‘Pipeline’ to the surreal

Not all that long before Facebook, Flickr and Snapfish became the favorite ways people exchange images, families shared their vacation pictures by inviting neighbors over to watch slide shows of summer holidays.

As a kid, I liked looking at the projected snapshots far more than I enjoyed listening to the adults drone on about the dreary details of family trips: overheated radiators, two-for-one lunch specials and unspeakable restrooms.

At the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a 40-minute slide show delightfully free of audio takes visitors back to the best moments of those pre-digital days: awesome images of faraway places unspoiled by long-winded stories. The only words in “The Trans-Alaska Pipeline” are in the informative captions beneath some of the pictures, which were taken by Matt Coolidge, the center’s director, as he and independent writer Bill Fox traveled the length of the 800-mile pipeline.

Last August, their two-week trip began at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, in Prudhoe Bay, where 6,000 employees work 14-day shifts at the largest oil field in the United States. There’s no public access to the 40-mile-wide zone surrounding the drilling fields, where oil was discovered in 1968, so Coolidge and Fox rented a helicopter.

The pictures are flat-out otherworldly. The bay’s marshy landscape is crisscrossed by shiny steel pipes that run parallel to one another before disappearing into the earth or angling off to various windowless structures. No people are visible. But big trucks, double-decker mobile homes and one-of-a-kind vehicles, designed to drive and float through the marshy tundra, add to the alien atmosphere.

At mile 0, just before Deadhorse Airport, stands Pump Station 1. It’s where the pipeline emerges from the ground and begins its zigzagging, up-and-down, river-crossing trip to Valdez, a port on the Pacific where oceangoing tankers are filled with a fraction of the 700,000 barrels of crude that flow daily through the 4-foot-diameter pipe.

The most famous tanker to leave the port was the Exxon Valdez, which hit a reef in 1989 and caused one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. The pipeline itself holds 9 million barrels of oil. At an average speed of 4 miles per hour, it takes the oil nine days to make its way from one end to the other.

The first half of the trip follows the Dalton Highway, a dirt and gravel road built in five months in 1974 to provide access for the pipeline’s construction crews. The road is an engineering feat that pales in comparison to the pipeline, which was built from 1975 to 1977 by 70,000 workers and with $8 billion in private investments.

Spectacular views of the Alaska landscape are regular features of the slide show, including herds of musk ox, fields of wildflowers, snow-capped peaks and hills that appear to roll forever. The largest town the pipeline travels through is Wiseman, population 20. Small ones include Coldfoot, Gobblers Knob and Old Man.

The pipeline’s unique characteristics are equally impressive. Where it crosses the Continental Divide and must endure avalanches, it is buried in an 8-mile-long concrete box. Where it is susceptible to earthquakes, it sits on skids that allow it to slide 20 feet from side to side and 5 feet vertically. In other places it’s elevated to allow caribou to migrate.

Its most distinctive feature is the 420 miles that run aboveground. Most pipelines are buried for protection and stability. That was the original plan for this one. But the oil carried through it comes out of wells at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat would melt the permafrost, turning the ground to mud and causing the pipeline to crack. So the engineers designed aluminum-fringed and ammonia-cooled supports for the thickly insulated pipeline.

The slide show ends at mile 799, where the pipeline enters the Valdez Marine Terminal. Coolidge and Fox again go airborne, renting a plane to photograph the surreal spectacle of the massive facility set in the sublime landscape and giving visitors a glimpse of a trip beyond words.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-5722, through March 9. Open noon-5 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. www.clui.org.

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A celebratory hodgepodge

A little more than 100 artworks by 57 painters, sculptors and printmakers are crammed into the Tobey C. Moss Gallery to celebrate the venue’s 30th anniversary. “The Big 3-0! Thirty Years of California Modernism” is a lovely hodgepodge of generally terrific things. Not one is diminished by the works crowded around it, and many actually benefit from the chaos.

In the entryway, a 495-year-old engraving by Albrecht Durer and a 246-year-old etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi hang on the same wall as “The Golden West,” a funky folk landscape painted by John Roeder around 1950. The combination is crazy, guaranteed to make the heads of strictly rational visitors spin.

The nuttiness continues nearby: a plaster bust from 1928 by Ejnar Hansen and a 1960s assemblage by Gordon Wagner. It’s interrupted by an inspired pairing: Ynez Johnston’s “Reflections” and Lee Mullican’s “Fall of Icarus” complement each other nicely.

To the left, the most conventionally installed gallery showcases L.A.’s first homegrown style of painting to gain international acclaim: hard-edged abstraction. Standouts include works on canvas and paper by John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg, Lorser Feitelson, Oskar Fischinger, June Wayne, Emerson Woelffer and Leonard Edmondson.

Two back rooms, both of which do double duty as offices and display areas, are treasure troves that make you feel as if you have fallen into an artistic version of “Where’s Waldo?” This part of the show is truly loopy. Pieces by Dorr Bothwell, Peter Shire, Rico Lebrun and George Herms clash. Others, by Claire Falkenstein, Peter Krasnow, James Heuter and Joyce Treiman, do not add up to any kind of whole yet form something greater than the sum of its parts.

Some of the pleasure resides in the feeling that you have stepped into a living time capsule. This curious sense has less to do with the age of the works and more to do with the style of presentation: The jampacked cornucopia defies the Minimalist efficiency that characterizes so much of modern life. Like an eccentric aunt’s attic, “The Big 3-0” is stuffed with a lifetime of loves and discoveries that refuse to be shoehorned into tidy categories.

Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-5523, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.tobeycmossgallery.com.

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Reverie wrapped around reality

If daydreams had daydreams, they might look like Paul P.’s intimate little pictures of people and places that are so breathlessly beautiful it’s hard to imagine they are not fantasies.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 32 works on paper and canvas in oil, watercolor, pastel, pencil, crayon, drypoint and chine colle give delirious form to the Paris-based artist’s vision of two very real cities: Venice, Italy, and Venice, Calif. To see these places through the 32-year-old’s eyes is to get lost in an ethereal world in which reverie wraps itself around reality and longing kicks into high gear.

Neither Venice ever looked better. Paul P. specializes in standard tourist views, and many of his images are no bigger than postcards. But what he does with line, making it simultaneously loose and precise, and the way he massages light from darkness, making space sing, is absolutely magical.

None of his works ever feels fussed over, but every touch of the brush, crayon or pencil is exquisite, conveying just the right combination of control and abandon, drive and lassitude, melancholy and wonder.

There’s some of James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s restless Romanticism in Paul P.’s extraordinarily gorgeous art, which inhabits the 19th century as comfortably as it lives in the 21st.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, L.A., (323) 933-9911, through Jan. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com.

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Forms bathed in icy light

Raimonds Staprans’ mid-size paintings come straight out of Cezanne, streamlining and separating the French painter’s blocky forms that gave birth to Cubism and inserting big chunks of empty space between them. Staprans bathes these spaces in icy light, treating tabletop still lifes no differently than expansive landscapes: as equally valid reasons to make seemingly empty space solid, robust, muscular.

The Latvia-born, San Francisco-based painter’s oils on canvas at the Peter Mendenhall Gallery are West Coast versions of European Modernism. Like Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud, Staprans is as interested in locking every part of every picture into place as he is in giving shape to a particular place or mood. What his art lacks in excitement and innovation, it makes up for in tasteful seriousness.

Peter Mendenhall Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 936-0061, through Dec. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.petermendenhallgallery.com.

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