Paul Graham. New Orleans (Cherries), 2005. Courtesy of the Artist and Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco.

With almost sixty works from three series spanning thirteen years, Paul Graham: The Whiteness of the Whale is the first single-artist show installed at Pier 24 Photography. In the work, British artist Paul Graham has taken America as his subject of interest, traveling to various states and documenting people, places, and objects. American Night (1998–2002) presents large 4-by-5 prints of waiting, wandering, and isolated subjects overexposed into obscurity along with dense, colorful prints of large California houses decorated with candy-red cars and pristine blue skies. In The Present (2009–2011), Graham took to the streets of New York, producing sequential street photography–style shots that play with senses of space and time. The last series installed, A Shimmer of Possibility (2004–2006), fragments the silence and stillness found in American Night into multiple perspectives in collections of images of parked cars, empty lots, and sunsets.

As a viewer moves through the massive show, Graham’s strategies for selecting his subjects and manipulating the formal qualities of the images become more apparent, resulting in a romanticized spectacle that leaves the viewer feeling ambivalent and unfulfilled. Graham uses the controlled process of photography, from aiming through the viewfinder to the adjustment of color on the final prints, to depict his vision of American life. The combination of banal, conventional subject matter and striking visual techniques ultimately reduces the work to its formal qualities. In American Night, Graham manipulates light to build contrasts between works with nearly invisible content and others saturated with intense color. But the differences between overgrown back roads in Louisiana and opulent homes in California are obvious, and the sense of drama depends on tired tropes of the empty plasticity of wealth and the transient non-places of poverty. By further playing up these perspectives through the massive scale of the photographs, Graham leaves a viewer feeling uncomfortable about accepting these imposing yet generic visualizations of economic standing.

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Ryan Wallace. LD50, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.

In his first solo show at Romer Young Gallery, New York artist Ryan Wallace has filled the space with junk. Wallace has accumulated a hoard of construction materials­—Hydrocal, plaster, Plexiglas, lead, enamel, tape, and more—into his new sculptures, paintings, and a site-specific installation for LD50. Swinging freely yet comfortably between the poles of chaos and order, composed and unintentional, Wallace’s process seems intuitive. Yet the repetition of the materials betrays their grungy disposition to present a tight body of work that forfeits the chaotic in favor of a more structured approach.

Immediately after the door, a random collection of 10-inch square tiles is gridded across the entire gallery floor. Each tile is impressively composed of layered construction materials, paint, and other detritus in aesthetically familiar ways. The installation, Pitch (2015), cracks, moans, and shifts with each step as the unevenness of the tiles pushes through the bottoms of one’s shoes. The dirty squares of Plexiglas and mirrors murky with dust reflect one’s image to effectively mimic wandering through an abandoned building or junkyard. The installation emphasizes the physical act of looking, and implicates viewers in its grit and (with its distinct Abstract Expressionist allusions) macho valor. When the tiles are considered singularly, arresting compositions and surprising material juxtapositions lurk quietly in the sea of cracked plexi and mangled duct tape. But together, as an installation, these smaller significant moments drown in the oppressive grid imposed by the installation’s scale.

Wallace’s material interests continue within his two-dimensional work. In Redactor 4 (2015), the repetitive process of endlessly adding and subtracting materials proves engaging up close.  Jaggedly cut canvas in ashy grays adheres over indiscernible strips of deep reds and inky blacks, echoing the posters or adverts that appear and disappear on city walls. The pieces compress together tightly on the canvas in long vertical strips, making the spray paint and enamel seem to ooze from each crease, transformed through the accumulation. In this way, the systematic construction of Wallace’s work begins to mimic the systematic function that the materials themselves possess, both in their construction and utility.

LD50 engages with specific ideas in a closed loop. Relationally to each other, the different works frame the same materials in new ways, but conversely normalize their otherwise eccentric qualities. Less may sometimes be more, but Wallace’s work acts as an example of how the two can function as one and the same.

Ryan Wallace: LD50 is on view at Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco through July 25, 2015.

Forrest McGarvey is a visual artist and writer currently pursuing his MFA in Fine Art and his MA in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

Tomokazu Matsuyama. Warm Water, 2015; acrylic and mixed media on canvas; 67 x 104 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

In Come With Me, Japanese American artist Tomokazu Matsuyama brings together an array of visual inspirations from his multinational background for his third solo show at Gallery Wendi Norris. Seemingly disparate elements collide in his acrylic paintings to create something new and unique, but they ultimately reveal how some visual resonances are more potent than others.

The bulbous canvas of Warm Water (2015) undulates from rounded corner to rounded corner, like a flag in the wind, or perhaps an unfurling scroll. Four figures stand among a thistle of Japanese maple leaves and orchids, as a bright red string flows throughout the composition, ending in a knotted bow floating above them. The figures’ hair blows wildly in the wind, making fluid shapes that harmonize well among Matsuyama’s bright patches of airbrushed gold and electric hues. They are dressed in traditional Japanese kimonos with details of Western clothes—such as shirt pockets, the lapels of a suit coat, and buttons—sewn into their patterns. As figurative forms give way to intricate patterns, amorphic forms, and precise applications of paint, Matsuyama’s work questions the line between representation and abstraction.

In Foresight Hindsight (2015), neon hues and whimsical shapes blend to create a field of psychedelic camouflage. The elegant mix of line and color in tangled geometric shapes fragments smoother, speckled forms throughout the frame. Emerging from the chaos, shapes group together to resemble roosters, monsters, and other odd creatures. Discovering these hidden elements evokes a memory of Mike Kelley’s collection of sewn dolls and children’s toys, crushed together by some unknown force. The visual language in Come With Me is more one-sided than a mixture of disparate motifs.

When Simone Legno’s overtly saccharine Tokidoki characters, and the menacing derangement of Takashi Murakami’s murals come to mind, Matsuyama’s paintings begin to speak a slick, commercialized language of logo design, or as a textile for the new fashion trend of an eclectic Tokyo neighborhood like Shibuya or Akihabara. Come With Me attempts ample examples of how America and Japan have absorbed one another, but from a docile position without any traces of complication or conflict.

Because of my familiarity with Japanese visual culture and history, the visual language in Come With Me seems so directly appropriated from Japanese art and folklore that even the vivid colors and flatness brings Japanese anime to mind before it does pop art or high modernism. The powerful appropriation of Japanese art styles, strengthened by the dynamic color palette, drowns out any strong markers of Western influences, proving that these two poles are not so distant after all.

Tomokazu Matsuyama: Come With Me is on view at Gallery Wendi Norris through May 2, 2015.

Forrest McGarvey is a visual artist and writer currently pursuing his MFA in Fine Art and his MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.