebecca Campbell’s new paintings at L.A. Louver radiate youth. The surfaces, even more than the subjects, exhibit a tension between self-assurance and restless instability. Paint itself turns out to be the most compelling character in the work, a force whose process of becoming echoes that of the young adults but is more gripping to behold.

“Salt Palace,” one of the large narrative canvases in the show, depicts a confrontation between figures appearing to be father and daughter. The man stands on the balcony of a nice suburban home, the young woman on the deck below. Campbell represents them deftly, but dryly, with pat familiarity. They seem stationed at their posts, figures standing in for breathing, doubting souls. It’s in the background, along the edges, that exhilaration and passion play themselves out, in the paint that describes the trees and clouded sky. Deep emerald swipes are sucked into the distance. The arcs and drips of leaves enact a flamboyant dance, breathtaking and destabilizing -- drama expected on center stage displaced to the fringe.

In five large portraits of adolescent boys (nicely titled “Unwritten”), Campbell paints their fleeting tenderness with a smooth, almost airbrushed polish. It ends up not being Hadley, the pierced tough guy, but the tree trunk behind him, a gorgeous, diffuse mosaic of strokes, that wrestles visibly with the stuff it’s made of.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Oct. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Wall sculptures for contemplation

One of Jane South’s entrancing wall sculptures at Susanne Vielmetter, “Untitled (Yellow Construction),” looks like a cross between an old-fashioned cash register, a Victorian bird cage and the mechanical guts of a ventilation system. Plus, it’s as much a drawing (that resembles an engraving) as it is a sculpture.

The British-born, New York-based artist fashions her work from paper that she’s painted, drawn on, folded, cut with an X-Acto knife and glued. Balsa wood makes a few cameo appearances in the form of connecting ladders and struts among the paper drums, wheels, and boxes, which are hollow, latticed.

South teases dimensionality out of paper by sculpting it but also by drawing hatched lines along the edges of forms to suggest their receding in space. Drum forms dangle from wall-mounted base structures by slim paper hooks. South cuts looping tabs from the centers of wheels, lifts them, then inks in a shadow, as if amplifying the punch line. Her work is terrifically playful and formally mature. It resonates with the assemblage tradition, Louise Nevelson’s relief sculptures, engineering models, scientific illustrations and the vexing trickery of optical illusions. Delicate as tracery, sturdy as grillwork, vaguely industrial, seriously fun -- South’s pieces read like articulate follies, novel but not merely clever. They demand -- and reward -- long, deliberate attention.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Oct. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.