Anything is permissible in collage, and multiple mediums like paint, paper cutouts, and found objects collide on and with the surface plane. The very selection and composition of incongruous materials reveals an attempt at order and meaning. In Saying Yes to Everything, source materials include glitter dollar signs, gold chain, penciled math problems, a rusted comb, comic-book cutouts, and a vintage stamp booklet cover. The boundaries of the medium are limitless, and therefore democratizing.

Alexis Smith. Kerouac Haiku, 1994; mixed-media collage; 27 x 32 x 2 in. Courtesy of Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles. CA. Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography.

The exhibit opens with a narrative diorama by Alexis Smith titled Kerouac Haiku (1994), in which a chart of constellations is affixed with various childhood objects. Two deputy sheriff badges flank the moon, and with red paint, the artist complements the original title “Beautiful moonlit night” with “marred by family squabbles.” The map’s key notes the magnitude of the stars and brings attention to perhaps the distance of these memories or desires in relation to each other.

Amanda Ross-Ho. Untitled Wall Arrangement (TIMER), 2012; sheetrock, wood, latex paint, acrylic paint, graphite, framed lightjet print, single earring, found images, blank canvas, thesis rag, aluminum thumbtacks, vintage goldtone chain, yellow plastic thumbtacks, CNC acrylic triangle, laser print, red plastic thumbtack, vintage goldtone chain, single earring, Keinholz thumbprint test, aluminum thumbtack; 96 x 74 x 4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Photo: New York Photo.

Amanda Ross-Ho’s Untitled Wall Arrangement (2012) is striking. What is visible to the eye is minimal, despite the artist’s use of at least twenty separate materials. The objects of measurement here—the photograph of the timer, the sleeved cup, the acrylic triangle ruler, the box—are either immovable or missing a dimension, and therefore nonfunctional. Unexplained math computations in graphite suggest themselves to be outside the realm of this collage, speaking to an unknowable context.

Brenna Youngblood. History of the Cowboy, 2008; color photographs, spray paint, gouache, and found frame; 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com.

Ray Yoshida’s Comic Book Specimen #1—Right Profile (c. 1965) is both earnest and humorous in its carefully cut study of comic-book characters. The portraiture profiles are cleanly cut from comic-book pages and presented in neat rows. Another standout in this exhibit is Brenna Youngblood’s History of the Cowboy (2008), in which both photography and paint are used. The piece is a play on and challenge to royal portraiture. Mounted in a found wooden frame and set against a blood-red background, Youngblood’s subject possesses distorted facial features and an enlarged body, wears a crown-like cowboy hat, and is set low in the frame.

Ray Yoshida. Comic Book Specimen #1 — Right Profile, c. 1965; collage on paper, 22 x 28 in. Courtesy of the estate of Ray Yoshida. Collection of KAWS, New York. Photo: Tom Van Eynde.

The works in this exhibition speak to the range of ways—conceptually, personally, impersonally, textually, visually, spacially, and through narrative—that American collage artists have addressed their experiences in the world since 1960. These works echo the original purpose of collage in the early 20th century, and demonstrate the progress of collage in American art history.

Saying Yes to Everything is on view at Honor Fraser Gallery through December 20, 2014.

Annie Lapin. Various Peep Shows (Through), 2013; oil and acrylic enamel spray-paint on canvas; 82 x 72 in. Courtesy of Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Most of the works in the show are based very loosely on a grid, with rough horizontals and verticals defining the composition. But within that basic structure, organized chaos reigns. Between the poles of impressionistic depiction and spray-painted letters, Lapin has smeared, dabbed, brushed, stained, and poured her way across the surface. The results often resemble the décollage of urban facades—torn posters, peeling paint, crumbling walls—hovering between creation and destruction, accretion and dissolution.

Despite the initial appearance of randomness, these works are carefully composed. Lapin has not simply attacked the canvas with all manner of mark-making, but has clearly preconceived her execution, as areas of thin wash abut patches of thick impasto. These different techniques lie side by side on the surface, only giving the impression of overlapping planes in the mind of the viewer.

Annie Lapin. That Looks In and Out, 2013; oil and acrylic enamel spray-paint on canvas; 82 x 78 in. Courtesy of Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

The strength of the work lies in Lapin’s deft fluctuation between the real space of the paint and the canvas, and the illusionary space of the painting. As the title suggests, it is all about looking, about the different forms of perception that painting can engender. The best paintings in the show are the roughly seven-foot-square canvases like That Looks In and Out (2013). Dingy, thin vertical strokes sit on the surface, framing a brightly hued but obscured impressionistic scene, perhaps a landscape. In the lower third of the canvas are crudely spray-painted red and orange letters. A thick, angry patch of black and gray is smeared just right of center, almost from top to bottom. ­It appears on top of the other layers, almost like an act of vandalism.

Annie Lapin. Various Peep Shows (Through) (detail), 2013; oil and acrylic enamel spray-paint on canvas; 82 x 72 in. Courtesy of Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

The work’s fragmented nature prevents us from ever really feeling comfortable with what we are viewing. Lapin keeps us off guard, always unsure of our footing. We are pulled through the rectilinear window into the shallow, artificial space of the landscape, only to be thrust back to the surface by the literal physicality of the gray patch and the spray-painted letters. Our vision vacillates between the flat plane of the surface, the implied layers of paint, and the fabricated space of the landscape. It is not surprising, then, that Lapin studied archaeology before turning to art; by carefully sifting through layers, we arrive at revelation. Foreground and background often flip, as what appears to be in the distance jumps to the surface. In another work, Various Peep Shows (Through) (2013), many of the same elements are repeated, but the landscape this time seems closer to a wall painting or mural—a painting of a painting—further complicating the exploration of perception that Lapin is undertaking.

Lapin’s paintings aren’t distinguished by their massive size, hyperrealism, or salacious content. They aren’t hard-edged geometric works or monochromes, composed of diamond dust or bodily fluids. She doesn’t look to the extremes of the medium or succumb to gimmicky tropes. But by thoughtfully looking at the history of painting, its many permutations, functions, and possibilities, she has created works that make the case for the medium’s continued relevance. We’re not sure what we’re looking at with these paintings, but she keeps us looking.

Annie Lapin: Various Peep Shows is on view at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles through February 22, 2014.

Album cover by Vivien Goldman, moderator of last weekend's Punk Panel at Honor Fraser Gallery.

On Saturday, July 16, Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City hosted a panel on Punk. The panel preceded the openings of two shows, one an earnest exploration into punk’s visual precedents and antecedents, and the other an extravaganza of posters, bills, and graphics from the Punk movement of 1970s Britain. The Punk panel, chaired by Vivien Goldman, who has been a writer, performer, scholar and manager—she’s recently written a book on reggae—included a surprise guest who came in and put his motorcycle helmet on his chair about ten minutes after the panel’s scheduled start time.

Linder, "Pretty Girl I 1977/2006," Pigment print of original artwork, 7 x 9 2/5 inches, Edition 1 of 5. Courtesy Honor Fraser.

This surprise guest was Billy Idol, one of the more accessible of the punk rockers who started out in Britain’s scene. He had his signature leather, sunglasses and spikey hair, and, when the panel finally started, a lady in the front row went on to take a good few hundred photographs of him. A few others were making cell phone videos. But the woman next to me, chicly dressed and probably in her sixties, handed me a paper and asked if I could please write down the name of the man with the sunglasses so she could remember.

Billy Idol does not qualify as obscure, but many of the bands whose posters are plastered to the walls of Honor Fraser—the Slits, for instance—remain utterly unknown in certain circles. But their provocateur posture and moody DIY aesthetic will, I assume, strike most in the Western world as familiar.

A professor I had in grad school used to say all artists are either punks or hippies. My classmates and I spent a lot of time picking out who was who, and it’s harder than it sounds. Are you a hippie just because you use organic shapes and found materials? And are punks more defiant and streamlined? Can you be a concise hippie? Can you be an earthy punk?

George Herms, "The Librarian," 1960.

A show that brings hippies and punks together in a concert of dissonant materials is the George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown) exhibition that just opened at MOCA. Herms, a California artist who came up with no-holds-barred assemblage artist Ed Kienholz in the 1960s, has always had a slightly more elegant approach to gritty found object sculpture than his burly peer. The MOCA show puts some his early and later works into conversation with a number of 21^st century artists, among them Amanda Ross Ho, Kaari Upson, Sterling Ruby and Elliott Hundley. Upson and Ruby are definitely punk; the blatant way they use ceramics and plastics feels insidious, unapologetic and almost dirty. Hundley is a hippie. His hanging sculpture is too organic and comfortable with itself. It has no bone to pick, but it’s painfully self-aware. Others, I can’t quite tell. What about the sprawling canvas made by Dan Colen, Agathe Snow and friends that looks like Sam Francis’ take on Warhol’s flowers? Even Ross Ho’s haphazard installation has a hippy-like mood, but a punk resistance to having meaning’s imposed on it. Whichever it is, the Herms show really does have a great, nonsensically collaborative mood to it, and I highly recommend a visit.

knives 2009, Steel, wood and plastic, 36 x 60 x 24 inches. Courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

In the new FX series Justified, a quick-to-draw marshal who wears a skin of coolness over his pent up anger nearly always shoots to kill. That’s the show’s conceit: at the end of each episode, someone is either shot dead or left alive by a carefully calculated hairsbreadth. The shootings are, of course, always justified. This would be a cheap shtick if not for the obsessive precision and confidence with which U.S. Marshal Raymond Givens handles his firearms; Justified tells the story, not of the law versus the lawless, but of guns and those who use them best. The inevitable deaths, never messy, stack up like side effects for the lawmen who, like virtuosic athletes, play their game too well.

That Robert Lazzarini uses weapons as the subject of his mind-bending metal sculptures is no small thing. A New York artist whose first Los Angeles show opened on April 9^th, Lazzarini has mounted kitchen knives, Smith and Wesson revolvers, and gold-plated brass knuckles to the walls of Honor Fraser Gallery. The sculpted weapons in the exhibition, all mounted at eye-level and fabricated with brass, steel and wood, look like photoshopped distortions of themselves. Which is more or less what they are. The distortions have been precisely, mathematically executed by Lazzarini, using Photoshop and 3-D digital modeling tools, so that the fabricated sculptures, while wonky, present as perfectly as ready-mades. The gallery walls, which slant in a way that’s at first imperceptible and later insidious, add to the effect of the already skewed guns, knives and knuckles.

gun (iv) 2009, Steel and walnut, 8 x 9 x 10 1/2 inches. Courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

Lazzarini plays with perception as shrewdly as Robert Irwin before him did, yet, while Irwin’s project could easily be read as one’s man’s dogged attempt to understand the optical and outsmart the sublime, Lazzarini’s subject lends itself to more of a pop narrative. Clint Eastwood used a Smith & Wesson revolver in Dirty Harry (though Clint’s was a Model 29 and Lazzarini’s is a Model 10); brass knuckles recall Nelly’s fifth album; and kitchen knives, especially eerily suspended like Lazzarini’s are, could hail from a horror flick as easily as from a Magritte painting. Yet no low-brow references make Lazzarini’s work any less smart and impenetrable. The weapons feel preternatural, like they hold some insight that makes it impossible for them to misfire. Each sculpture shrink-wraps the kind of confidence Marshal Givens takes from his holster and presents it as a surreal packaged good.

But what makes Lazzarini’s work most interesting is that, the more you look, the more the three-dimensions recede into two-dimensions. The sculptures become images, photoshopped mirages.  Their smooth, practiced confidence makes them unbelievable as objects, just like, eventually, Marshal Given’s unblemished aim will make it impossible for us to accept his heat-of-the-moment, spot-on shootings as justified.

brass knuckles (i) 2010, Brass, 13 x 16 x 8 inches. Courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery