Drawings Match Drama in Landscapes and Human Acts

Strange things are going on in Jeanine Breaker’s ravishingly beautiful drawings at William Turner Gallery. In each panoramic slice of landscape, the earth’s natural drama offsets a human drama, both odd and familiar.

Odd, because the context makes no rational sense, but familiar, because we have seen these acts before. Walking a tightrope, walking on stilts, juggling with fire--these are classic components of the circus repertoire.

Matching spectacle with spectacle, Breaker sets these awe-evoking acts in equally awe-inspiring places. The stilt walker passes in silhouette before a windbreak, a perfectly aligned row of trees on a low horizon. The sky behind him (gender being somewhat ambiguous) has turned a deep, serene blue, though in the area he’s just passed, it ripples and flickers in luminous gold and white and pink, as brilliant as the aurora borealis. In another of the drawings, tiny, agile figures perform aerial feats, upside-down, against a stunning backdrop of rugged, terraced pools, their surface reflecting the radiant pink light of dawn or dusk.

Breaker’s own spectacular facility with pastel pulls us in close, where we can better savor the drawings’ vibrant colors and velvety textures. These images of feats are feats in themselves, case studies in pushing boundaries of skill and power. The subjects occupy an arena of physical extremity that transcends the literal and seems to rise to the level of metaphor. Breaker’s images suggest conditions, predicaments, risks, states of balance and hard-earned equilibrium.

She titles her drawings with obsolete phrases and colorful colloquialisms--”fog-dog,” “to chant the play,” “dive the twine,” “blue fine of the dinkum oil”--that refer to phenomena of nature and human ingenuity. These too stretch credibility, but are absolutely of a piece with Breaker’s playfully edgy imagery.

Some speak of exposed tricks, false miracles and clever illusions, practices of useful deceit as basic to art as to theater and the circus sideshow. Breaker’s tiny performers proceed without either guile or irony, but with a self-possessed precision that is both bewildering and beautiful to behold. Breaker’s own performance in these drawings is no less impressive.

William Turner Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 392-8399, through March 30. Closed Sunday.

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Contrived Monotony Dominates Installation

Sarah Seager’s scattershot installation at LACE can be described, but not easily summarized. Her title hints at the problem: “188 loose elements/things like/pure sound associations/improvisational jazz/free form where in principal/everything is equal/the id/and the superego/supersystems.”

In practice, when everything is equal, nothing stands out. Nothing takes priority. Contrast, dynamism, tension take a back seat to carefully contrived monotony. In Seager’s installation, all of the “loose elements” stay loose, purposefully (and somewhat pretentiously) resisting order.

Three large rolls of white paper (each 9 to 12 feet wide) unfurl across the floor at skewed angles. Strewn upon them are sheets of paper printed acid green, gray or hot pink, some cut or crumpled. A sheet of musical staff paper rests atop one of the unrolled carpets of paper, a jar of pushpins sits on another, some loose pins scattered about. Two framed collages by the artist, who teaches at Art Center College of Design, stand propped against one another, not far from two crinkled sheets of silver paper, a wooden ax handle, and two slim paper ribbons printed with the repeated phrases, “tiny details but they weigh as heavy as 50,000 dead soldiers and horses in Waterloo” and “complete scorched (in no way).” Five large panes of glass lean against the walls, each sandblasted with text that makes reference to sightlessness.

There are tiny moments of visual poetry here: The corners of two of the colored papers rise from the floor and meet in a kiss; the sandblasted text reads in shadow form on the wall; and from above, the installation as a whole suggests a spunky Constructivist composition. But these aren’t enough to give this collection of loose ends a meaningful middle.

The product of Seager’s artful artlessness is a kind of framed vacancy. The blank score, the white paper, the ax without a blade--all speak of potentiality and latency, linking Seager to the radical acts of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. But empowering chance and valuing contingency are no longer the daring moves they once were. They’ve been stretched thin by artists like Seager--so thin that they leave no thread to follow.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 957-1777, through April 20. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Gentle Images With a Life-Affirming Message

Ever since Joe Goode took a shotgun to his paintings in the early 1980s, pocking the canvases with frayed-edged craters, power has been a palpable, if not always overt theme in his work. That series (called “Environmental Impact”) urged an equivalence between violation of the painted surface and violation of the environment.

Groups of work that followed by the L.A. painter and printmaker have focused on oceans, waterfalls, tornados, fires and pollution, with Goode eliciting both the awesome power of nature and the fearsome power of humankind. We have the power to revere the earth and not just to scar it through benign neglect or calculated policy, and it’s this affirming capacity that materializes in Goode’s latest works, at Bobbie Greenfield Gallery.

These are exceedingly gentle images, intimately scaled and privately imagined, beautiful studies of pure atmosphere. Each is no larger than 15 inches per side, and many are half that size. The drawings, in graphite or powdered pigment on paper, are each labeled “Study for Oil and Water Painting,” but the sense they give is less that of opposites repelling than of neighboring substances on a continuum. They easily read as cloud studies--akin to Alfred Stieglitz’s photographic “Equivalents”--or more abstractly, as meditations on light and density, form and insubstantiality.

Passages of luminosity ease into pools of shadow. Freckles of light skim across the surface, sometimes in the form of a powdery crust, like small evaporations of liquid light. Pigment, whether predominantly gray or an intense, nearly royal blue, fills the sheets from edge to edge, strengthening the impression that these are framings (like Stieglitz’s) of continuous, given fields.

Two “Oil and Water Paintings” hang here among the drawings, but the smaller studies, so concentrated and rich, outlast them in terms of visual staying power. Graceful and personal, the drawings articulate the hushed rapture of long, private meditation. Power breathes through them--Goode’s own and the profound energy of the earth, at once vast and intimate.

Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-0640, through March 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.