Around The Galleries

For many, landscape photography need proceed no further than the majestic idylls of Ansel Adams, but in 1975, an exhibition titled “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” presented a new approach to landscape that has quietly infiltrated the mainstream of art photography. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore and the other artists in that show, which was first presented at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and is now being restaged at LACMA, created spare, straightforward images, most often in black and white, that depicted not the glories of pristine nature but how it had been transformed by human intervention.

“Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies” at Sam Lee Gallery is a thought-provoking look at how nine contemporary artists are updating this aesthetic. It includes pieces by two artists from the original exhibition -- Lewis Baltz and Frank Gohlke. These works, in particular Baltz’s small, 1977 images of bleak Nevada landscapes, function as touchstones, allowing us to evaluate how their dispassionate, matter-of-fact approach appears in the exhibition’s other works.

Baltz and his contemporaries were interested in stripping landscape photography of its romantic tendencies. The younger artists in this show combine that clear-eyed vision with humor, new technologies and narrative to suggest a different kind of psychic investment in the environment.

Paho Mann’s photos of vacated Circle K convenience stores are straightforward documents of generic, corporate architecture repurposed by smaller businesses, often to amusing effect. Each of his nine images is a full-frontal view of what looks like the same building: a nondescript modernist box with large windows and an overhang in front.

However, each structure is a different, former Circle K that, like a paper doll, has been variously re-dressed as “Mr. Formal” (a tuxedo rental shop), “Big Apple Cleaners” or “Carniceria Cuerrero.” Although Mann’s relentlessly similar compositions attest to the corporate homogenization of the landscape, they also offer a glimmer of hope that this blankness might be a canvas for a more quirky, local presence to assert itself.

Several artists use GPS technology, a quantitative take on landscape that the “New Topographics” artists would (and do) appreciate. Margot Anne Kelley pairs her landscape photos with first-person texts about her adventures in geo-caching, a kind of treasure hunt in which participants hide caches of various things and post their GPS coordinates to a website for others to locate. Christiana Caro used GPS to locate places exactly 10 miles from her home in eight directions and took 365-degree panoramas at each spot. Unfortunately, only one of them, a wooded area, is on view.

Similarly underrepresented is Gohlke’s project, a collaboration with poet Herbert Gottfried, in which they use GPS to explore a particular latitude line and respond to what they see. Serial projects such as these are often more interesting as ideas than visuals anyway, but it might have been better to keep the show more focused than to include such small sections of these works.

More successful is Andrew Freeman’s series “[Manzanar] Architectural Double.” When Freeman learned that the barracks from Manzanar, a World War II Japanese American internment camp, had been relocated all over California after the war, he set out to find them. His photographs of their new locations and identities as apartments, garages, even museums, are poignant evidence of how a national shame becomes part of the everyday landscape. As such, the series excavates history hidden in plain view and, like Mann’s recycled Circle Ks, suggests how a certain architectural blankness can be a clean slate for starting over.

Also included are works by Adam Thorman, Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe.

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“Locating Landscape,” Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., No. 190, Los Angeles. (323) 227-0275, through Dec. 5. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www .samleegallery.com

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Motherhood and life’s transience

It may seem self-indulgent to create an exhibition about one’s own pregnancy, but Danica Phelps manages to tie it to a larger sense of life’s transience. Her exhibition of drawings and video at Kathryn Brennan Gallery explores motherhood in a way that feels honest without being overly sentimental.

She records pregnancy’s inevitable physical changes in a six-second video composed of still shots, taken over several months, of herself standing naked in a bedroom. Her belly grows, but the room undergoes an even more drastic change, transforming from a cluttered work-space to a stately boudoir, complete with four-poster bed and dark wooden armoires. “Growing up” is figured as both a temporal and spatial transition.

Time and space are also intertwined in a group of spare pencil drawings of Phelps and her son. Executed in a thin yet confident line, each depicts a variety of everyday scenes whose contours overlap and intersect. In previous works, Phelps used this effect to convey the subjective passing of time, but here the layering takes on an added dimension, connoting an intense, almost claustrophobic closeness between mother and child.

This kind of condensation is reflected in the show’s title, “Drawings About the Present Quickly Become Works About the Past,” which is written on the wall in letters made alternately out of scrap paper, drawings and real flowers. Although these ephemeral materials illustrate the meaning of the phrase, they are also a little cliched -- dying flowers are an overused shorthand for the impermanence of life.

But Phelps makes an interesting connection between drawing and those moments (like becoming a parent) when we are conscious of time passing. Both are transitions between the present as we know it and the past as we choose to remember it.

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Danica Phelps, Kathryn Brennan Gallery, 955 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. (213) 628-7000, through Nov. 14. Closed Monday and Tuesday. www .kathrynbrennan.com

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Some incredible feats of dexterity

Laura Riboli’s spare but intriguing exhibition at Redling Fine Art takes a close look at the relationship between the body and geometry. In two projected video loops and a handful of photographs, Riboli juxtaposes perfect forms -- a ball and a hula hoop, both pure white -- with the lines of the figure. Each video features the same lithe young woman in a gray leotard and tights performing remarkable feats of dexterity and flexibility with one of the objects: rolling the ball along the back of her shoulders or flipping the hoop over and around her body.

Cropped tightly to create dynamic compositions, the projections read like moving abstract paintings, portraits of the body in thrall to geometry. This relationship becomes even clearer in a pair of photographs.

One is an image of the white ball alone on a black ground; the other depicts the woman in a graceful back bend that emulates the spherical form. This equivalence between object and body reveals, not surprisingly, the body’s failure to mimic the form exactly; but, in highlighting this gap between ideal and reality, the work debunks in a small way the quest for absolute transcendence that has characterized much abstract art, from Malevich to Rothko.

Instead, there is a kind of classicism in Riboli’s images. Perfect shapes like the sphere and the circle have formed the building blocks of representations of the body -- think of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” inscribed in his perfect circle. In this way, Riboli’s works trace the flickering line between representation and abstraction, reminding us that all images are an intertwining of the two.

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Laura Riboli, Redling Fine Art, 932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. (323) 230-7415, through Nov. 29. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.red lingfineart.com

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Follow the bouncing exhibit

Rubber can be a funny material. It’s bouncy and used to make things like whoopee cushions and rubber chickens.

Jeanne Silverthorne takes advantage of these associations to poke fun at artistic genius by reproducing its hallowed site -- the studio -- almost entirely out of rubber. At Shoshana Wayne Gallery, the installation includes a faux-wood patterned rubber chair and easel, a trash can full of rubber light bulbs, several rubber shipping crates and of course, rubber plants, complete with ambitious rubber ants.

Silverthorne seems to exhort us not to take art so seriously, but her pliant studio artifacts are also laced with signs of decay and disease. There are dying flowers, tiny flies and candles shaped like DNA sequences for mental afflictions like depression and panic (also all made of rubber). The quiet charm of the exhibition emerges as it uses this dark sense of humor to buoy the inevitable doubts and failures of artistic practice.

The objects function on several levels, one of which is simply that they are made from an unexpected medium.

The chair, easel and crates look like wood but are made of rubber, which turns them into a species of cartoon prop that one imagines might go bouncing or shimmying around the room.

But then there are objects like the trash can of light bulbs studded with flies, which could be just that, but might also be a metaphor for discarded, rotten ideas.

Also of indeterminate status are the DNA candles, which could be artworks, but might also be read as novelties or a darkly humorous statement about artistic practice fueled by mental disorder.

This multivalent approach allows the pieces’ goofy humor to surface alongside their more macabre implications, cleverly defusing some of the drama we normally associate with the depths of creativity.

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Jeanne Silverthorne, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave. No. B1, Santa Monica. (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.shoshanawayne.com