Tangles energize, take flight

In several new wall works plus a large installation that cascades down from the rafters and up over the rear gallery wall, Jacob Hashimoto gets his kite strings all tangled up. That’s a good thing. The twist energizes compelling work that, in the past, has sometimes seemed too tastefully sedate.

At Otero Plassart, the wall-work “On a Pitch Black Lake” employs materials Hashimoto has used for several years. Hundreds of small “kites” made from bamboo and Japanese paper are suspended in space from wooden dowels, which protrude from plexiglass wall-mounts. These nominal kites are layered, here anywhere from six to 12 deep, in a work that is more than six feet tall and wider than a viewer’s outstretched arms.

Most of the circular kites are translucent white, which makes the spatial flow ambiguous; numerous ones in the lower rear are decorated in geometric patterns of bright color -- red and blue squares against yellow, for example, reminiscent of something by Ellsworth Kelly, or jaunty rainbow plaids. An irregular, overall pattern of black disks punctuates the work’s visually delicate, indeterminate surface.

Like the other kites, the black discs are held in place with black nylon string. Unlike earlier works that I’ve seen -- Hashimoto lived in Los Angeles before moving to New York a few years ago -- these strings don’t form a three-dimensional vertical and horizontal grid that organizes the image.

Instead, the black lines zigzag, intersect and intertwine, tugging at the implied physical orderliness of the abstract image. Like gathering energy in a supersaturated, ionizing cloud-chamber, the black dots seem to be gathering toward the center of billowing white atmosphere, while a curving vertical row at the right pulls everything from the center toward the edge. One result is that the work’s luminous three-dimensional structure transforms into a quiet but determined force field.

For the installation work, Hashimoto has pulled out all the stops.

Building on a work he made for the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Italy, earlier this year, “Forests Collapse Upon Forests” is a huge cascade of large, white-paper disks suspended on black string. From one that rests askew on the floor, hundreds of others rise up in a cloud that undulates back toward the rear wall, sliding over its open top and out of view.

The effect is like a mountain landscape in a Japanese screen painting, although the light-filled space of the room stands in for a flat-screen painting’s reflective gold-leaf. Against this Eastern motif, Hashimoto poses Western and Middle Eastern abstractions: Vertical lines of disks are decorated with patterns as simple as modern stripes and as complex as centuries-old paisley.

Toward the rear, a thick, dense swarm of paper birds and butterflies disturbs the scene, their frozen but furious flapping enhanced by fat, twisted tangles of black string. The tangles are disturbing. At first they seem like an error, snarls signaling a kite’s imminent downfall. Then it emerges as an insistent warning, as forests collapse upon forests.

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Otero Plassart, 820 N. Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood, (323) 951-1068, through Nov. 7. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.otero plassart.com

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Photographs that

ask questions

Rarely is there enough visual information in a photograph by Elad Lassry to quite tell what is going on in the picture. That’s the reverse of what most photographs intend, dedicated as they typically are to delivering data selectively plucked from the quotidian world. Since we live in an engorged image-environment, where we are continuously hectored by photographs that purport to be telling us stuff, the subtle absence disorients.

Lassry’s marvelously peculiar show of a dozen recent photographs and a film at David Kordansky Gallery seems determined to head in a different direction from the photographic norm. He pulls information out of his pictures, draining it away.

Sometimes the method takes a while to see. A purple stripe down the center of what appears to be a publicity still obscures the show-biz image of a female entertainer who, at the margins, appears to be all spangles, ostrich feathers and curly blond hair. Look closely, though, and the stripe has been scratched and flaked, exposing bits of the hidden woman underneath; she becomes a postmodern Gypsy Rose Lee.

Sometimes the method is simple. The colored frames of these modestly sized C-prints, each about 11 by 14 inches, derive their hues from the dominant color within the photograph. For a couple of traditional black-and-white gelatin silver-prints, the frames turn out to be silver. In both cases the gesture italicizes photography’s inherent artificiality, which is routinely obscured by our submersion in the image-world.

This repetitive gesture also establishes a larger frame of reference -- one that gets interrupted in the middle of the show and overturned at the end. Halfway through the sequence of still photographs, a 16-millimeter film is projected in a continuous loop on the wall. Slightly larger than the stills, the size of the moving image seems to reflect our natural inclination to give more attention to a movie’s time-based demands -- or, come to think of it, is that extra attentiveness acculturated, a learned behavior?

At the end, reading all the pictures from left to right, a cluster of four snapshots shows a couple of young boys playing basketball in an ordinary domestic driveway. Do the gold frames on these pictures, which don’t appear to follow the material logic of the colored and silver frames we’ve just seen, sanctify the youthful imagery of play?

The works in this exhibition, Lassry’s second gallery solo, play with a variety of established photographic forms, including animal images, advertising, nudes, souvenir snapshots, portraiture and more. It’s hard to make a photograph ask a question, but Lassry makes the questioning look easy.

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David Kordansky Gallery, 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 558-3030, through Oct. 24. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.davidkordanskygallery .com

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A critique

via credit cards

From the department of “the more things change, the more they stay the same” comes Conceptual artist John Knight’s “Worldebt,” a 1994 work that resonates anew today. Lining the walls at Richard Telles Fine Art, most of a set of 165 slightly oversized credit cards represent a mid-20th-century example of the tidy profits to be gained from investing in the cruelty of disaster capitalism.

The fictional bank cards were made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, established at a meeting in the northern wilds of Bretton Woods, N.H., a year before the end of World War II. Each card sports a National Geographic-style lithographic photo of a nation whose banking system subsequently saw IMF intervention. Knight’s initials replace the “trademark” sign next to the word “Worldebt,” while the telephone number of the bank’s fraud and corruption hot line substitutes for an account number.

The alphabetically arranged selection of cards begins with Afghanistan and here ends with Russia, while Kuwait, Laos, Malawi and many more come in between. Midway through the lineup a card is turned over; the small print on the back explains an expressed need “to ensure the continuous flow of capital into the world market,” so that foreign investment might remain profitable.

For whom it might remain profitable is not explained. But in economically bleak 2008, Wall Street did pay $18 billion in year-end bonuses to its New York City employees.

The show is nicely timed for another anniversary -- the first anniversary of America’s most recent banking collapse, with its colossal quotient of pain for all but the wealthiest. (Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson recently charted America’s transformation into a giant

banana republic.) In light of it, the linear installation of the cards at a four-foot height around the gallery is the show’s most powerful component: To see the works, it is incumbent upon a compliant viewer to bend over.

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Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Oct. 24. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.tellesfineart .com

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Embracing

fading loveliness

The rough, burlap-like canvas used by French artist Cristof Yvore is complemented by his blunt painting style and a palette of somber hues. Heavy and bleak, the still lifes set against blank walls and the scenes of empty interiors provide sallow contemplative grist.

In the 14 works from the past two years at Michael Kohn Gallery, Yvore paints light over dark, so that shadows cast across a table top or floor by a vase of flowers or a protruding wall appear almost carved into the picture’s dense surface. Even when the paint is thinned and runny, any illumination feels contradictorily thick and weighted down.

A shallow white dish, placed at a table’s (and the canvas’) edge; views down toward the floor across an empty room, into which light from an unseen outside source seems unable to fully penetrate; a few big but drooping blooms in a brown vase, adjacent to what appears to be a small portable television set -- Yvore has chosen subjects that embrace downcast conventionality rather than distinction.

These are not the tender accumulations of humble but admired objects in the manner of Giorgio Morandi, nor are they the ordinary objects in a studio from which a bit of warmth might be coaxed, as Vija Celmins did in the 1960s. Instead, a fading loveliness is embraced for its own sake -- a loveliness that includes painting.

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Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., (323) 658-8088, through Oct. 24. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.kohngallery .com