The past speaks to the present

In Robin Kandel’s short, silent video, “Mythological Parentage,” six men confront each other on a beach. Three wear coats with Nazi armbands. The other three are dressed in suits of a similar vintage.

The groups shoot at each other, but then they start exchanging hats and coats, switching sides it seems, before shooting some more. The brief passage shifts from slow motion to the accelerated jerky movement of early silent film, as if part distant dream, part theatrical skit. The imagery is indelible -- poignant, tragic and slightly comic, much like the family history that Kandel draws upon in her absorbing recent work at Sherry Frumkin Gallery.

We learn in one of the installations that Kandel’s maternal and paternal great-grandfathers were brothers. In 1910, their paths diverged: One immigrated to the U.S. and the other stayed in their native Russian town of Berezno (now Ukraine). During World War II, the Ukrainian strand of the family, successful cattle merchants, was subjected to German occupation, forced into a Jewish ghetto and sent to a labor camp where peat squares were dug and dried for fuel. When rumors of imminent killings reached the camp, the family escaped into the surrounding woods, hiding for the remaining two years of the war, losing numerous members of the group along the way to discovery and death.

The American branch of the family, assimilated Jews in Detroit, had ties in the 1920s and ‘30s to gun-runners and bootleggers known as the Purple Gang. Kandel’s grandfather served time for driving a getaway car for cousins who ended up in Alcatraz. This side of the family -- unaccented, glamorous and vaguely dangerous -- was the side the young Kandel preferred as she was growing up.

The two tales interweave throughout the show, most explicitly in “Benjamin & Julius,” which incorporates a timeline, framed wall panels (most with text, a few blank), a globe, map and chalkboard, and snippets of stories printed on colored paper and scattered on the floor. The stories pick up in the middle and leave off without closure. They are anecdotal, reflective. They skip back and forth through time, from past accounts to their recent discovery.

Kandel, a Bay Area artist, learned the details of her father’s wartime childhood only six years ago when he gave her copies of several taped interviews a graduate student had made with him in 1983. Her assimilation of the information, her incorporation of it into her own sense of self has been the focus of her work ever since.

She approaches the stories and their legacy in various ways. Some works -- a large paper weaving made from cut strips of maps, for example -- feel facile and slight. An installation pairing an assembly of globes with a painting evoking the ocean as it appears on a globe also seems too generalized to have much impact.

The most affecting works marry the literal and the metaphorical. In “Backward Text,” Kandel transcribes a long excerpt from her father’s testimony, writing it by hand, in reverse. The pain of the story itself is echoed in the strain of reading it. This isn’t information easy to receive or deliver.

In her performative videos, Kandel negotiates her inheritance of a fractured past in concentrated, evocative vignettes. Trauma is laced with levity.

In “Dress Up,” she puts on clothing associated with her mother, her father and others (even a Nazi) that played roles in the formation of her family’s story. She physically assumes the layers contributing to her own identity. In another video, of unlikely objects deliberately stacked in piles, she refers to the stacking of peat squares in the German labor camp as well as to the broader notion of identity as multilayered, compressed, geological in its stratification.

Kandel’s family history is powerful raw material. Through her strengths as both storyteller and image-maker, she gives it further dimension and relevance, extending its power to the present.

Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 3026 Airport Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 397-7493, through Aug. 11. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.frumkingallery.com

Some will nurture, some will torture

Richard Ross’ latest book of photographs bears the simple, apt dedication, “To Josef K” -- protagonist of Kafka’s “The Trial.” Twenty-nine large color pictures from the project, “Architecture of Authority,” hang in a breathtaking show at ACME. The spaces photographed are those of Josef K’s waking nightmare -- stripped-down, hard-edged rooms designed to facilitate systems rather than accommodate individuals, places where power is exercised and suffered.

Holding cells, interrogation rooms, isolation units -- the gamut runs to a chilling extreme in the image of a lethal injection chamber at Angola State Penitentiary. Ross’ crisp, cool manner amplifies the rigidity and order of these places, their pervasive aura of control. Nothing is left to chance; there are no cracks to fall through.

The photographer, who teaches at UC Santa Barbara and has done extensive work exploring the visceral, subjective qualities of built space, covers the seemingly benign end of the spectrum as well: a Montessori preschool classroom, wood-paneled telephone booths at a luxury hotel. Juxtaposing images of spaces meant for torture and those meant for nurture is jarring and uncomfortably revelatory. Where on the continuum the church confessional should be positioned is a question that gapes, newly urgent.

All the spaces in the photographs stand empty, like stage sets awaiting the next drama of power and liberty to be played out within. In fact, Ross adds to the mix photographs of television crime-show sets, models of authenticity and artifice.

His studied neutrality makes the pictures in “Architecture of Authority” plainly declarative. Through accumulation and combination they become interpretative, subtexts seep out and the images gain the force of arguments. There are those who might see pictures of tarp-covered cages (“segregation cells”) at the new Abu Ghraib prison as reassuring, according to the circular justification that freedom must be sacrificed to protect freedom. But for the rest of us, those images and the rest in Ross’ series are daunting, haunting, chilling and deeply reflective of our vexed nature as both victims and perpetrators.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, ends Saturday. www.acmelosangeles.com

All charted on the maps of our lives

“Zoom +/-,” an enjoyable excursion through the theme of mapping, is threaded with good humor and clever subversion of the map’s physical integrity and implicit authority. Nineteen artists -- youngish and older; East Coast, West Coast and beyond; painters, sculptors, photographers, makers of videos and collages -- are represented in the show, organized by Doug Beube and Sherry Frumkin for Arena 1.

Nina Katchadourian’s works are among the wittiest explorations of the map as both discrete object and indicator of position. Cutting away interstices and leaving only linear routes, she transforms a subway map into a delicate tangled nest and photographs it resting in the palm of a hand. She cuts out Finland’s longest road and curls it, like a fragile specimen, into a petri dish. Her genealogical chart of comestibles (Mrs. See’s begetting Wolfgang Puck, cousin to the Sun Maid raisin girl and so on down the generations to the Gerber baby) is a wry, hilarious take on branding.

In Joyce Kozloff’s richly layered images, drawn maps of battle sites are embellished with children’s drawings of superheroes and UFOs and studded with tiny reproductions of resonant imagery from the Italian Renaissance to German Expressionism. Place becomes the sum of recollection and imagination.

Another provocative highlight is Christian Nord’s “Newham Sensory Deprivation Map.” Some 30 students at a London college were sent out in pairs, one wearing blindfold and earplugs, the other with a GPS device, pen and paper. The resulting map dismisses with familiar campus landmarks and roads, instead redefining the environment according to smells, breezes, levels of comfort and discomfort, hunger, texture, feelings of confusion and relief. Place and experience connect in a literal and yet suggestive way.

Among the other notable works in the show are a skittish etching by Jeff Woodbury, Robert Walden’s painted “Ontological Road Maps” and co-curator Doug Beube’s worm-eaten “Erosion” collages.

Arena 1, 3026 Airport Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 397-7456, through Sept. 8. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.santamonicaartstudios.com

How we come to understand a place

There’s wisdom to the maxim that life is more about the journey than the destination and that truth applies to all sorts of experiences, art included. Process often outshines product. In the best of circumstances, the artist’s process delivers something that then launches another set of processes (sensory, intellectual, emotional, etc.) in the viewer. Renée Petropoulos’ new work at Rosamund Felsen Gallery acts only weakly as such a spur.

It’s uneven visually and not very gratifying as a coherent whole but does have merit as a diffuse collection of prompts about place and perception. Maps, flags, historical accounts, direct observations, literature and current news all factor into our understanding of a place, and all of these play a part in Petropoulos’ show.

From a bench constructed by the artist, viewers can face large, lozenge-shaped paintings of intersecting stripes and concentric circles while hearing a montage of sounds pertaining to Zanzibar and the Gulf States -- stories, radio transmissions, calls to prayer and more. Flags made of colored ribbons hang in the entryway, near painted silhouettes of individual countries at different political moments in time. Another room is lined with small, attractive gouache paintings of architectural details and patterns from walls and windows the artist observed in L.A., on travels and in film. Oscillating between touristic and scholarly, conceptual and concrete, the show ends up feeling like a compilation -- like the residue of several journeys unrelated in tone, ambition and destination.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Aug. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamund felsen.com