Beyond the beaded curtains, a uniquely L.A. experience

AS KORI NEWKIRK stands amid his very mixed-media retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, it’s not easy, he confesses, to explain what it all means.

The show vividly reflects his tendency toward the peripatetic, incorporating photography and encaustic (or hot wax painting), video and the waxy hairstyling aid pomade, as well as collage and sculptural elements such as his beaded curtains (constructed from artificial hair extensions and pony beads) and elongated, Rapunzel-like basketball hoops made of the same.

A collaboration between L.A.’s Fellows of Contemporary Art -- a nonprofit that supports emerging and mid-career artists -- and the Studio Museum of Harlem, the exhibition “Kori Newkirk: 1997-2007” first opened in Newkirk’s hometown of New York City. However, it centers entirely on work the artist created in Southern California, spanning a decade in which he’s lived and worked in downtown Los Angeles.

“My attitude is, I just live here, I’m not of here,” Newkirk, 38, says. “I’m still trying to find my place here. I’m always in flux.” In other words, his is, ironically, a very L.A. experience, with the city itself exerting some influence on his art, most clearly in the show’s earliest examples.

Take his two 1999 self-portraits, “Channel 11” and “Channel 9,” in which the artist disguises his identity a la TV’s “Cops” by mimicking pixelization with encaustic in the former and digitally blurring a photograph in the latter. For both, Newkirk, a tall, thin African American, has donned T-shirts -- one blue, one red -- that are deeply symbolic to the South Los Angeles neighborhood where he once taught high school art. “It’s about what it felt like to look like me and be me in this city,” he says.

This concept of self-portraiture, of toying with representations of identity and stereotyping, pops up throughout the show. It reappears in a dark, stark photograph of a nude Newkirk adrift in a snowy landscape. Nearby lurks a small rubber great white chomping on a snowflake, as well as a separate wall adorned with milky blue encaustic sharks arranged in the delicate outline of such. Taken together, they show “the beauty and danger of two white things that can kill me,” he says.

That notion, of producing something beautiful but not merely so, of creating meaning as well as aesthetic experience, is a key element of Newkirk’s practice: “I think it’s totally possible to make beautiful things that mean something beyond eye candy,” he says.

As to that larger meaning, well, “I gave a talk to some Getty interns yesterday, and they brought up that maybe the whole show was one big self-portrait,” he says. It’s a point he’s willing to concede, but in a qualified way. “Most art is a sort of self-portrait. Even for artists who want to deny that, it’s all about us, our identities as people.” But, he adds, “I know I can’t speak for everyone, or even a lot of people, but I don’t want to just speak about me.”

Overall, in Newkirk’s opinion, his PMCA retrospective marks the end of a chapter in his artistic trajectory. For an inkling of where he’s headed next, viewers can visit his new LAXART installation. What exactly it looks like, Newkirk isn’t ready to divulge, but here’s the basic idea: “It’s a bit about architecture, and the idea of monument, and communication and our roles in all of that. If we even have roles in that. It’s about how we as people are reflected.”

If this sounds as if it has vague political undertones, it does. But that’s just where Newkirk likes his politics: submerged.

For another piece in the Pasadena show, Newkirk employed neon to complete a commission from L.A.’s Korean American Museum, which had asked artists to create site-specific pieces marking the 10-year anniversary of civil unrest after the Rodney G. King verdict. Newkirk selected a swap meet, then produced a deceptively straightforward phrase executed in clean white neon to place above its exit: “Take What You Can.”

“It’s sort of open-ended, like all my work,” he says. “Let people take what they can.”

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-- Mindy.Farabee@latimes.com

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‘KORI NEWKIRK: 1997-2007’

WHERE: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St.

WHEN: Noon-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun.; ends Sept. 14

PRICE: $7; free, first Fridays of the month

INFO: (626) 568-3665, pmcaonline.org

‘RANK’

WHERE: LAXART, 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City

WHEN: Opens 7-9 p.m. Saturday. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat.; ends Aug. 30

PRICE: Free

INFO: (310) 559-0166, laxart.org