Installation View, Rogue Wave, 2013. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

It’s July in Los Angeles, and as every hokey reality television show portrays, the beach beckons. I pass barefoot teenagers hustling toward the Venice promenade, Boogie boards in tow, and a motley crew of sand-encrusted terriers out for a midday stroll. My hands are already sticky from the brined air as I reach for the door of L.A. Louver—a gallery that has been situated in this coastal borough since 1975 but that still prioritizes the production of exhibitions reflective of industry sea change. The Rogue Wave series is the hallmark of the gallery’s investment in currents beyond those of the water, aiming to tease out the trends, techniques, and aesthetics of art made in Los Angeles at present. Now in its fifth installment, Rogue Wave 2013 features fifteen local artists—an ambitious survey curated by Chief Preparator Christopher Pate and Founding Director Peter Goulds—who are diverse in media but comparable in their collective interest in a process-driven practice. From painterly abstraction to durational photography, the vast majority of works in Rogue Wave 2013 substantiate the claim that Los Angeles houses an ever-rising tide of emerging talent.

Installation view, Rogue Wave, 2013. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Arguably, not all of the featured artists in the exhibition are expressly rogue, but it is this intersection of nascent and esteemed careers that gives Rogue Wave its significance. Recent MFA graduates are placed in conversation with artists collected by dozens of public institutions, yet commonalities in both concept and process can easily be extrapolated: forbearance is at risk, instant gratification is fruitless, and social cognizance is not synonymous with unedited dissemination. We can all agree that our ideas about time are becoming increasingly disparate as technology and globalism march forward, a concern manifested through the equally diverse paintings, drawings, installations, photographs, and sculptures installed throughout the gallery’s exhibition space. Though each artist in the exhibition affords a valuable contribution to this analysis, I found particular resonance with the work from five particular artists: Sarah Awad, Matthew Brandt, Asad Faulwell, Owen Kydd, and Eric Yahnker.

Sarah Awad, Untitled (Reclining Woman), 2013, oil on canvas, 65 x 95 in. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Awad’s voluptuous, harlequin forms deliver us to a fauvist yesteryear—rife with the sensory romanticism of loose curves and capricious brushstrokes. Her figures are paused in heedless repose, as if wholly engrossed in the finer details of their physicality and being. A sharp contrast to the contemporary desire for uniformity and idealism, Awad’s women appear at peace with their vulnerability—creating a kind of epicurean mood that is both alluring and intimidating.

Matthew Brandt, Rainbow Lake WY 1, 2013, C-print soaked in Rainbow Lake water, 72 x 105 in. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

During a period in which haste is king, Brandt actively works toward deceleration. He is process-oriented to the point of complete absorption—in the most literal sense. Brandt’s images of lakes and reservoirs appear as scorched or hallucinatory landscapes, a result achieved by submerging his C-prints in the water pulled from the depicted pool itself. In Brandt’s hands, the subject becomes the material as well as the procedure, resulting in sublime abstractions that bespeak a performative aspect to his technique, as well as the human act of recollection.

Asad Faulwell, Les Femmes d’Alger #27, 2013, acrylic, paper, and pins on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Faulwell’s intricate portraiture of female freedom fighters from the 1950s and 1960s are obsessively elaborate in their detail. An amalgamation of the textures and patterns found in Moroccan textiles, mosaics, and embroidery, Faulwell’s radiant embellishment serves as a stark contrast to the ghostly, hollow-eyed women he renders. His frenetic ornamentation celebrates their unheralded magnificence, at once paying homage to both their complex political affiliations and the popular expectations of feminine domestic craftsmanship. By immortalizing their narratives in ornate acrylic paint, paper, and pins, Faulwell conjures a past that delineates an eerily topical present.

Owen Kydd, Retail Composition, 2013, video on two 40-inch displays with media player, edition of three. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

In an adept fusion of new media art and early still life photography, Kydd’s durational photographs deny the stagnant nature of the archival. Presented on digital monitors, Kydd’s still-life compositions capture movement at a nearly indiscernible pace, giving a subtle illusive quality to everyday objects. Requiring the rapt attention and focus of the viewer, Kydd’s work challenges the increasingly dismissive and impatient nature of our modern culture, thus reactivating the tradition of mindful art viewing and intellectual presence.

Eric Yahnker, Epiphany (The King Grabs Crotch), 2013, colored pencil on paper, 72 x 96 in. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Yahnker’s faithful (but comically warped) colored pencil reproductions of historical and pop-cultural icons hide a bitter pill just beneath a deliciously farcical surface. Of the two works featured in this exhibition, Epiphany (The King Grabs Crotch) (2013) feels astutely apropos; a midthrust Michael Jackson seamlessly interjected into Jacob Jordaens’s seventeenth-century Flemish baroque painting, The King Drinks. Surrounded by unruly and voracious guests of a bygone Christmas feast, the self-declared “King of Pop” appears a simultaneously glorified and tragic monarch—a testament to how quickly the unforgiving tides of popular reverence can turn. Perhaps it is this sentiment that is most shrewdly evident in Rogue Wave 2013, be it clearly delineated or hinted at with an elegant minimalism. The ebb and flow of demand and critical proclamation may prove tempestuous, but the artists featured in this exhibition prove that with enough creative perseverance, one can stay afloat long enough to see the horizon. For Angelenos, it looks quite promising.

Rogue Wave is on view at L.A. Louver through August 23, 2013.

On September 15, 2008, contemporary artist Damien Hirst took an unprecedented risk. Bypassing the normal protocol enforced by his partnering galleries and dealers, Hirst took 223 of his own works to auction at Sotheby’s Auction House (London), resulting in a two-day sale marketed as an ephemeral, high-stakes solo exhibition titled Beautiful Inside My Head. The event was strictly all-ticket and limited to 656 clients, arguably ironic considering this was Hirst’s attempt to “democratize” the sale of his artwork. The high estimate for the combined sales of Hirst’s works was £98 million; by the end of the second evening, the lot had totaled £111.5 million—and represented the peak of the contemporary art market.(1) Simultaneously in New York City, Lehman Brothers was in the process of processing the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history— revealing losses of $639 billion, kickstarting what would shortly become the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. In this environment, how would any business—much less the small niche of contemporary art galleries—survive?

Damien Hirst. For the Love of God, 2007; Image courtesy of Aaron Weber and Flickr.com.

Partnerships have served as one successful facet of the coping strategy devised by dealers to survive the tightening scope of the art market. In forging a well-regarded community brand, Culver City galleries had the advantage of being able to address some of the early needs of the Knowledge Age consumer by providing multiple options in one location. At the same time, because of falling real estate prices, the prospects for both large and developing galleries to buy space instead of renting became increasingly feasible, along with a lessening of the strain on midsize and emerging galleries in the same area, thereby creating a more solidified network of eclectic art spaces. Being in Culver City allows the galleries and the consumers to be part of a more diverse art community, and not just one gallery.

At the same moment, the advent of additional technologies expanded the Castellian notion of the provincial gallery network: in fact, the very idea of a province could be taken online, where it could be defined as a part of a localized or branded gallery culture. One of the more successful examples of this is Artsy, founded by Princeton undergraduate Carter Cleveland after trying to search for a “cool” piece of artwork in a gallery-deprived New Jersey town.(2) Cleveland wanted to fill the void between gallery communities and non-local budding collectors, making all the world’s art available to anyone with an Internet connection.  With the help of partners, advisers and backers like the infamous gallerist Larry Gagosian, the Russian art-world celebrity, Dasha Zhukova, and John Elderfield, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, Cleveland was able to quickly develop a product that offered a user-friendly platform and global interconnectivity at essentially zero cost to either user (gallerist or collector).

Sebastian Cwilich (left) and Carter Cleveland (right) at Haunch of Venison, 2011. Photo: Eric Ogden.

With 275 galleries and fifty museums and institutions as partners, Artsy has digitized twenty thousand images into its reference system, which it calls the Art Genome Project. Each partnering gallery or institution retains full control over the images uploaded to their individual profiles, and can maintain an easily accessed, online active inventory of their available works or exhibitions.  Once uploaded, a team of art historians “tag” the work with terms associated with certain genres, movements, techniques, or styles, which then enters that work into dialogue with like-minded works listed in the index.  The average browser can be introduced to thousands of artists, galleries, and institutions simply by defining his or her general preferences within a given image gallery. From the gallerists, Artsy simply asks for 3 percent of the net sale price of any work sold through the website, which is less than the average gallery salesperson earns on a sale commission.  Furthermore, with no required membership or listing fees, Artsy offered an attractive, progressive alternative to pre-existing online inventory listings and databases like ArtNet, which do not ask for commissions on sales, but require monthly hosting dues upwards of $350. And Artsy is merely one brand within the groundswell of economical online art platforms.

This new way of conducting business is less a viable replacement for the gallery business model than a compliment to it, but in the post-2008 economic climate, access has become an infinitely more critical aspect of the gallery world than what the original “White Cube” attitude may have prescribed. Today, access is about availability in both time and space. “One hand washes the other,” says Bennett Roberts of Roberts and Tilton. “You must have both [an online presence and a physical space] to reach the audience you want.”(3)

An illustration promoting a smartphone application being developed by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Image courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

In the Knowledge Age, access is about being there when the individual wants you to be there; there is no single method for being there for people.  In other words, access can be achieved through physical location [as well as] by the use of technology. The arts province of Los Angeles (as developed by the Ferus-era galleries) is divided into sub-provincial states of encounter, which includes the brand of the Culver City gallery community, and that sub-province is divided further into multiple forms of online presence and collaborative byproducts.  In testing and implementing the adaptive gallery model required for sustainability and advancement, contemporary art galleries in the post-2008 recession environment (like those in Culver City) have managed to navigate and make use of various avenues for interactivity and exchange.

Of course, this leads us to question where galleries will find themselves as the economy continues to shift.  Will physical gallery culture, which responds to the unique socioeconomic environment of a given time, eventually be rendered obsolete?  Art dealers today claim not, but many feel that the traditional boundaries of the brick-and-mortar gallery are beginning to feel strain.  The desire to be everywhere at once with inventory for every possible configuration of collector, coupled with the increasing advent of art fairs in every city in the world, will ultimately take its toll. Yet despite the hardships, the changes made within the Culver City gallery community represent an advance in the methodologies employed by contemporary art dealers—not mere temporary adjustments—and as technology and consumer expectations continue to develop and change, so will gallery culture, as it always has.

Catlin Moore is currently the Director of Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, CA. Some citations have been eliminated for the sake of brevity.

Big Geezers in Culver City, 2008, Ori. Courtesy Flickr / Creative Commons

The popular perception of the contemporary art gallery is one of inaccessibility and elitism.  By and large, the gallery’s reputation is one of isolated sanctity, an entity that sustains itself through a preserved set of conventions and a closed system of values. The walls shall be white, the prices shall be hidden, and the information shall be guarded by inhospitable staff; ideally, the formality of the visitor’s experience obfuscates all cues that suggest it is “art” on display, rather than the chamber and ritual itself. The fastidious effort to highlight the prowess of a gallery’s brand over its actual exhibitions oftentimes conceals the necessity of its inherently commercial aspects.  The sale of art must take place in order for the contemporary or fine art gallery to exist—a seemingly obvious notion that is often obscured behind a defensive shield of ceremoniousness—a behavior that projects the illusion of a higher pedagogical purpose.  However, the conventional art gallery is still subject to the realities of any commercial business model, that is, the inherent fluctuations of a global economy and demand-driven market.  Given this, and the notions of an industry reputably built upon an aristocratic character, how does the structure and purpose of the gallery survive, adapt, evolve, and thrive?  How does the historical trajectory of the gallery model affect its progress moving forward?

The business model of such galleries is based upon a popular “provincial”[1] gallery model first pioneered by New York gallerist Leo Castelli. Fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris, Castelli arrived in the United States along with the advent of Abstract Expressionism, entering a New York bustling with the kind of desperate art creation he had connected with in Europe. Hoping to rescue the American art market from its “impasse” of selling work, Castelli opened his first New York space in his home on February 3, 1957.  He needed no more than a few hours to reorganize his own apartment; emptying the L-shaped living room, Castelli designated his daughter’s bedroom (she was away at Radcliffe) as his showroom. This literal internalization of his gallery practice exemplifies Castelli’s most unique quality, an outward demonstration of his personal investment in the work he showed.

Frank Stella, installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1960

Perhaps more important, however, was Castelli’s highly progressive business model.  The need to present important ideas in a language understood by investors (derived from his banking experience), the need to forge collaborative efforts with like-minded peers (derived from his military experience), and the need to consider local idiosyncrasies, resources and trends (derived from his international living experience) were considerations not previously integrated into the traditional art gallery model. In fact, history reveals quite the opposite—American art dealers were driven to sell only the most well known of European artworks.[2] Most contemporary dealers offered only “a small stock of domestic works amid a preponderance of foreign art,” and were so tied to merchant-inspired practice that the mere idea of collaboration with competitors was unheard of.  The existing model was a “buy low, sell higher” method of resale, not the maintenance of a gallery “roster” or artist  “representation,” which Castelli started to do in the 1950s.

Along with the above, Castelli’s development of the provincial gallery model was, in his words, “the quantum leap to something new.”[3] While the crux of his program was museum-like in its purpose to expose important “movements” rather than sell singular works, Castelli was not so egocentric as to dismiss the commercial realities of the gallery. According to Castelli, an important consideration for an artist should be how well his dealer distributes the work, and that he/she is making sure it is shown in other parts of the country, not to mention Europe. In the early ‘60s, Castelli formed collaborative relationships with dealers outside New York, including Europe and California, despite the drastic cut in his commissions.

Poster for The Studs group exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, 1964

Here in Los Angeles, Ferus Gallery also engaged in many of Castelli’s practices. As William R. Hackman writes, “Just as important as the exposure Ferus gave these young Los Angeles artists was its role in bringing to L.A. New York and European artists known locally only by reputation, if at all.”[4] This bi-coastal cooperation proved eye opening and (eventually) lucrative for not only a new generation of dealers and collectors in Los Angeles, but also their collaborative counterparts in other locations. As curator Paul Schimmel writes, “[This was] a period in American art when modernism, characterized by a master narrative of progress and succession, reached a dead end, and a multiplicity of movements, forms, and genres began to take shape simultaneously.”[5] It can be argued that Los Angeles galleries in the ‘60s functioned more fluidly than in any other city in the United States during this time, and that this kind of collaborative spirit, shared between artist and dealer, artist and artist, and dealer and dealer, remained idiosyncratic to Los Angeles until recent years.

Nicholas Wilder, of Ferus’s rival gallery, Nelson and Wilder, recalls La Cienega Boulevard as a place built on enthusiasm and ambition, where “the agenda was to make an art scene, to be important.”[6] Wilder’s gallery was one of nearly three-dozen galleries along the “spread of five art-choked blocks from the north 900s to the 500s and now spilling southward.”[7] Revisiting Castelli’s notions of collaboration and provincial thinking, the gallerists of La Cienega, while certainly commercially competing for the few local collectors in Los Angeles, embraced unprecedented modes of cooperation to forge (in a sense) a branded geographic identity and survival strategy, practices that have been built upon by contemporary art galleries in Los Angeles and beyond.  It could be argued that in addition to borrowing the entertainment industry’s tactic of self-generated momentum, in which businesses create the allure of a “hot scene” or a “happening,” this version of a “Gallery Row” also adopted the Marxist “power in numbers” policy often championed by Castelli.

With increasing national and international attention being paid to art and artists in Los Angeles, the community that cohered around La Cienega developed a strong sense of group identity, though one that expressed a growing feeling of unease about the implications of this publicity and about art’s broader role in society. This situation would be intensified in the mid-1960s, when the art community was mobilized in the name of political action in the first artist-led protests against the war in Vietnam. Almost as quickly as it boomed, however, the community would feel the radical effects of the financial repercussions wrought by the collapse of the aerospace industry.  The art market practically dissolved by the mid-1970s, and the lively ‘60s gallery scene of La Cienega Boulevard was devastated.

After 1970, areas like Downtown, East Los Angeles, and Mid-City, where studio rent for young artists was most affordable, quickly became alternative space neighborhoods, such as LACE and Womanspace, and later, REDCAT and the Chinatown Gallery district. Conversely, Venice and Santa Monica, home to studios of seminal artists like Vija Celmins and John Baldessari, soon became orthodox destinations, as did commercial gallery complexes like Bergamot Station in the early 1990s.  With the two primary gallery districts flung to either far side of Los Angeles (LACMA acting as the primary center point), and the increasing obstacles of freeway congestion and mileage between them, there seemed yet again an opportunity for a centralized gallery community; perhaps even a gallery community that appealed to the “middle class” of art collectors in terms of programming content, making a compromise between the rigorous conceptualism of alternative spaces and the decorative reputation of the “gallery malls.” It was exactly these traits that were on art dealer Jeffrey Poe’s mind when he drove through Culver City on January 1, 2003.

A crowded opening for Damian Hirst's "The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011," Gagosian Gallery, 2012

Principals in the contemporary art gallery partnership of Blum & Poe, Jeffrey Poe and Timothy Blum are often credited as “the pioneers”[8] of the Culver City Art District. The partners were the first to move to the area in 2003, and occupied what is currently Angles Gallery for three years, before purchasing and renovating a two-story concrete manufacturing plant (built in 1968) with nearly triple the footprint of their previous location. Blum & Poe has since become Culver City’s preeminent gallery destination, both because of its roster of thirty-seven international artists (which currently includes Sharon Lockhart and Takashi Murakami), and the 21,000-square-foot mega-gallery now located on the corner of Washington Boulevard and La Cienega Avenue.

Thirty-eight galleries are strewn in either direction from the intersection of La Cienega and Washington Boulevard, all of which opened after Blum & Poe’s 2003 move. Collectively they fall under the umbrella designation of “Culver City,” despite the fact that not all of these galleries are technically located within the city’s actual limits. In fact, more than half of the galleries identified as “Culver City” galleries actually fall within the city of Los Angeles, but aligning with the invented community brand affords a sense of immediate industry understanding:  if your gallery is located in Culver City, you show ambitious work; you are in close proximity to a number of flagship galleries; and your sense of gallery culture is the most dynamic and navigable within the province of Los Angeles.

In fact, “Culver City” has fast become understood as L.A.’s “art capital,” due in part to its newness and invented persona.  The district’s brand is part of the marketing and business strategy employed by each gallery in the area, and its resulting stature is a large part of how international collectors, dealers, and curators understand Los Angeles gallery culture. With a capital again established, the art world in Los Angeles has seen an increase in momentum and recognition.  At the same time, the economic downturn of the last several years has forced these same galleries to invent new ways to sustain themselves, both in terms of finance and cultural relevance. So how are gallery communities like these moving forward?

Catlin Moore is currently the Director of Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, CA. Some citations have been eliminated for the sake of brevity.

Installation View

Despite this electronic outburst, I am making every attempt to focus on the meditative installation in the back gallery of Ambach & Rice, and it hits a poignant nerve. The ability to concentrate on any singular thing has become an art form within itself. We are unremittingly multi-tasking, documenting, transmitting beings to which space – between thoughts or plans alike – is uncomfortable. Even in the face of social atrocities that beg for grave respite, we are cursory in our reflections because of a shared, trained inability to pause, to simply be present. Rocks & Clocks takes umbrage with this compulsion through a purposefully minimalist and elemental selection of works by Cameron Gainer, Mark Hagen, Emilie Halpern, and Mungo Thomson. On view through May 18^th, the group show confronts our collective anxieties about modern time and space in an elegant and quietly plaintive way.

Installation View

The aforementioned meditative installation – Sunrise/Sunset (2013) by Cameron Gainer – features a projected image through a sand-filled hand blown hourglass. What is initially a black wall gradually becomes a rich, citrusy sunset as the diminishing sand reveals the vista sliver by sliver. Within eighteen minutes, the last granule tumbles into the bottom half of the glass, and I am left with a stillness that is both comforting and unnerving. This artificial, static sunset has managed to seize more of my attention than the actual Los Angeles dusk does on a daily basis; not necessarily because it is more visually alluring, but because its manifestation of mortality is so precisely articulated.

Mungo Thomson's "Untitled (TIME)" (2010)

With a contrasting technique, Mungo Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) (2010) delineates a similar regard for the ephemeral by parodying our progressively accelerated attention spans. Over a mere two minutes and thirty seconds, eighty years’ worth of TIME Magazine covers flash upon the gallery wall in violently rapid succession. A maelstrom of pop cultural personalities and events eclipse one another before the eye can fully register their form, as if the relative notoriety of each cover’s subject has fallen from a center to peripheral view. An expedited impersonation of our fleeting interests and concerns, the work feels astutely topical in a moment when social media feeds vie for (often misinformed) headlines.

Emilie Halpern's "Big Dipper" (2010)

Mark Hagen’s To Be Titled – Subtractive Sculpture #11 (2013) bears a likeness to a prehistoric Larry Bell work, a rainbow obsidian slab balancing atop an elegant steel pedestal.  Hagen displays how removed we have become from our utilitarian roots, as if the inky block is an artifact from an era in which craft and function superseded perfection and immediacy.  Similarly, Emilie Halpern’s Big Dipper (2010) critiques our distance from cognizance. Suspended from the ceiling, a collection of found beach rocks stand in for the constellation’s stars, and vary in wire length relative to their distance from the earth. From an initial vantage point, the rocks appear completely abstract in their formation; but a quick glance to the mirror below their arrangement displays Halpern’s true composition. The distinctive constellation’s shape is reflected back at the viewer, revealing our present tendency to experience the world through mediated agencies as much as our oversights. Increasingly, we capture and observe moments in time through a series of screens and displays – simulacra of conscious actuality. From this perspective, the sunset is prolonged, the headline is bygone, the material is flawed, and the arrangement is random; but from a place of authenticity, we see the stars.

Installation View

Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Art Basel Miami 2012

Let’s begin with the facts. This year’s 12^th annual installment of Art Basel Miami Beach featured 257 exhibitors (excluding publications, institutions, or bookstores). This means 257 booths spanning the floor of the approximately 500,000 square foot bottom floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center. If you walk all eight north-to-south aisles (one way), you will canvas a little over two miles of carpeted ground. This does not include the shorter east-to-west aisles (of which there are six), or offsite partnering venues (of which there are three). Add to the mix the record attendance numbers (50,000 visitors) over a short period of time (four days) at the pricey cost of participation ($35,000 on average), and you have a bona fide contemporary art circus. At $42 a ticket, the show better be worth the cost of admission.

Photo by Andrew H. Walker / Getty Images

Needless to say, the costs associated with exhibiting in one such fair are astronomical. Beyond the cost of the booth itself (which runs $52 per square foot in the fair’s main section), a gallerist must consider packing, shipping, flights, meals, staff hotel accommodations, promotional expenses, possible furniture rental, client entertaining, and the omnipresent “unanticipated expense.” Need an extra light bulb in the booth? That’ll be $150 each. Lunch for the staff of four? $96 a day. Needless to say, the pressure to (at a minimum) break even on the expenses of participating in the headlining mega-fair oftentimes results in high-ticket inventory from high-ticket artists, leaving little room for the mid-career, emerging, or unknown set. So when a gallerist decides to feature the atypical – potentially, unsaleable – artists of his/her program, it can often be considered a bold, magnanimous statement. Moreover, to hold the attention of a collector is challenging enough when sensory overload is a fated plague, but to also attempt to capture their focus through an unorthodox sensory faculty requires certain panache. Enter: sound and video art; the conceptual, disenfranchised cousins of Basel’s long running triple feature, starring Koons, Murakami, and Warhol. This is not to say that presenting sound and video art at a venue like Art Basel Miami Beach is easily done, or even encouraged, by participating dealers. All signs typically point to “easily overlooked,” especially when competing with more commercially digestible works like the colossal Roy Lichtenstein in Gagosian’s booth, or the hustled parade of hip hop moguls weaving through the masses. However, a select few of these ambitious projects managed to cut through the white noise of the fair’s inner murmur, and conduct an alluring opus for the observant few.

Video Still, Courtesy of LeapLeapLeap Magazine

Shanghart Gallery’s (Shanghai, Beijing) presentation of Zhang Ding’s “Buddha Jumps over the Wall” (2012) offers a two-minute video tucked behind several lengthy tables of red-stained plaster fragments, as if the removal of a body cast has gone horribly awry. Set to an incongruously elegant soundtrack of soft classical music, the video’s explosive gunshots lure the viewer in to a staged annihilation of white plaster animals. Filled with red paint, the bleached creatures in the video are disturbingly-yet-gracefully pierced and dismembered, the illusion of blood flowing from their figures causing simultaneous agitation and intrigue. The push/pull revulsion and curiosity evokes the kind of tension associated with romanticized reality, as we dissect the parts we long to keep and discard those less appealing – precise like a butcher in his shop.

Courtesy Galeria Laura Marsiaj

Galeria Laura Marsiaj (Rio de Janeiro) transformed their booth into a sand-filled dune for the installation, sound, and video-based work of Paulo Vivacqua, “Desert” (2012). Projected upon the back wall are the summits of a tawny mountain ridge against a slate sky – unspecific to any one region. Buried in the sand are several glass columns – in which audio channels and speakers are housed – that emit ambient, meditative sounds. Wind rushing, cicadas hissing, and voices whispering meld into a hypnotic sibilance, and are carefully interwoven with the artist’s own atmospheric compositions. Meant to represent the lapse of a full day within eight minutes, the installation is haunting and tranquil – a nod to the lost repose in our increasingly harried lives.

Courtesy Krome Gallery

Just around the corner, Raebervon Stenglin (Zurich) presents a solo booth of paintings and sound by Ivan Seal. Painted from memory, his still lifes appear evocatively disjointed – and are accompanied by a matte black boom box resting on the floor. Much like the spacing of his works on the walls, Seal’s irregular beats hiss from the speakers like a misfiring audiocassette. Though acting as the wholly recalled memory of one painting’s subject in particular, the abstracted autobiographical track emits a guttural, throbbing pulse every few seconds, preventing the viewer from having a singular sensory experience through its comical diversions. The cadence of the work mimics the meter of Seal’s erratic reverberations – imprecise, authentic, and constantly shuffled, as no two viewings will ever be the same.

Courtesy Cherry & Martin

“Stars Stairs Ptemkin Exorcism” (2012) by T. Kelly Mason absorbs much of Cherry & Martin’s (Los Angeles) booth. Like a makeshift abode born of speedrails and packing blankets, the environmental installation consists of two darkened enclaves – both of which are illuminated only by lightboxes. Like stained glass windows, they depict a starry night sky and a dimly lit staircase – false vistas narrated by hushed voices, footsteps, and musical snippets emitting from the speakers overhead. As the title suggests, the installation bespeaks the shoddy illusions of a Potemkin village, and the expelling of our disenchantment – Mason’s eerie din further recalling the incessant thrumming we endure throughout our days. Not the least of which resonates throughout these vast halls in Miami Beach. Will you stop to listen?

Installation View

“I didn’t set out to be a 48-year old man painting unicorns,” remarks Cuban-born painter and sculptor, Enrique Martínez Celaya. Featured in six of the sixteen works currently on view at L.A. Louver, the one-horned mythical creature does make an unlikely appearance in Celaya’s work; though it is merely one facet of his calculated exploration of absurdity rooted in reality. The Hunt’s Will is a continuation of the artist’s purposefully divergent narrative: vibrant and whimsical, but also muted and unidealized – a conscientious union that encapsulates Celaya’s preoccupation with disillusionment. In totality, his work appears the uncanny amalgamation between the pragmatic and imaginative – perhaps a residual effect of his Ph.D in Quantum Electronics – yet it maintains the vague familiarity of recollection. Scrutinizing “the promises of childhood,” Celaya extracts vignettes from the ubiquitous farce in which the unknowable meets reality.

The Guest, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 92 x 118 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

In The Guest, Celaya exemplifies the isolation that often comes with knowledge. The young bullfighter stands atop a tree stump, and stares pleadingly at the viewer. A charcoal mountain range looms in the background, void of amphitheater or four-legged opponent, and starkly rendered with Celaya’s wax and oils. Wistful in his expression, the matador seems prematurely defeated; his red muleta dangling limply by his side. As if plucked from the drama of his playful daydream and stranded in this melancholic locale, the bullfighter personifies the cognizance of mortality. Not only do the reveries of our youth rarely become manifest, but the exclusive guarantee in life is death – for we are simply guests upon this earth.

The One Who Has Taken Its Place, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 78 x 100 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

It is this arrival upon enlightenment that Celaya captures so succinctly, even in its most unassuming incarnations. In “The One Who Has Taken Its Place,” an ivory unicorn tussles with a German Shepard; a picturesque blue sky and grassy meadow setting a seemingly frolicsome scene. However, the ambiguity of this interaction denotes unease, as the encounter is neither determinately benign nor violent. As the adult mind grasps the limitations of a terrestrial actuality, is the fantastic image ultimately annihilated by one of domesticity, or is their coexistence feasible? Such an unreliable milieu accentuates the necessity of choice – both with regard to the immediate viewer, and the external factors that shape our perpetual maturation.

The Faithful, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 132 x 180 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Celaya’s paradigm for disenchantment is simultaneously one of faith. Despite the distress oftentimes innate to awareness, there is also the opportunity for decidedly resolved belief and hope – regardless of futility. “The Faithful” features a solitary black bird seeking refuge in a snow-laden thicket as a sherbet-hued dusk unfolds. As if awaiting a greater purpose, the bird is apparently unfazed by its thorny circumstances – perhaps an homage to the deficiencies of cynicism and rationality. Though Celaya’s figures often suffer a kind of instability, they typify the conditions he cites as universally endured: “a life under threat of forgetfulness, and the collision between what one hopes and what happens.”

The Long Dream, 2012, oil and wax on canvas, 78 x 96 inches. Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Through he refutes any loyalty to Magical Realism, Celaya seamlessly obscures the boundaries between verisimilitude, fiction, memory, and subconscious – a sublime tapestry woven from the threads of experience and invention. “The Long Dream” illustrates this fluidity of being, as a barely perceptible unicorn forges through an open sea. The inky sky and waves meet without horizon as the creature treads towards an unascertainable future, alluding to the improvised movements through which we make our way. It is at once a portrait of ephemerality and forbearance; a duality that Celaya masterfully portrays in his excavation of the dark, otherworldly waters we compulsively tread.

“The Hunt’s Will” is on view at L.A. Louver through January 5, 2013.

Let’s delve into a weird place. Tunneling towards a mine of suppressed, latent, and untapped oddities, this rabbit hole burrows deep into the human psyche. Like a cognitive roll call, every repressed thought is buried here: the traumatically humiliating moment from your childhood, the impure dreams you had as a teen, and the irrational fears you disguise as an adult – this is a den in which the taboo hibernates. Rousing these dormant compulsions are Michelle Carla Handel and Eve Wood in their two-person exhibition at Garboushian Gallery, Your Mouth, Undone, an inaugural exhibition for both artists at the space. As the title suggests, the show appears as if the stream to a collective consciousness doth runneth over – the previous barricade between social restraint and inhibition deteriorated in its wake. Immersed in this liberated visceral flood, Handel and Wood create this deluge’s disturbingly alluring remains.

With a dexterous manipulation of industrial materials, Michelle Carla Handel transfigures wood, polyester fiberfill, muslin, silicone, rubber, urethane, vinyl and rope from the banal to the corporeal. She coyly references the dichotomous nature of her mediums – which are as easily used for commercial purposes as they are deviant – to evoke a purely visceral confrontation with our most lascivious associations.

Eve Wood embraces a similarly fearless exploration of the subliminal and innermost cast of mind. Painted on seemingly raw wood panels, her paintings are ingenuously primeval. Elements of absurdism and phantasmagoria in her portraits forge a naked sincerity, as if traversing the non-sequiturs and anxiety rampant in our unencumbered dreamscapes. Wood’s sharply rendered figures personify the illusion of control; illustrations of a shared plight to discern rationality from irrationality, and the lucid from the incoherent.

The two are futility incarnate – the progeny of insecurity and powerlessness’ incessant breeding. Through such a stark vignette, Wood spotlights the distress and apprehensions innate to our self-consciousness. Beyond mere vanity, she poignantly addresses our fleeting existence, the certainties that shape it, and our thwarted efforts to control it. Like Handel, Wood is privy to trifling with the fruitless – in mining the amusing, farcical, and often-stifled compulsive elements of the unconscious, both artists chaperone an earnest tour of the collectively bizarre human condition.

For more information on Michelle Carla Handel, or Eve Wood, please visit Garboushian Gallery’s website.

Jennifer Steinkamp, "Moth, 5," 2012. Computer generated light projection. Approximately 7.5 x 10 feet.

Standing within Jennifer Steinkamp’s most recent solo exhibition, “Moth,” at ACME (Los Angeles, CA), I was reminded of this detached relationship with actuality. Esteemed for her captivating 3-D animation projections and installations, the new media artist has steered away from her recent room-engulfing environments for something quieter, though still digital. A few swatches of tattered fabric are suspended by unseen pins, silently fluttering and twisting in a simulated breeze. Their pastel hues evoke a Southern spring, like garments abandoned on the clothesline for the alluring indulgences of a lazy afternoon. Steinkamp’s mastery of movement simulates the kind of nostalgic hypnosis found in nature’s many gestures – a beckoning tree branch or a nodding lilac coax you to stay for awhile, like a child meandering through the park. “Moth” is alluring in its unpretentious grace, the cloth reminiscent of a neglected, tangible past, elegant despite its imperfections. Hinting at the nettlesome insects of the same name, “Moth” brings to mind abandonment, or human experience left to decay in favor of e-simulacra. Consumed by a persistent need for a personal repository, we often overlook the ephemeral in our desperate plight for eternal imitation – a notion best illustrated by Steinkamp’s moth-eaten textiles, which reveal a reoccurring choreography after several moments.

Jennifer Steinkamp, "Moth, 2," 2012. Computer generated light projection. Approximately 7.5 x 10 feet.

Much like “Madame Curie,” (2011) the artist’s recent commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, “Moth” alludes to the increasingly complex kinship we share with nature and technology. While both share the unwavering observation of time and evolution, each faction poses ever more conflicting interpretations of mortality. Whether our sensory consciousness or our intellectual annals prove our livelihood remain to be seen; until then, we may continue to twist in Steinkamp’s imitation wind.

“Moth” is on view at ACME through March 10th, 2012.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice.

Catlin Moore: Let’s start with the book, Modernity in Very General Terms. This piece spans the course of ten years’ worth of writing and research for you, and also serves as a tutorial for your  exhibition currently on view at Ambach & Rice in Los Angeles, Conclusion to the Big Ideas. For those unfamiliar with your work, how are the concepts in the book incarnated in the exhibition, or are they? Is this a relationship you have forged in previous bodies of work?

Alon Levin: I wouldn’t really call the book a tutorial, it is more of a collection of notes to myself. I made the book before I made the work for the show, and I included the book to serve similarly in the context of the exhibition: as a companion piece that is on the one hand a work in and of itself, but that at the same time provides a kind of background to the rest of the exhibition.

CM: Some sections of the book are more minimal than others. For example, “An Introduction to Europolis” consists of incredible detail, empirical evidence and formulas, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” is more allusive.  Why the variation in presentation, and how does that manifest in the tangible artwork?

AL: All the texts and works within the book were originally made with different intentions. Some segments were written to myself, some to friends, some for publication, and still others as works [of art] in and of themselves. “An Introduction to Europolis” was a work that was published in dot dot dot in 2004, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” was part of a reader that accompanied an installation in 2010. Since the book was not written at once or in any linear way, it is as fragmented and seemingly under construction as the rest of the work in the exhibition. Both the written and the physical work range from the severely abstract to the absolutely concrete, while dealing all the while with whatever issues are of interest to me. In that sense, they don’t seem so at odds with one another to me. They are two poles of a language that sometimes clash and sometimes merge.

Book view, courtesy of the artist.

CM: The book explores the experience of finding patterns and relationships within power structures and modern realities. Did you unearth data or information that caused you to view your practice differently? What is alluring about parameters, rules, taxonomy and thematic patterns in modern culture to you?

AL: Maybe it is my background—between countries, cultures, schooling systems, and nationalities—that drew me toward the subject of power structures. I had many run-ins with bureaucracy, and never did well with authority.  I went to six high schools in three different countries.  At a young age I had already decided that power was assumed through symbols and costume and was not to be trusted. I suppose my strong distaste for hierarchy is the reason for my obsession with it. I can’t locate any ideological shift as of yet, but the constant confrontation with ‘modern reality’ in its many incarnations of administration has undoubtedly informed my practice.

CM: Do you find yourself employing irony or humor as a means of illustrating these points?

AL: I don’t see my work as being nearly as serious as its subject supposes it is.  Maybe because power and its structures are so severe, I try to approach the work with a kind of humor. I don’t mean to illustrate some joke or have a punch line, but I do think it is important that people recognize the irony and can see the subject with some distance. I think the subject (and my practice) can use a little mockery.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Some of the text is purposefully nonsensical in its evaluation of social patterns and successes.  Why is this an important attribute to highlight?

AL: I seem to make things just as nonsensical as the quest for a social pattern.

CM: Can you explain the notion of “objects attempting to understand themselves?” Is this an intended parallel to the human condition?

AL: It’s a little hard to give an explanation about that. I was meaning this more as an intuitive thought rather than a scientific analysis.  Obviously, things do not become aware of themselves. So let me give you another somewhat cryptic anthropomorphic thought: I am thinking of an elephant trying to hide behind a skinny tree, not being aware of its own dimensions.

CM: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is perhaps my favorite section of the book. What was your goal here, and how did the concept manifest itself in the exhibition?

AL: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is a series of collages from images published in an entire quarter of the New York Times. It is a somewhat absurd reorganization of all these images by theme or subject. I started collecting the images without a clear idea of what I was going to do with them with the intention of somehow making sense of it all in the end.  When I started sorting everything, some groupings that emerged were very concrete: such as “International protests” and “American protests.” Others, on the other hand, were simply collections of recurrent gestures and tendencies. Examples of these are “Men with one hand I and II,” “Men with two hands I and II,” “Three men,”” Men with ties I, II, III” or “Verticals.”

In some ways the current show is like a quarter report, though one that spans a longer period of time and is not particularly methodical. Some things have been omitted, while many new things have been added. The show is a kind of rearrangement and reinterpretation of thoughts, ideas and actual physical works. This is particularly clear in the work Untitled, ‘The Everything of an Almost Future I – V,’ 2011. This tower-like structure houses a collection of sketches I made for a series of painting cut-outs that were based on Malevich’s work. These sketches were used in preparation for an installation I made last year and now are restructured as an exaggerated archival shelving unit.

CM: Focusing on the art itself, much of your earlier work included color, both as an organizational illustration of your practice and an aesthetic choice. This show is quite minimal and stark.  How does that choice function for you?

AL: Though the show may give a first impression of being minimal, beyond perhaps the aesthetic relation to minimalism, I think the work is anything but. The objects in the show have an overload of layers, both in the physical sense and conceptually. Rather than ideas being reduced, they are in fact expanded and all layers of the process are kept transparent. Be it the stacks that hold the piles of frames so that they can be painted, the earlier paint job still shown on the edge of an object, or simply the expanded history of modernity in the two-volume, custom-made, print-on-demand Wikipedia-book, Modernity in Very General Terms, 2011, that serves as a balancing foot to the object in Prospects of Validation IV, 2011.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Many of the works feel deconstructed. In your evaluation of constructed societal practices, was this a tongue-in-cheek decision, or purely compositional?

AL: Definitely not purely compositional.  The deconstructing starts in my initial dealing with a subject matter; this is later translated into the process and thus is still evident in the resulting physical structure. Deconstruction (and my general demeanor, I’m afraid) is usually perceived as a rather serious matter, so I am glad you asked.  And yes, I mostly mean it to be tongue-in-cheek!

CM: Despite exploring the very notions of genre and boundary, your work defies common art historical references. There is no nod to abstraction, realism or the like, but it does remains conceptual. Was this an organic development in your work?

AL: Well, just as I have a resistance to power, absolutes, and definitions in the real world, I suppose I avoid it within the realm of art. Any one genre with its doctrines or manifestos is fun to investigate, but mostly to then push off of, not to adopt or join. I don’t want my work to belong to something that is already defined, or to be read from any singular perspective.

CM: You’ve referred to your works as a stage.  How does that hold true?

AL: I guess I say “stage,” because the work often functions as a model for something else: something bigger, or something real. In the meantime, the work itself is more of a prop, part of a somewhat theatrical version of societal operations.

Levin’s current exhibition is on view at Ambach & Rice through October 8, 2011.

Ori Gersht, Imperial Memories: After Dark (2010). Archival pigment print. Image courtesy of Angles Gallery.

Cherry blossoms lead a cursory existence. Like blushing plumes, their trees bring forth bountiful masses of cotton candy petals, flourishing for a mere two weeks before they are hurriedly shed. The rosy confetti blankets the surrounding grounds, the wilting florets scattering as swiftly as they bloomed. To the Japanese, the blossoms are emblematic of the ephemerality of life.  Intrigued by their reputation, Israeli photographer Ori Gersht traveled to Japan in the spring of 2010 to capture the blossoms’ proliferation. Exactly one year later, devastation swept the site of his previously captured landscapes, all too hauntingly demonstrating the prodigious truth behind the symbolism. Falling Petals—Gersht’s current solo exhibition on view at Angles Gallery—is a timely exemplar of the cyclical and transitional histories of specific localities. Though sites of abundance, his tableaux are also inhabited by the unseen ghosts of war-torn pasts, not to mention those of a devastated present.

Ori Gersht, Pomegranate (2006). Video still. Image courtesy of Angles Gallery.

Pulling from a heritage shaped by the Holocaust, Gersht knows the fickle temperament of being. In short: get it while you can, because life’s only guarantee is there aren’t any. In his earlier video works, Gersht riffs on a combination of seventeenth-century Spanish bodegones and Dutch vanitas paintings through the “Quicker’n a Wink” lens of Harold Edgerton, but with the graceful prolonging of Bill Viola.  In Pomegranate (2006), a bullet rips through the ripe fruit, showering the scene in a constellation of ruby innards.  In Big Bang II (2007), an unassuming floral bouquet—indistinguishable from countless Western European oils—abruptly detonates into diminutive, glittering shards.

Ori Gersht, Big Bang II (2007). Video still. Image courtesy of Angles Gallery.

These demises are sudden, simultaneously violent and beautiful in their illustration of the unpredictability of life. In Falling Petals, however, Gersht performs a quiet assessment of our mercurial existence, focusing on Hiroshima and Tokyo. Faithful to the vernacular of his preceding photographic terrain, Gersht proffers uninhabited territory, void of perceptible history. Picturesque cherry trees, voluptuous with flowers, curve over placid water and untenanted boats. A palpable sense of anticipation brims from Gersht’s shrouded vantage point, as if the artist was evading the disquieting memories tied to the land.

Ori Gersht, Imperial Memories: Night Fly 1 (2010). Archival pigment print. Image courtesy of Angles Gallery.

Hiroshima and Tokyo, much like Gersht’s previously explored Auschwitz and Sarajevo, are covert archives of struggle, loss, recovery and ascent, and Gersht’s purposefully distorted, nighttime renditions of the burgeoning cherry trees—the first body of work in which he has photographed his subjects at night—allude to a hazy reminiscence of yore. The remembrance of atomic bombs and warfare is obscured by pastoral idealism, an ominous suggestion of the years succeeding today’s already dwindling commemoration efforts.

Ori Gersht, Against the Tide: Diptych Monks (2010). Archival pigment print. Image courtesy of Angles Gallery.

At the same time, Gersht’s cropped panoramas address our tendency to dodge the unpleasantries of the human condition, despite our cognizance of them. Does collective memory grow dim once it stops trending on Twitter?  How soon will these once rampantly visible regions become ambiguous backdrops?

Ori Gersht, Imperial Memories: Memorial Garden 1 (2010). Archival pigment print. Image courtesy of Angles Gallery.

Falling Petals is on view at Angles Gallery until July 9th, 2011. Lost in Time, Gersht’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, is concurrently on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through September 4, 2011.

Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest

In a former life, Walead Beshty may have rubbed elbows with Patti Smith. Flaunting her contemptuous disregard for the cautionary advice of her peers, Smith famously denounced words as mere “rules and regulations” in her rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” In one unruly, titillating performance, Smith flipped the good ol’ boys’ fraternity of rock and roll on its ear by lampooning the muffled sexism of the music industry, exposing the frivolous laws that command its economy. In other words, let’s not shy away from the fact that sex sells in this game, kiddo.  Similarly, the art world has its own rulebook.  And Beshty has a shredder.

The first rule of art market is you do not talk about art market. The vernacular of commodity is strictly verboten, seductive aesthetics are ill-advised, and materiality is secondary to concept. The clandestine, operational logistics of the art world are something of an urban legend—on which Beshty shines an astute light. In a 2009 interview with BOMB Magazine, the artist acknowledged this hush-hush stigma, stating: “Any art effect people don’t like, or find alienating, is ascribed to the market. In this, and in all other aspects of art making, I think transparency is the only way to destabilize the mythologies of the art market, and of art in general.” In his current exhibition at Regen Projects (Los Angeles, CA), PROCESSCOLORFIELD, Beshty takes a wily swipe at the absurdity of the art world’s covertness with more than twenty-five new works, ranging from photograms to readymades to the mulched remains of works “unfit for exhibition.” He deftly navigates the precinct between improvisation and calculation, as well as object and material, while subverting the rules that govern each model.

With a discerning hand, Beshty manipulates the analog qualities of film in his “Black Curl” photogram series. Perhaps a tangential nod to his 2006 “Picture Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light” works, which were the result of a roll of film’s unintentional exposure to an airport X-ray machine, Beshty’s most recent photograms hypostatize fluke relationships between photo paper and color structures into electrified bands of twilight hues.  Austere blocks of black and white border sherbet-colored ribbons of pink and orange, as if we were peeking at the garish Los Angeles sunset through a haphazard set of blinds.

Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest

Reflecting the vibrant patterning of the photograms are Beshty’s “Copper Surrogates,” whose polished surfaces are tarnished with alarmingly prevalent fingerprints, smears and coffee mug rings. To the seasoned gallery-goer, the constellation of blemishes on the works’ surface is cause for stifled panic, as art-viewing policy is built upon a longstanding empire of “Don’t Touch.” This is Beshty’s guerrilla erosion of one of art’s most fortified rules.  Literally used as workspace for the duration of a prior exhibition, the sullied copper counters display traces of conversations past, meetings adjourned and infrastructures built—empirical evidence that alludes to the presence of the industry, the gallerist and the collector.

Finally, in a tongue-in-cheek intimation of the sway of institutions, Beshty’s “Selected Works” reframe the notion of artistic failure, unearthing the unseen practice behind the tradition of curating and contextualization. Shredding his self-declared “unsuccessful works,” Beshty turned the refused scraps and slivers of photos and paintings into reconstituted mulch, displaying the literal and conceptual debris of exploratory authorship in an unconventionally candid manifestation. In his forthright acknowledgement of the tensions between the material and the visual, as well as between posturing and actuality, Beshty bends the rules with dexterous maneuvering and a covert smidge of sensory seduction. The art market never saw it coming.

PROCESSCOLORFIELD is on view through May 14, 2011.

Kandor 10 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 and Kandor 12 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35, installation view. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

In its original graphic incarnation, Kandor is noted as the fictional capital city of Superman’s native planet, Krypton. By the swift and conniving hands of the villainous Brainiac, the city was taken hostage and miniaturized for purposes not entirely sensible or mildly coherent – but not without valorous retrieval by our hero. Despite Superman’s Samaritan ways, the omnipresent plague of a haunting past hinders him from true emotional and psychological liberation – not to mention, visible underpants. For Kelley, the conceptual appeal lies in Kandor’s embodiment of an alienating victim culture for our protagonist: the notion of a burdensome present dictated by a labyrinthine past. Kelley’s unorthodox fusion of fragmented narrative, medium and sensory immersion seem nonsensical and queer at first encounter, yet the further we delve into his sensational rabbit hole, the closer we come to the truly bizarre fidelity of the human condition. Kelley confronts our latent attitudes and popular convictions relating to sexuality, socioeconomics, education and history with jocular finesse and – well – candor.

Kandor 10 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 and Kandor 12 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35, installation view. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Like glowing orbs, a handful of Kandor sculptures pepper the multiple galleries within the darkened Gagosian megaplex. The dwarfed cities encased beneath colorful bell jars appear relic-like, yet also profane at times – their jutting skyscrapers evoking a curiosity born of both estrangement and familiarity. The two primary microcosms – Kandor 10 and Kandor 12 – bear oversized tubes that snake into tanks of (presumably) atmosphere, per the accuracy of the comic book reference. Each is situated within environmental installations that embellish upon two distinct anecdotes central to the exhibition: the carnal Moroccan harem featured in EAPR #34, and the bleak sooty chamber that appears in EAPR #35. In merging his previously autonomous Kandor and EAPR projects, Kelley suggests an innate relationship between our own respective microcosmic realities and subsequent conditional behavior.

Mike Kelley, video production still from Extracurricular Projective Reconstruction #34, 2010. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery and Kelley Studio.

By way of illustration, Kelley’s EAPR #34 videos largely examine the lascivious conduct of society’s upper echelon when handed unrestricted power and entitlement. Directed in the style of a maladroit stage play, EAPR #34 shifts between a piggish male King belittling his covetous female harem and a group of scornful Queens admonishing a male servant. In both scenarios, the authoritarian’s disposition to abuse of influence and insatiable gluttony bespeaks a cyclical global history of flawed paradigm and deep-rooted desire for accumulation. Beside the video installation, Kandor 10 is nestled within a life-size stony grotto reminiscent of EAPR #34’s exotic Moroccan setting, as if displaying the incubator in which these voracious human mannerisms were nurtured. When the Kandor’s luminous mini-cityscape appears more familiar than it does foreign, one can only muse on how fictitiously reconstructive Kelley’s staged milieu really is.

Kandor 12 A (green screen), 2010. Tinted Urethane resin, steel, blown glass with water-based resin coating wood, enamel paint, silicone rubber, acrylic paint, lighting fixture and Lenticular 12. 126 x 202 x 276 inches overall (320 x 513.1 x 701 cm). Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Conversely, EAPR #35 jettisons us into a place of somber isolation and denial. Grimy clownish gnomes aimlessly shuffle around a murky cell, their void gazes searching for an ambiguous cue. Homogeneous in tired costume and ashen faces, the destitute prisoners amble in silent futility – resigned to the dim prospects of their ordained condition.

Video production still from Extracurricular Projective Reconstruction #35, 2010. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery and Kelley Studio.

The analogous Kandor 12 shares an equally inauspicious aesthetic; the cloudy brown bottle houses a municipality more reminiscent of chess pieces than modern skyscrapers – as if underlining the inmates’ loss of an unassailable game. The sparse backdrop of the gnomes’ cellar intimates a societal tradition of abhorrent secrecy and muted abuse of the weak, a ritualistic convention of marginalizing the vulnerable in order to preserve the greater hierarchy. As if acting as the underbelly to the rapacious actuality in EAPR #34, the vignette captured in EAPR #35 exposes the ensuing trauma that occurs in the wings as we strive to fulfill our socially performative roles – most of which remain immutably out of reach.

Kandor 12 A (green screen), 2010. Tinted Urethane resin, steel, blown glass with water-based resin coating wood, enamel paint, silicone rubber, acrylic paint, lighting fixture and Lenticular 12. 126 x 202 x 276 inches overall (320 x 513.1 x 701 cm). Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

In fact, Kelley’s inclusion of the sets from the EAPR #34 and EAPR #35 videos in this exhibition make us feel but a mere player in one hell of a bewildering production. In tandem with his Kandors, the sets feel like an abstract extension of a transient ecology, a faux mise en scène demonstration of how we enact our own mortality. Do we unconsciously fall victim to institutional constructs in our quest for repute and satisfaction, acting a character merely to clinch our chances of eminence? Or do we find ourselves waiting in the wings for a cue – a protagonist – that may never come?

Kandor 10 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34 and Kandor 12 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35, installation view. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

]]> https://www.dailyserving.com/2011/02/mike-kelley-at-gagosian-gallery/feed/ 1 https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/11/doug-aitken-at-regen-projects/ https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/11/doug-aitken-at-regen-projects/#comments Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:00:05 +0000 http://dailyserving.com/?p=11502

Installation view: HOUSE, 2010. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

It feels like a thousand years, though I know it’s only been about five minutes. Feet balancing atop five-inch heels on the loose gravel floor, my ankles quiver unsteadily as I clench every muscle in my legs to avoid toppling into Jeffrey Deitch’s back. This misstep would surely initiate a domino-like collapse of the well-coiffed Who’s Who that is gathering inside Regen Projects’ main gallery for Doug Aitken’s opening solo exhibition, House. My breath becomes shallow as I am awash with a zen-like focus on maintaining my balance, and partially so as not to disturb Beck – who is intently fixated on the picnic table in the center of the room.

“Do not move,” I tell myself. “And for God’s sake, do not inflict bodily harm on Beck should you fall.”

Plumes of dust swell overhead as more spectators shuffle into the gallery. The freshly lain gravel proves to be logistically problematic for others with similarly unfortunate choices in footwear, as they timidly navigate the sierra of debris that borders the gallery walls. Splintering two-by-fours, jagged shards of windowpanes and fractured tiles create a mountainous rubble potpourri.  I stare in astonishment (and mild jealousy) as one guest nimbly scales a nearby detritus summit to circumnavigate the throng of people blocking the entrance of the gallery. We all encircle the picnic table, which features a double-sided monitor protruding from its surface that showcases Aitken’s newest film, also titled House. I occasionally lock eyes with guests on the other side of the table, and we both hurriedly return our gaze to the monitor – nervously aware of one another’s actions. Some poke at the glowing screens of iPhones and Blackberrys; the woman next to me updates her Facebook status. Despite being communally immersed within an unprecedented space of conceptual and physical transformation, each member of the crowd seems fragmentally participatory.  Conversely, Aitken’s video depicts his parents sitting across a table from one another – silent, hands neatly folded, eye contact unwavering – as the artist’s house literally crumbles around them. We stand within those remains, uncannily disengaged, while Aitken’s parents remain solely occupied with an immediate frame of actuality: each other. It is in this ironic conundrum that Aitken’s astute poetics are at work.  We seemingly struggle to achieve personal archive and immutability through obsessive self-documentation, but is it ultimately performative? If we cannot avert our focus from the immediately framed image, can we truly be aware of our greater context? Or will it simply disintegrate around us under the weight of desultory cognizance?

Aitken, in speaking about his work, has asserted, “I would like the permanence of my process to be as temporary as possible.” This constant state of flux is oftentimes cited in his multi-media canon, and dramatically percolates through the impassioned components of House. His fascination with our own manipulation of memory and time typifies our simultaneous repulsion and preoccupation with decay and mortality. By distorting context, Aitken achieves a kind of fluidity that seizes that which defines humanity in a modern era: a mercurial state of being that is both isolating and interdependent. A related departure from projects like MoMA’s “Sleepwalkers,” (2007),  House utilizes the notion of public and private space as a reflection of its inhabitants and the inversion (or destruction) of contained micro-realities. Without a constructed sense of boundaries, we make ourselves vulnerable to happenstance and transience, a temporal randomness that Aitken embraces. As the video draws to a close, and the empty lot in which Aitken’s house once stood fades to black, it seems a sagacious foreshadow to the impending provocations to come from the iEra. Will the construction of space and unmitigated narrative only be achieved through destruction of artifice, a kind of regress in order to progress? The inquiries manifested by the wreckage at Regen Projects may merely be the foundation for larger queries, but for Aitken, the foundation is all that remains.

House is on view through December 18th, 2010.