Honoring a quilt and its powerful message

Not so long ago, artists made art, people looked at it and, after some time passed, historians wrote about what it all meant. Today, some of the most compelling art is being made by artists who are not content to sit back and wait for historians to determine what their work means for posterity.

Andrea Bowers takes matters into her own hands. She is an artist who behaves like a historian, researching, recording and bringing together poignant details to tell stories that are multilayered and moving.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, “The Weight of Relevance” focuses on the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a monumental work of folk art that was regularly exhibited on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., from 1987 to 1996. Since then, the continually growing quilt, which now weighs 54 tons, has been in storage -- first in San Francisco, where it was conceived by activist Cleve Jones, and more recently in Atlanta, where storage costs are cheaper and the population better represents the changing face of the pandemic, whose highest rates of infection are now among women and people of color.

Each 6-foot-by-3-foot panel of the quilt, handmade by friends, relatives and lovers, memorializes a man, woman or child who died from an AIDS-related illness. In 1987, the quilt consisted of 1,920 panels. In 1988, it had grown to 8,288; in 1989, to more than 10,000; and in 1992, to more than 21,000. Today, there are more than 40,000 panels.

Bowers evokes both vastness and intimacy in a three-channel video projection. While one 6-foot-by-10-foot image shows an individual telling a personal story about his or her involvement in the populist project, the other two images slowly survey the shelves and aisles of a warehouse where the quilt’s 12-foot-square sections are neatly folded and stacked.

Another video, projected on quilted fabric laid on the floor, shows a bird’s-eye view of a seamstress diligently mending sections of the quilt that have worn out. The Sisyphean labor she has undertaken since 1987 -- stitching by hand or with a noisy sewing machine -- embodies a type of devotion, loyalty and love more common to old-fashioned epics than to contemporary culture, which seems to be fixated on celebrities, sound bites and hot-button controversies.

A side gallery displays 10 of Bowers’ drawings. Eight small ones are realistic renderings that zero in on single parts of single panels. Some feature phrases, such as “Life Is Uncertain, Eat Dessert First,” “This Is No Joke” and “Terry Sutton, He Hated This Quilt and So Do We.”

A large black-and-white drawing, laid on the floor like a grave, depicts abstract patterns copied from the quilt and a printed list of some of its materials: paintings, pearls, photographs, pins, studs, stuffed animals, suede, T-shirts, taffeta, vinyl, wedding rings.

On another large white sheet of paper, Bowers used colored pencils to draw a snapshot-size close-up of a section of the quilt, folded and stored on a shelf. The drawing’s palette matches that of the American flag. Its format -- a tiny image surrounded by emptiness -- echoes the sense of aloneness the AIDS Memorial Quilt bravely fights.

The most powerful piece in the show is an actual section of the quilt. Borrowed for the run of the exhibition from the NAMES Project Foundation, Block 5671 hangs in another side gallery, where it drapes off the wall and rests on a low pedestal.

Its imagery is utterly conventional. Flowers, butterflies, hearts and musical notes decorate the panels of two grade-school kids. The favorite pizza parlor, chewing tobacco and television channel of a soldier in the U.S. Army memorialize his short life. And a stylized depiction of a mother holding an infant pays homage to a woman who died in 1995.

The emotions elicited by this section of the quilt -- sadness, sorrow, regret -- are also utterly conventional. But that does not make them any less profound.

Part of the power of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is that it emphasizes the common experiences and emotions that hold humanity together and link people across time and space. Part of the power of Bowers’ work is that it doesn’t matter if you think of it as art or as history or as some mixture of the two. Its point is to move you, to awaken your awareness that humanity is a fragile collaboration and that we are all in it together.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through June 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.vielmetter.com

Soothing works, and one big jolt

Erwin Redl’s spectacular installations of LED lights strung through the big darkened spaces of the Ace Gallery Beverly Hills are initially impressive. Grandly scaled, impeccably installed and seemingly stripped to the essentials, they lead viewers to expect experiences of perceptual nuance and rigor.

Instead, we get high-tech pleasantness. Five of the six galleries provide soothing, mildly amusing escapes from the chaotic tumult of everyday life. If a Minimalist designed a dance club’s chill room, this is what it might look like.

The sixth installation, “Matrix XVI (White-Blue Gradient),” is the smallest. It’s hard to look at. And hard to be in. It’s also Redl’s best, and suggests that he can turn his trendy light source into more than a gimmick.

Across the back wall of a rectangular gallery he has strung vertical lines of tiny light-emitting diodes. Some are white. The rest are blue. No pattern can be discerned. The white lights illuminate the wall behind them more brightly than the blue ones. As your eye scans the space, the wall floats out of focus and then snaps back into place. It creates the sensation that the lights are flickering although they are not.

Imagine stepping inside a great Op painting. Your body says, “Wow!” Your mind screams, “Flee!” And you’re caught in the crossfire, your consciousness struggling to make sense of what had seemed to be perfectly neutral surroundings.

Such perception-sharpening anxiety is discomfiting but well worth the trouble. It grounds you in the moment and connects you to the contradictions of the information age, in which digitally transmitted information delivers more thrills -- and pitfalls -- than can be comprehended.

Ace Gallery Beverly Hills, 9430 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 935-4411, through June 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acegallery.net

A grand scale and plenty of detail

Jacci Den Hartog’s new sculptures and drawings are more abstract and dynamic than anything she has made. In the past, the L.A. artist used plaster, resin and metal to cast, carve and construct miniature models of streams and rivers cascading through space. The mind’s eye was called on to conjure the rocks, boulders and riverbanks around which Den Hartog’s realistic torrents tumbled.

At the Solway Jones Gallery, her two new sculptures, mounted on solitary rods, do not evoke the small scale of dioramas. Instead, they seem life-size, as if each turbulent splash of agitated water were rendered in actual size, with one-to-one fidelity to the real thing.

The increase in scale gives Den Hartog more room to maneuver. Each of her fluid, swirling sculptures is filled with an abundance of delicious details. The polymerized clay she uses defies gravity, extending horizontally and vertically in ways that confound belief. It’s mesmerizing.

But the magic wears thin, despite how technically impressive “KABOOM” and “poof” are. They suggest exquisitely fabricated 3-D versions of gestures in Abstract Expressionist paintings -- loose, fluid marks that sweep through space with verve and abandon.

Den Hartog’s six drawings fare better. Each seems to be bigger than its actual dimensions (which is astonishing, since one is nearly 19 feet long). Leaving more room for a viewer’s imagination, the watercolor-enhanced ink drawings maintain a more complicated relationship to the visible world. They layer shifts in scale atop one another, confusing the boundaries between minds and bodies more effectively than the sculptures.

Solway Jones Gallery, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-7354, through May 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

www.solwayjonesgallery.com

Emphasizing the looks, not meaning

In the old days, curators took poetic license and organized group shows around their feelings for favorite songs, movies and short stories, not to mention candy bars, turns of phrase and out-of-the-way places. Such freewheeling subjectivity has gone out of fashion, replaced by the solemnity of supposed scholarly seriousness.

“Without Sun,” a two-venue group show organized by independent curator Carole Ann Klonarides, brings the intellectual playfulness of organizing shows in the 1980s up to the moment. At the Christopher Grimes Gallery and the Chung King Project, the seven-artist exhibition stands out as one of the best of recent memory because it puts more emphasis on how things look than on what they mean.

The paintings, by Dan Bayles, Thom Merrick, Joshua Podoll and Elizabeth Tremante, have the presence of cataclysmic landscapes. In them, the visible world is a slippery continuum of abstraction and representation. It’s impossible to distinguish reality from its virtual doppelganger.

The sculptures, by Case Culkins and Anna Sew Hoy, do something similar to three-dimensional space. They form columns, pilings and blobs of ordinary things and everyday shapes, somehow making them strange, like the flotsam and jetsam of an imaginary world that has crash-landed.

The show’s only misstep is a video and a three-part drawing by Euan Macdonald. These one-dimensional works lack the loopy complexity and stimulating ambiguity of the others.

If there is a meaningful theme to “Without Sun,” it’s that meaning is elusive -- that it’s most provocative when it slips beyond the horizon or gets stuck on tip of the tongue, like something you know but cannot say, despite your best efforts.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through May 26. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.cgrimes.com

Chung King Project, 936 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 625-1802, through June 9. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chungkingproject.com