Framing the Many Possibilities of Photography in the Tech Age

The so-called reinvention of photography has been in full swing for a number of years now, and yet the “hows” and “whys” and “what nows” of this task are still open-ended questions. Tucked away in a small storefront in downtown Hollywood (just one door down from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies is at the heart of these debates. Offering a glimpse into the current state of the photographic arts is the center’s annual juried group show, curated by board co-president Glenn Kaino and featuring 13 L.A.-based members of the center.

As is typical of this kind of show, overarching themes and manifestoes are absent. This will frustrate some viewers and relieve others. What the uniformly strong works do make clear is that artists working with photography and photo-based media are embracing a wide range of approaches that do not necessarily include photography per se.

You can’t see the photograph in Craig Johnston’s ingenious installation, but you can hear it. Using a computer, Johnston has translated a photograph into a bitmap image and a digital audio file, then pressed the resulting rumbling sounds onto a vinyl record. Similarly, Brian Moss’ fragmentary newspaper tracings leave conspicuously blank the sections where photographic illustrations would normally appear.

Highlighting the fragmented and fabricated nature of history and memory are Todd Weaver’s self-consciously stagy stereoscopic photographs, Shaune Thyne’s ghostly and intransigent portrait of downtown legend Don Jones, and Nicholas Fedak II’s spliced-up archival Codalith transparencies.

Kip Fulbeck’s autobiographical video shrines to his Chinese grandmother explore the generational push and pull that creates--and complicates--ethnic and cultural identity. With equal parts irony and goofy good cheer, Young Chung dramatizes his own cultural dislocation by fetishizing a model Korean Airlines jet (along with a motherly flight attendant).

Karin Geiger’s large color photographs of female high-school students and Liza Hennessey Botkin’s black-and-white images of women standing in grocery lines or changing diapers honor routinely forgotten moments, while the brightly painted water valves documented in Nancy D. Nisbet’s “Somewhere in Irvine” series infuse decorative excess into a deadpan tradition made famous by Lewis Baltz and others.

Insisting upon the singularity of tragedy, Louis Cameron takes a postage stamp-sized photograph of a missing African American youth and enlarges it to hundreds of times its original size. The large, mirror-like surfaces of S.E. Barnet’s high-gloss C-prints of Barbie and G.I. Joe clothing invite viewers’ uneasy identification, while Mike McMillin’s digital prints of a leopard, “captured” from what appears to be a TV or computer screen, remind us that photographic images expand and limit our view of the world in roughly equal proportions.

* Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, 6518 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 466-6232, through March 13. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Snapshots of America: Lisa Ruyter’s large-scale acrylic paintings at Ace Gallery look a bit like the pages in a child’s coloring book. Still, there’s no mistaking the fact that these 14 eye-grabbing works, each titled after an obscure or forgotten movie, were made by an artist with a sophisticated awareness of the inspired give-and-take that exists between contemporary painting, drawing, photography and film.

The New York-based artist projects snapshots of demolition sites, highways, farmhouses and nondescript suburban homes onto her canvases, tracing the photograph’s outlines with a black marking pen and then filling in the spaces between with clashing hues, pitting lavender against yellow, Day-Glo orange against red, puce, dark blue and brown. Ruyter’s smooth, unmodulated brush strokes and wobbly, hand-drawn outlines both emphasize and efface the material presence of her own hand.

The invisible brushwork, nonrepresentational coloring and flattened perspectives in Ruyter’s paintings engage them in a visual tug-of-war between figuration and abstraction. At any moment, her neatly rendered compositions threaten to slide into a visual cacophony of discrete geometric units, where dimensional reality collapses into a single plane, and foreground and background, solid object and shadow, assume equal prominence.

“Muddy River” depicts a highway seen from the reversed perspective of a rearview mirror. The sky is a thick, muddy brown, the highway deep blue, the shadows beneath the putty-gray cars bright red, with cartoonish white stars glinting off the windshields.

A statue of Abraham Lincoln with its head cut out of the frame in “High and Low” recalls a clumsy tourist’s snapshot. Reminding us that wayward paths often lead to the most interesting places, Ruyter’s paintings dazzle because of their many “errors,” not in spite of them.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 935-4411, through May 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Winnie the Symbol: Watch out, Jerry Falwell: Karen Finley’s back, and her wickedly funny new drawings at Track 16 Gallery are bound to raise your hackles. Precautions have been taken; the entryway to “Pooh Unplugged: A Parody” has been slapped with a parental warning sticker that reads “not meant for children or stupid adults.”

On that score, Finley certainly knows whereof she speaks. Probably the best known of the “NEA 4,” Finley has fought a number of highly publicized court battles against some exceedingly stupid adults intent on silencing her and a number of other vital artists whose work contains sexually explicit subject matter.

Up late one night reading stories to her 4-year-old daughter, the controversial performance artist imagined an alternative reality in which Pooh Bear and his pals were cutting edge instead of cute and cuddly. The 54 ink drawings that sprung from these musings portray gentle Winnie and his pals Eeyore, Piglet, Rabbit and Christopher Robin as sex-crazed S&M; aficionados who, while not performing painful sex acts on one another, cynically debate the pros and cons of a Disney buyout. Should they hold out for the Frank Gehry dream house? Or settle instead for a 22-episode commitment?

Finley clearly relishes the Freudian-cum-Falwellian implications of Pooh (starting with the scatological connotations of his name), while cleverly lampooning the pretensions of Hollywood and the art world alike. As you might expect, the results aren’t terribly nuanced--but, then again, subtlety’s the last thing this straight-shooting performance artist cares about.

There’s a deeper logic to Finley’s stratagems, however, that speaks to the deep-rooted paternalism fueling the culture wars. “I feel it is important in child development for the child to adore something the parent hates,” Finley notes in the show’s catalog. Perhaps the same idea holds true for the artist, as well.

* Track 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4678, through March 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Connected Thoughts: Any work of art, no matter how singular, could always have been made differently. Art, like life, results from a series of decisions.

When this trail of choices is erased, as it is in Minimalist sculpture, for example, the finished object appears as if it were imminent, preordained. When renegade possibilities are laid bare in the object, though, as in the work of Barry Le Va and other Post-Minimalist sculptors, art assumes the burdens of its own contingency.

Le Va’s elegant new sculpture at Richard Telles Fine Art looks a bit like a giant jigsaw puzzle that could be solved in any number of ways. Low-lying blocks of sand-cast hydrastone of various sizes and rectilinear shapes are arranged in clusters on the floor around a large, black, cast-rubber element shaped like a stencil of the letter I.

Affixed to the wall are six ink and pencil drawings, each the size of a standard piece of paper, which resemble architectural plans and depict alternate ways of configuring the same elements in the sculpture. Although they exist independently of one another, the drawings and sculpture each represent different ways of thinking about a related set of ideas. As such, they mediate between conceptual possibility and physical reality, while suggesting that the finished work of art is, in many ways, only the beginning.

Le Va once wrote that drawing provides him with a direct pipeline to his thoughts. All of his drawings are thoughts about sculpture, while his sculpture inevitably manifests new problems that future drawings will address. Conceptual tracings of thought and action by artists and viewers alike remain central to Le Va’s sculptural process, although it is the inner workings of his own mind that Le Va’s art ultimately seeks to apprehend.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 965-5578, through March 20. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.