On the Verge

Alexander May

The Company, Los Angeles (Chinatown)

Alexander May’s solo show On the Verge of a Response (Conversation with Everything) at the Company in Chinatown closes today. For me this show places a perfunctory quotation mark on the year 2009 in all its gutsy and gory glory. May’s response gesture overtakes the entire company space unifying every piece of square footage by hand cutting a custom (albeit clumsy) linoleum floor and spray painting a line between the floor and the wall space. The halo of spray around the floor wafts up the wall like smoke and activates the entire space creating a spatial conversation about the conceptual gallery space as well as the cognitive space of the artist’s imagination. Not unlike Liam Gillick May hopes to underscore the intersection of intercourse and architecture as evidenced by his studio couch on display in the projection room crushed by the enormous weight of a concrete slab. May’s conversational weight is mighty and this show pretty much encapsulates the zeitgest. There is more to be found here aside from the purely abstract conceptual connection, a delicate piece of silk wafts from the ceiling evoking the sense memories of cheap silk shirts from the late eighties and a particular lover. May’s work lacks the intellectual pretense of most M.F.A. candidates perhaps because of his disability (May is dyslexic) or perhaps because he is good. This is the first of a series of solo shows planned for May at the gallery during the course of May’s M.F.A. program at Bard. Lets hope that institutional mastery won’t rob May of his sensuality or clumsiness both elements in his production process that are clearly his own.

-Mary Anna Pomonis

Joel Kyak

The Knifeshop

by Maya Lujan

 

There's something undoubtedly serious and menacing about a show constructed around the tool called a knife. There is the clear statement that fundamentally, one really only needs a knife in any given scenario when self-preservation is at stake. This concept presents a certain level of potential, but also of course, violence; destruction and renewal, order and chaos, essentially, entropy. In Kyack's work, there is the retention of an abstracted living entity mimetic of often-unseen-always-functioning design systems.  In thermodynamics, the internal energy of a given system is the expected amount of information needed to exactly specify the state of the system, given what is known about the system. This is critical knowledge for a living, surviving human animal. To a certain degree, the installation is a total apparatus built with a variable amount of expectation within a defined internal system regarding the current market or the undefined external system of the art market and what it means to subsist within it. Joel's approach is to become a sort of street performer wherein the work may collapse, break down and be relocated. It remains self-contained while maintaining liberal and fluid qualities. 

The installation presents a mix of a functional pseudo wood shop, including; New Hampshire license plates, a mailbox, blades, ping-pong balls, insulation sheet foam, an ice hockey stick, crank straps, forging hammers, blacksmith gloves, blades, and a DVD player, to name a few. The show is loaded with the aesthetics of the mid-west or a Steelers/punk/lumberjack/construction worker vernacular. The Knife Shop plays with the concept of switching (no pun intended) or a substitution as a method of change and development in that there is a switching of materials and cultures while the concept remains the same. In other words, the substitution of a wooden spear for a chiseled stone spear, a fish bone to a sewing needle made of a fine tooth with a hole carved into it. A saws-all to a chop saw, a switchblade to a Bowie knife. Meaning: constant improvement until the system in itself becomes apparent and there is a loss of control over the conditions that were set for the original system, and the preservation of the form in itself, becomes the function. Besides, any skilled craftsman demands perfection of their tools, which means not only tools of good materials and workmanship, but also an enormous selection as seen in the knives. 

In the video, a gloved hand holds a knife steadily in the passenger window as the vehicle continues along in a suburban neighborhood on a cold, clear autumn morning. The placement of the blade immediately creates a horizontal division that, in effect, cuts houses in half without physically doing it, lops off the tops of trees and kills (in play) entire families... providing a relevant social commentary about the results of the Western horizontal expanse and state of mind, and it's inherent tendency to obliterate natural systems for the provision of more quantities, faster speeds and efficiency. This video seems to take it's point of origination from Gorda Matta Clark's Building cuts, "Splitting Series", I974, in which he very poignantly dealt with the psycho-socio dynamics of the nuclear family by literally splitting open suburban homes, therefore violently revealing the inner guts and psychic life of the typical American.

Joel shares grounding points with the artists John Bock, Bruce Conner and Jessica Stockholder. Similar to Bock's performative work, there is a prop-like quality in the installation comparable to a backdrop of an 80's horror flick; however, the "pre" activated sculpture performs in lieu of Joel. Due to this, the materials retain a sense of vitality, rather than being leftover remnants from an event. Kyack's work is reminiscent of the arrangements of Connor in that the show is compiled from bits and pieces of everyday human activity to produce a kinetic self-operating mechanism. Also, there is the maintenance of internal symbologies and treatment of materials analogous to Stockholder.

Kyack also employs his sense of humor consistently starting with the butchered foamcore mono that greets the audience as they enter the door.  The Costco beer container provides a visceral impact as it pumps and drives the blood, or kool-aid- and maintains the pulse of the carcass as seen in a paper mache arm sculpture with an empty cage. One can see the indication that the system- if the sculpture is like a body- has illness. If you see blood in your urine; you know something is terribly wrong. You may very well have to go under the knife.

 

 

Ry Rocklen

Ry Rocklen @ Parker Jones

September 9 – October 25 , 2009

Ry Rocklen's show closed Sunday at Parker Jones in Los Angeles.  It’s Rocklen’s first solo show in Los Angeles since his appearance in the Whitney Biennial in 2008.  The title of the show, “The House of Return” makes reference to his returning to Los Angeles his hometown to work and create a home.  Rocklen’s show presents an image of a gritty Los Angeles home life and all of its banalities.

Rocklen’s works at Parker Jones are composed of rarified street detritus presented as sculptural forms. The gallery floor is covered with faded carpet remnants locked together in a vaguely tessellated grid. The carpet has a crudely abbreviated marquetry effect on the floor. Elegantly slumped on top of the carpeted floor and directly facing the entryway to the gallery is a mattress. As a pneumatic form it's hard to miss the mattress as provocateur. The magic here is not necessarily in the subject but the emotive content of the subject implied via glittering tiles elegantly placed in precise stripes on the surface. Subtle and perfectly aligned it's easy to misunderstand this piece in reproduction. Its seductiveness relies heavily on its ability to transform itself into a visual prostitute of sorts putting its best face on for our entertainment.

Because these pieces were found and preserved by Rocklen they bring to mind a populist notion of the "street" and an artist's contemporary responsibility to relate to the practice of everyday life. There is a lot more going on in Rocklen's pieces than the romanticism and marketing behind urban images. Rocklen invokes the history of art in playful and witty ways with ordinary junk. He has created a tableau of objects arranged almost as the characters from Manet’s, “Luncheon in the Grass”. The fake grass carpet and reclining nude mattress create a current context for aesthetic meditation parallel to the one that Manet implied.  However, instead of revealing a simple straightforward recognition of human sexuality and naturalism, Rocklen seems to imply that our exterior experience is supposed to be more at ease than this. The fact that our societal experience is neither natural nor easy alludes to an unstable interior world removed from the slick artifice of contemporary life. .

The strategy that Rocklen utilizes is a synectic one that simply asks each found object to play against its type. A crushed sweatshirt dulled by sidewalk rigor mortise is revivified by a bronze surface. His sculptures have been compared to Duchamp because of their associations with the, "readymade". However I find them to be completely antithetical to the Duchampian strategy in the sense that Rocklen doesn't see his found objects as complete in and of themselves. His interventions animate the pieces and bring to life an interior dialogue that is simultaneously smart, playful and tragic.

-Mary Anna Pomonis

The Magic Hour in Los Angeles

Robert Frank’s “The Americans” the Museum of Contemporary Art Grand Ave

Robert Mc Ginley’s, “Topography Light and Magic” Blue Seven Gallery

 

I set out to see photographs this week in Los Angeles driving both east and west across the 10 freeway. I realized that the two shows I saw during the space of that day were connected through their similar dislocation. Swiss born Robert Frank found himself disillusioned with American cultural life probably as the novelty of the country grew tired. In order to find his subjects Frank famously hit the road taking thousands of photographs in the process. Robert Mc Ginley found himself far from the slickness of Hollywood knee deep in Illinois farmland with a camera. In Mc Ginley’s dislocation he found a community of conservationists and eventually created a wildlife easement out of his photography project.

 

Robert Frank immigrated to America and initially became a fashion photographer.  In 1954 he won a Guggenheim and traveled across the United States photographing the everyday people and situations of daily American life far removed from the artifice of fashion.  The resulting book, “The Americans” launched a firestorm of criticism for its gritty look at Americans and awkward takes on masculine identity, race relations and alienation. It’s no wonder that Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the book full of irony and malaise. 50 years after the publication of the Americans MOCA Grand Avenue is displaying the complete collection of photographs from its permanent collection. Though many of the images are familiar they remind the viewer of the importance of intuition and authorship on the part of the photographer. There is a remarkably unified blankness in the photographs. Fleeting moments are captured and the lack of self-consciousness on the part of the subjects leads us to believe that Frank was able to move around the country almost invisibly.  Otherwise its hard to imagine that a shoeshine would allow himself to be photographed bending over subserviently in a public toilet surrounded by of a row of urinals. The artifice of our encounters with reality via moving pictures is also explored by Frank in one image of a Hollywood premiere the alienated masks of aspiring talent in Hollywood seem to flash by us in an anonymous way the identity of the starlet concealed by her archetypal blurry beauty. Frank’s seems to be speculating that as Americans we are so invested in aspiring to be one of these archetypes of beauty either the cowboy or the ingénue that we miss out on the actual scene right in front of us.

 

Across town at Blue Seven Gallery in Santa Monica is a very different kind of photography show a slick foil to the show at MOCA with a no less compelling story. Mc Ginley a film director found himself in Barrington Illinois endowed with an estate, Horizon Farms. While on the farm taking care of business for his parents who ultimately passed away during his stay, Mc Ginley discovered a watershed ecology full of endangered wildlife and aquatic species.  Mc Ginley saw an opportunity to create a wildlife easement in order to protect the species on the property and prevent further development along the Spring Creek Nature Preserve. The photographs in the show were shot to create exhibits for federal and state lawmakers and ultimately led to the creation of the largest permanent land preservation easement in the state of Illinois. These photographs have all of the technical awareness of a filmmaker and an artist with a vast knowledge of pastoral landscape painting and Italian Cinema. They seem to deliberately quote of from Frederich, Boucher, M.C. Escher and Antonioni. The images dramatize the state of the environmental preservation efforts and make nature the star of the show deliberately pulling on our heartstrings in order to create a moment of communion between the viewer and the life around them.

 

-Mary Anna Pomonis

Andrew Gavenda, "Houser"

Andrew Gavenda

“Houser”
at Texan Equities
January 10-Feb 14


Andrew Gavenda’s stunning sculpture solo show at Texan Equities in Highland Park opened January 10th to a large and loyal crowd. The artist works as an arthandler and has built museum crates for some of Los Angeles’ most famous artists. Appropriately Gavenda’s work exhibits the broad range of skills and levels. Twelve sculptures of different sizes and proportions from the massive Gate Tower (98 x 121 X 73 inches) to the delicate Houser (27.5 x 7.25 x 34.5 inches) dominate the large main gallery space. The theatrical like presence of the pieces is due to the stagecraft techniques the artist employs riffing on stage risers, and polystyrene foam props.

Gate Tower the most massive piece in the show appears like a pos-modern mash up of the video game Q-bert and a Navajo rug. The negative space in the inerior of the sculpture plays off the exterior striped painting creating a moiré-like after image. The resulting optical effect is heightened by the modesty of the craft as these are simple materials built in a small shop and slapped together. The casualness of the construction seems to fit the cartoony transcendentalism of the content alluded to by the artist.

By contrast the piece Houser has the delicacy of a sculptural maquette with its finely tuned carving. A chiseled foot rises from the corner where the wall meets the floor and a spiny form rises to meet a delicate museum board construction. The museum board forms the contours of a fragile quartz rock or diamond crystal form.

Scattered around the room are, Lamed (109 x 8 x 33 inches), Untitled (30 x 21 x 4 .5 inches), and Untitled, Corner Handle (14.5 X 18.75 x 14.5 inches). These iridescent textured foam tubes dodge in and out of the space like abstract earthworms irrigating the gallery space. Formally Gavenda moves space in astonishing ways. Conceptually the pieces seem in keeping with current trends aimed at heightening our cultural relationship with desublimated junk e.g. Justin Beal, Maya Lujan and Davis Rhodes. The question artists seem to be asking all over town this season is how do you make really good bad sculpture. Gavenda’s answer seems to be you make it as good and as fast as you can creating a theatrical like production of the whole enterprise.

Charles Hachadourian

Charles Hachadourian
Topographies
Curated by: Suzanne Adelman
Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions
6518 Hollywood Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90028
February 14th - March 21st


Charles Hachadourian’s remarkable sculpture show at Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions is alive and full of surprises. Hachadourian creates portraits of physical sites ranging from Armenia , to the nearby Pasadena Arroyo Seco. The artist begins his process by digging in the earth using hand tools. He then casts the negative space with different materials (usually wax). Once the piece has set he removes the positive forms and displays them. With the work that is displayed up on pedestals the viewer experiences the pieces as a solid living forms with clotted earth and branches hanging onto the exterior of the cast forms. The pedestal pieces seem like effigies of tree goddesses animated and reminiscent of folk narratives. Some of the work is displayed down below eye level and allows one to peer into the waxy slightly sweaty interior of these sculptural forms. Some of the interiors contain spiders and their webs as charming reminders of both the mood of Hachadourians work and the organic rootedness of creatures to their spaces. Bold and fragile Hachadourian stands like the spider on a web stringing together place, genre and life into a unique sculptural vision all his own.
-Mary Anna Pomonis

Darkness Surrounds Us at Jail

“Darkness Surrounds Us”
Jail Gallery


“Darkness Surrounds Us” at Jail curated by Michael Dee deals with the spiritual loss and alienation characterized by both philosophy and pop psychology. The premise of the show challenges the participants to make meaning out of the void and comment on the proximity of the gallery to the Los Angeles County Correctional facility located across the street. The role of existentialist artist as a solitary tormented figure has perhaps become a cultural cliche. However, there is a power to this show that brings new attention to the contemporary recontextualist fascination with modernist philosophy and the very real anxieties of artists living in the face of Los Angeles’ hollow urban core.

The curator Michael Dee’s sculptures are an odd mix of savant charm and Occidentalism. Dee’s work seems to literally embody the need for a personalized grounding within the darker context of meaninglessness and depression. His piece, “the blue light was my blues the red light was my mind,” fuses plastic 99 cent store glasses creating a piece that resembles a Murano chandelier. Lit from underneath in a darkened corner the piece casts phallic shadows forms on the wall creating sexy red and blue lights out of the otherwise mundane material. Much like the crafty experiments of the Swiss team of Fischli and Weiss, Dee’s piece has an ability to capture the beauty encompassed by the banality of everyday life and magnify this presence.

The rest of the show similiarly riffs on the theme with mixed results. Martin Durazo’s assemblage, “The Ballad of Jim Jones” seems like a derivative Jessica Stockholder without the nostalgia and handiness of Stockholder’s craft. The ancillary photocollage depicts bodies surrounding a Kool Aid tub along with a letter from Harvey Melk vouching for Jones’ character, attempt to push this piece into the territory of a sprawling Jason Rhodes installation. However Durazo falls short in both concept and execution. On the other hand his neon pink drawing “Motorhead Distress Logo” cleverly points to a, “white power” prisoner aesthetic perhaps illustrating the tension between the gallery space and its neighboring “Bailbonds” storefront. Pentti Monkkonen’s giant beer sculpture, “Native America” misses the point, its art historical references to Jasper Johns and political subtext makes it seem out of place in the context of the show’s very personal nature. His much more poetic, “beer cans” sculpture of mice trapped in resin plastic seems to illustrate the creepy tension between alcoholism and hallucination characterized by the lonely addict. Ricky Becerril’s piece, “ Elk” creates a graphic architecture of personal and cultural references bringing the surroundings of downtown Los Angeles into focus. While Jamie Scholnick’s series, “Enemy Combatants” brings to mind the spiritual simplicity of isolation. Her careful renderings of caged pittbulls highlight both to the urban sport of dogfighting and the meditative cloistering of imprisoned souls in direct relation to the gallery. Another stand out is a group of fine small oil paintings by Jamie Adams. “Almost” and “Upstairs” depict the moments just before waking when dim light begins to paint the walls of a plastic thrift store alarm clock and sculpture with imaginative light, and transcience.

Artists attempt to expose the real texture of human experience, in an unreal simulacra. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of “The Darkness Surrounds Us” is its attempt to approach such a grandiose conundrum, successful or not.
-Mary Anna Pomonis