Advertisement

‘Contradictions and Complexities’

Share
Special to The Times

“Contradictions and Complexities: Contemporary Art From India,” on view at both d.e.n. contemporary and Western Project, takes a straightforward approach to an impossibly broad subject, presenting not an argument, overview or analysis but rather a tantalizing sampler: six artists whose names you may not know but whose work deserves your attention.

The show’s two abstractionists -- Santana Gohain and Shobha Broota -- prove a handsome pairing at Western Project. Gohain’s large, script-covered panels, made with layers of chalk, graphite and paper in shades of slate gray and white, have an air of esoteric significance reminiscent of ancient tablets or plates from an aged printing press. Broota’s canvases, comparable in scale, are airy and meditative, characterized by concentric circles and squares cast in genial shades of pink, orange and sky blue, some painted, others wrapped in strips of shaggy, garland-like fabric.

The work at d.e.n., by contrast, is primarily photo-based and conceptual. Sheba Chhachhi‘s roughly two dozen photographs document a nomadic band of female ascetics, exploring the process by which personal identity is renounced and eradicated in favor of a divine purpose.

Advertisement

Mithu Sen, who is a generation younger, adorns photographs of people, body parts and a variety of vaguely erotic objects (a pair of shoes, a lock of hair, a mannequin) with rhinestones and other decorative elements to draw out aspects of both the fanciful and the grotesque.

Anita Dube is one of the more established artists in the group, and the dynamic scope of her production is difficult to grasp from the handful of mixed-media pieces on view here. (The gallery’s copies of her previous catalogs are well worth a perusal.) Her one video piece, however -- a 15-minute, single-channel projection in which the artist assumes the persona of a male shopkeeper to expound on such topics as love, religion, politics, art and fascism -- is among the show’s highlights.

Another is the contribution of Chitra Ganesh, an artist in her early 30s who was actually born and raised in New York City (most of the others live in New Delhi). In a hauntingly strange and beautiful photographic triptych -- the artist appears in a wooded landscape, nude but for a pair of ruffled briefs and a crone-like mask with long black braids -- as well as in several digital collages that appear to be based on old Indian comic-book panels, Ganesh explores a sort of mythologically inflected erotic surrealism, with both political and poetic implications.

That all six of these artists are women was apparently incidental but lends a subtle sense of cohesion to the exhibition. Organized by Patricia Hamilton and Peter Nagy, both dealers (here and in New Delhi, respectively), the show reflects an infectious degree of curatorial enthusiasm but succeeds primarily -- as such shows should -- because of the distinction of its artists.

d.e.n. contemporary, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-3023, through Aug. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.dencontemporaryart.com. Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through Aug. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.western-project.com.

Inspired by the Santa Ana winds

Advertisement

If one ideal for that often attempted but rarely perfected curatorial form known as the group show is that it amounts, in some sense, to more than the sum of its parts, “Red Wind” at Blum & Poe achieves that through the cultivation not of a coherent theme so much as an atmospheric climate: a visual tone comparable to the peculiar sensory and psychological effects of the famed Santa Ana winds, aptly summarized by the show’s organizers as “a collective visceral sense of foreboding.”

The show begins with a vaguely menacing installation of wind chimes by Mungo Thomson, all black in color and dead still in the draft-less gallery. A low, steady buzz issues from an antique-looking generator in the opposite corner, as if amplifying vibrations from the bowels of the Earth, in a piece by Peter Coffin. A photograph by Mark Wyse depicts a rock face stained with traces of red.

In several works, this earthy disquiet takes a gothic turn. Jedediah Caesar‘s ominously titled series “0,000,000” consists of numerous table-sized resin disks studded with bits of plaster, dirt and other semi-organic detritus, suggesting fragments of geological extraction or some kind of post-apocalyptic patio furniture. Christina Lei Rodriguez‘s “White Fly I, White Fly II,” an installation of small ficus trees coated in melted plastic, epoxy, foam, paint, tinsel, metal studs, rhinestones and chain mesh, might have come from the same “Dune”-like fantasy.

Two dynamic sculptures by Liz Larner embody the spontaneous violence that the Santa Anas are said to inspire. The first, “high-strength,” is an explosion of aluminum tubes, steel and cables, about the size of a very large tumbleweed; the other, “Plash,” is a cast pewter fist that appears to be slamming into a puddle of water on the flat surface of a pedestal.

The show’s one burst of light comes with Coffin’s enchanting “Untitled (Rainbow)”: a collection of 30 photographs arranged in such a way that the rainbows streaking the sky in each form a smooth, contiguous spiral pattern while the corners of the prints skew at all angles -- a magical balance of chaos and cohesion.

Works by Anya Gallaccio, Thomas Helbig, Jennifer Nocon, Markus Selg, Anna Sew Hoy and Katja Strunz round out the selection in a mostly complementary manner, sustaining the mood without particularly standing out.

The show’s title comes from the Raymond Chandler story of the same name, as does its epigraph, a famous passage extolling “those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” It’s a feeling most Southern Californians know well, persuasively embodied here.

Advertisement

Blum & Poe, 2754 La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 836-2062, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe.com.

Lively sculptures sure to surprise

“American Primitive,” Mason Cooley‘s third exhibition at China Art Objects, is accompanied by a statement that spans two single-spaced pages -- which would typically be cause for suspicion, given the inversely proportional relationship, in most cases, between artistic resonance and verbal accompaniment. It is especially peculiar here, however, inasmuch as Cooley spends the first paragraph of this statement declaring his intention to “turn away from methods of representation and toward an exploration of the ontological condition of artworks in their embodied state.”

“I am interested,” he writes, “in how and why sculpturesexist over what they represent.”

Why he bothers to spend four more bulky, italics-laden and none too lucid paragraphs elaborating on this succinct and otherwise estimable sentiment is unclear.

Fortunately, the work appears to have escaped this verbal barrage unscathed and succeeds admirably in its strictly embodied state. Made primarily from cleanly cut, sometimes painted plywood, with stones, pieces of driftwood, antlers and a handful of other accents winding through, the show’s half-dozen sculptures are lively, handsomely crafted and full of surprises, with lots of intriguing twists and turns and cozily interlocking pieces. They hint at functionality -- one work takes the form of a bench; another suggests a sort of dwelling -- while maintaining an air of decorative whimsy, suggesting a character both pragmatic and mysterious.

At a time when grad schools are regularly advocating the statement as an indispensable facet of artistic production, the contrast here is illuminating. Language (like its gussied-up cousin, theory) can be extremely useful from time to time, but it tends to fade toward irrelevance in the face of a genuinely well-crafted object.

China Art Objects, 933 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 613-0384, though July 26. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chinaartobjects.com.

Advertisement

Ghostly tribute to neighborhoods

The paintings in Matty Byloos’ first solo show at Sandroni Rey are portraits of architectural ghosts, their subjects an assortment of suburban tract homes demolished in the mid-1970s to make way for an expansion of LAX. The houses appear in a state of crisp realism, one per canvas, floating in fields of tempestuous color, as if carved wholesale from the fabric of the city and set adrift in some sort of pictorial purgatory.

The concept is a bit simplistic: a basic formula melding two exceedingly well-worn motifs (the suburban milieu and the painterly gesture) repeated more or less identically in every piece. The effect is luscious nonetheless, with the turbulent, richly hued backdrops emerging as luxurious visual worlds of their own, seductive but, insofar as these houses are concerned, fundamentally desolate.

It is a formula one could apply to any number of neighborhoods around Los Angeles -- ours is a city of such ghosts -- and it comes across here as a humble but poignant tribute.

Sandroni Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 280-0111, through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sandronirey.com.

Advertisement