AB OVO

AROUND THE GALLERIES By Holly Myers, Special to The Times February 3, 2005 A collaborative project by Stephen Hull is a clever and logistically ambitious undertaking. Oakland-based artist Stephen Hull has been carving out a curious curatorial niche for himself in recent years, orchestrating large-scale relay-style collaborative projects among artists from various disciplines. For the first, in 1997, he invited 31 visual artists to each create a single artwork, then randomly assigned those works to 31 writers, who were asked to produce a piece of writing in response. The pairs weren't introduced until the opening of the exhibition - hence the title, "Blind Date." The second project, "Song Poems" in 2002, staged a similar operation among artists, writers and musicians, resulting in a performance, a book and a set of three CDs. For his current project, "AB OVO," Hull began by soliciting 19 artists (including Mike Kelley, Mary Kelly, Jim Shaw, Martha Rosler and Bruce Yonemoto) to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2TM, a personality test used by the court system to identify and evaluate psychological disorders. Each test, customized to the settings used in child custody cases, produced a personality profile, which Hull then handed over (anonymously) to 19 writers, asking them to write a children's story based on the character that emerged from the profile. These stories were then given to 19 different artists, who were asked - you guessed it - to produce illustrations. The results were published in book form as well as on a lovely website (www.abovoproject.com), and the artwork is on view in person at Arena 1, along with sample copies of the profiles. It is a clever and logistically ambitious undertaking - as uneven as any large-scale potluck is bound to be, but an entirely entertaining exercise nonetheless. The stories are a mixed lot. Most have a tentative, rambling quality, as if unsure of what to do with themselves in this unusual context. The question of audience - of whether they were to be written for children or for adults about children - appears never to have been resolved. Most of the stories waver awkwardly between the two, sounding vaguely uncomfortable assuming a child's voice. The art, though extremely varied stylistically, is more consistently compelling, which makes the exhibition worth a visit even if you see the book or website beforehand. Especially memorable are a charming series of Polaroids by Isabell Heimerdinger following the antics of a playful, pigtailed little girl; Marnie Weber's characteristically fantastical landscapes (also photographs); and Hiroki Otsuka's crisp, cartoonish paintings of a grouchy fish gazing longingly toward the world beyond his tank. (Otsuka's work accompanies Terri Phillips' "Jitney Junior in a Brave New World," the only one of the stories to be written in poetry form and one of the most charming.) Ambitious though the project is, it would be great to see it taken one step further. The best of these stories - Trinie Dalton's wonderful "The Wookie Saw My Nipples: A Week in the Life of Princess Leia" (the only story in the collection to employ a child's voice convincingly), Ben Ehrenreich's bizarre but tragic "The Sad Story of Rhonda the Rhinoceros," and Benjamin Weissman's hilariously weird and irreverent "Hairy Prince" - could be made into books in their own right, with a full set of images (by Aaron Noble, Tanya Haden and Scott Cassidy, respectively) rather than the tantalizing handful that appear here. The most gratifying thing about the project is the lively sense of community it evokes. In a world dominated by solo shows and individuated statements, it's nice to be reminded of the pleasures of interaction and collaboration.
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The Shape of Space

AROUND THE GALLERIES By David Pagel, Special to The Times November 18, 2005 Testing spatial sensibilities Space isn't what it used to be. There's a lot less of it on streets and highways, and you don't need to be a real estate expert to know that population density is on the rise. In art, similar developments are afoot. Back in the 1960s, a handful of Southern Californians made a name for themselves as Light and Space artists by creating expansive, often huge installations in which seemingly empty spaces triggered perceptual experiences of remarkable subtlety. Today, spatial sensibilities seem to be filtered through digital technology - and miniaturized. At Arena 1 Gallery, an eight-artist exhibition suggests that it's far more common to look at space via screens or images than to move through it physically. The most ambitious works in "The Shape of Space" strive to do both - to give flat pictures bodily impact. Kim Schoenstadt draws thick black lines on the wall and floor and then fills in some of these coloring-book shapes with thick layers of paint or pale pastel tints. Fran Siegel cuts abstract shapes out of mirrored Mylar, adds encaustic and mica, and encases the reflective and transparent mixture in shallow Plexiglas boxes that appear to be lighted from within. Almond Zigmund and Sherin Guirguis treat negative space as if it were as important as positive forms. Zigmund's monochromatic wall relief turns decoration into an illusion-inducing, mind-bending delight. Guirguis' 8-foot-long paper cutout, pushpinned to the wall like an insect specimen, flirts with fragility yet packs surprising punch. Computer technology may save time and shrink space. But there's no substitute for in-the-flesh experiences of well-designed things.
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Kimberly Squaglia's "Scend"

AROUND THE GALLERIES By Holly Myers, Special to The Times Dec 2, 2005 Jazzy confections compel viewers to go forward The adjectives that spring to mind in the presence of Kimberly Squaglia's paintings suggest the climate of a successful cocktail party. They're jazzy, lively, bubbly, blithe, sprightly, spirited, vivacious, frolicsome and elegant, with an intrinsic dynamism that propels the viewer, like an intoxicated guest, from one painting to the next. The effect, like all good party tricks, belies Squaglia's meticulous and labored technique. Each painting at Sherry Frumkin Gallery is composed in layers, with various shapes suspended in different coats of resin, creating the impression of cavern-like depth. In some cases, the resin is clear and glossy, like hard candy. In others, it's sanded and cloudy, creating a softer, dreamier quality. The palette is a delicious range of sherbet, taffy and bubble gum. The forms have an organic, stringy, often lace-like delicacy. In "Pander," one of the largest and most exhilarating works in the show, whirling clusters of frenetic blue lines streak across a field of sea foam green. Columns of pink and rose reach like stalagmites from the top and bottom edge of the panel, while tiny circles and dots float like champagne bubbles through the oceanic space between. Drifting into this festive enclave of color and form, one is loath to return to the comparatively bland world outside the gallery.
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Katsushige Nakahashi's "Zero Project"

AROUND THE GALLERIES By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times Sept 16, 2005 Burning it is part of the art Katsushige Nakahashi's "Zero Project" is a multifaceted, participatory act of storytelling. It involves ritual and performance, creation and destruction. It breaks down History with a capital H into its constituent parts: individual actions with human consequences. Considered in its entirety, the project carries tremendous emotional, intellectual and spiritual weight. Elements on view at Sherry Frumkin Gallery are fascinating fragments of that larger whole. The Zero was an agile, long-range fighter plane used by the Japanese navy during World War II. The plane became symbolic of Japanese military superiority in the air in the early '40s and legendary for its use in kamikaze (suicide) missions later in the war. Nakahashi, born 10 years after the war's end, started building plastic model planes as a child. For the Zero Project, ongoing since 2000, he revisits the craft. This time around, model-building is just the starting point for something physically and conceptually much larger, and the action is informed by deeper understanding of the repercussions of the war on his family, his generation and his nation. For each installment of the project, Nakahashi builds a 1/32 scale version of one of the Zeros in plastic, using a commercially available kit or creating the parts himself. When finished, he photographs the sea-green model methodically, in 2-millimeter sections. The images (roughly 15,000 of them per plane) are printed in snapshot size and taped together by volunteers to recreate the form of the plane in its actual size. Each quilting bee-like assembly is designed to be a cross-generational affair, military veterans sharing their stories with students as they build together. The planes, when completed, look intentionally handmade. Irregular, glossy and slightly lumpy, they're less precious than the similarly taped-together photocollages of the Starn twins, more politically charged than the Pop soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, which they bring to mind. Nakahashi keys each project to the story of a particular plane, its pilot and its fate. When the paper plane is complete, it's brought to a location pertinent to its story. On a date also chosen for its relevance, the plane is ceremonially burned. Photographs in the Frumkin show (poignantly, across the street from the Santa Monica Airport), of projects in Australia, Japan and the U.S., depict different stages of the process: the carrying of a plane, the sculpture in flames, the scorched silhouettes branded into the earth. Nakahashi's first Zero plane didn't fully burn, and sections of it are on view in the gallery as well. A wing, one edge singed, is propped in the corner like a heavy pelt. Nakahashi is soliciting volunteers for a project he hopes to bring to fruition in 2007, with a burning in San Diego, linked to Southern California's role in the Zero's history. In 1942, a plane, its pilot dead, was found by American naval scouts in the Aleutian Islands and brought to San Diego's Miramar Naval Air Station for examination. What American crews learned about the plane helped deflate the Zero's mystique and better equip Americans charged with bringing them down. Nakahashi's father served on the maintenance crew for Zero planes at a base near Nagasaki during the war. If the Zero Project is the artist's way to process a chapter in his family history, it's also an opportunity for those who encounter the work to draw their own connections to places and events that Nakahashi foregrounds. Itinerant memorial, history lesson, burnt offering — the Zero Project engages on multiple levels. Images of the burning planes evoke a visceral unease, akin to witnessing the wreckage of a crash landing. Yet the fire has intentionality. It's sacrificial, purifying. It releases the spirits of the dead. It clears the ground of myth and legend, allowing for more immediate perspectives on the experience of war and its aftermath. Normally, burning photographs would seem a way of extinguishing memory. Here, however, burning activates memory, the way forest fires catalyze new growth. Nakahashi may be destroying something symbolic, but in the process he brings real, potent understanding to life.
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Corey Stein's "Trying to Pick Up a Gallery Guyde"
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GALLERIES By Cindy Chang, Special to The Times January 25, 2007 On a solo expedition Corey Stein's exhibit riffs on words that might cause single women pain. WORDS such as "couple," "mate," "partner," "pair" and "match" can make single women think not of wedded bliss but of their own loneliness. Those words also have other, non-conjugal associations, and perhaps it would ease some women's pain, or at least make them smile a little, to be reminded that dates are a fruit and socks also have mates. Los Angeles artist Corey Stein plays with these varied meanings in a series of 16 pastel-and-paper self-portraits that put a gently humorous spin on her predicament as a single woman in her early 40s. Her series "Trying to Pick Up a Gallery Guyde" is on view at the Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica through Feb. 24. Several of the "Gallery Guyde" portraits draw on one of Stein's favorite hobbies, square-dancing, to highlight the pathos of being a lone woman at an event where a partner is required. In "Mate," Stein is in a classic square-dancing outfit - red vest, white puffy-sleeved blouse and lacy black skirt, with a nametag that says, "Solo." The captions read, "My dog has a mate. My sock has a mate. My coffee has a mate." "Partner" shows Stein in a red-white-and-blue square-dancing dress with the American flag as a backdrop. She is wearing the "Solo" tag again - people who attend square-dances alone wear such a tag, Stein says - and holding a matching red-white-and-blue men's shirt on a hanger. "The caller has a partner. The lawyer has a partner. The bank robber has a partner." In each case, the viewer can supply the next sentence: "I don't have a mate." "I don't have a partner." "In my 20s, like in college, I thought, 'That guy's so cute, he needs a girlfriend. Who can I set him up with?' I never even thought about me," Stein said in an interview at the gallery last week. "In my 30s, I think I was scared of guys. Now I'm ready to go." "Gallery Guyde" is mostly about finding a man, but finding gallery representation was also on Stein's mind as she was making the series during the last three years. Her art has been featured at museums and she has participated in group shows, but this is her first solo gallery show in more than a decade. One of the self-portraits, "Spotted," does not seem obviously connected to either search. It shows Stein in leopard print boots holding her pet gecko, Jennifer (now deceased), with these captions: "Jennifer is spotted. My boots are spotted. The cricket has been spotted." The connection becomes clearer when you notice that the cricket is standing on a plastic Solo cup lid. And then there is the ambivalence about being discovered that plagues the more neurotic among single people and unrepresented artists. "You want to be spotted but you don't," Stein explained. "Part of you wants to crawl under a rock." STEIN studied with conceptual artist John Baldessari and others at CalArts in the 1980s. Much of her previous work has dealt, directly or indirectly, with the surgery she had at age 28 to remove a part of her brain that was causing debilitating epileptic seizures. Her brother - filmmaker and novelist Garth Stein - made a documentary about the surgery, "When Your Head's Not a Head, It's a Nut," that aired on PBS in 1993. For "Gallery Guyde," Stein drew dresses, earrings and locks of hair, then used an X-Acto knife to cut them out and Elmer's glue to layer them. The intricate pieces look two-dimensional from far away but up close have a paper-doll-like quality. All of the rather eccentric outfits and hairstyles have been worn by the real Stein at one time or another. With "Gallery Guyde's" opening in mid-January, Stein's search for gallery representation has come to a close. At least for now, she has returned to Sherry Frumkin, where she had her last solo show, "Please Do Not Twirl Me," in 1993. "You would never misidentify one of her pieces as someone else's. They're so unique to her and they're so dependent on words and the way words and images play off each other," Frumkin said of Stein's work. There may be hope in the dating realm too. Stein is still trying to master e-mail and other computer basics, but friends have helped her set up an online dating profile. She plans to go out soon with a guy she met online who also likes square-dancing.
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Zoom +/-
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AROUND THE GALLERIES By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times July 27, 2007 All charted on the maps of our lives "Zoom +/-" an enjoyable excursion through the theme of mapping, is threaded with good humor and clever subversion of the map's physical integrity and implicit authority. Nineteen artists -- youngish and older; East Coast, West Coast and beyond; painters, sculptors, photographers, makers of videos and collages -- are represented in the show, organized by Doug Beube and Sherry Frumkin for Arena 1. Nina Katchadourian's works are among the wittiest explorations of the map as both discrete object and indicator of position. Cutting away interstices and leaving only linear routes, she transforms a subway map into a delicate tangled nest and photographs it resting in the palm of a hand. She cuts out Finland's longest road and curls it, like a fragile specimen, into a petri dish. Her genealogical chart of comestibles (Mrs. See's begetting Wolfgang Puck, cousin to the Sun Maid raisin girl and so on down the generations to the Gerber baby) is a wry, hilarious take on branding. In Joyce Kozloff's richly layered images, drawn maps of battle sites are embellished with children's drawings of superheroes and UFOs and studded with tiny reproductions of resonant imagery from the Italian Renaissance to German Expressionism. Place becomes the sum of recollection and imagination. Another provocative highlight is Christian Nord's "Newham Sensory Deprivation Map." Some 30 students at a London college were sent out in pairs, one wearing blindfold and earplugs, the other with a GPS device, pen and paper. The resulting map dismisses with familiar campus landmarks and roads, instead redefining the environment according to smells, breezes, levels of comfort and discomfort, hunger, texture, feelings of confusion and relief. Place and experience connect in a literal and yet suggestive way. Among the other notable works in the show are a skittish etching by Jeff Woodbury, Robert Walden's painted "Ontological Road Maps" and co-curator Doug Beube's worm-eaten "Erosion" collages.
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Robin Kandel
L.A. Times review (pdf)
L.A. Weekly review (pdf)
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AROUND THE GALLERIES By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times July 27, 2007 Robin Kandel sifts through her family history In Robin Kandel's short, silent video, "Mythological Parentage," six men confront each other on a beach. Three wear coats with Nazi armbands. The other three are dressed in suits of a similar vintage. The groups shoot at each other, but then they start exchanging hats and coats, switching sides it seems, before shooting some more. The brief passage shifts from slow motion to the accelerated jerky movement of early silent film, as if part distant dream, part theatrical skit. The imagery is indelible -- poignant, tragic and slightly comic, much like the family history that Kandel draws upon in her absorbing recent work at Sherry Frumkin Gallery. We learn in one of the installations that Kandel's maternal and paternal great-grandfathers were brothers. In 1910, their paths diverged: One immigrated to the U.S. and the other stayed in their native Russian town of Berezno (now Ukraine). During World War II, the Ukrainian strand of the family, successful cattle merchants, was subjected to German occupation, forced into a Jewish ghetto and sent to a labor camp where peat squares were dug and dried for fuel. When rumors of imminent killings reached the camp, the family escaped into the surrounding woods, hiding for the remaining two years of the war, losing numerous members of the group along the way to discovery and death. The American branch of the family, assimilated Jews in Detroit, had ties in the 1920s and '30s to gun-runners and bootleggers known as the Purple Gang. Kandel's grandfather served time for driving a getaway car for cousins who ended up in Alcatraz. This side of the family -- unaccented, glamorous and vaguely dangerous -- was the side the young Kandel preferred as she was growing up. The two tales interweave throughout the show, most explicitly in "Benjamin & Julius," which incorporates a timeline, framed wall panels (most with text, a few blank), a globe, map and chalkboard, and snippets of stories printed on colored paper and scattered on the floor. The stories pick up in the middle and leave off without closure. They are anecdotal, reflective. They skip back and forth through time, from past accounts to their recent discovery. Kandel, a Bay Area artist, learned the details of her father's wartime childhood only six years ago when he gave her copies of several taped interviews a graduate student had made with him in 1983. Her assimilation of the information, her incorporation of it into her own sense of self has been the focus of her work ever since. She approaches the stories and their legacy in various ways. Some works -- a large paper weaving made from cut strips of maps, for example -- feel facile and slight. An installation pairing an assembly of globes with a painting evoking the ocean as it appears on a globe also seems too generalized to have much impact. The most affecting works marry the literal and the metaphorical. In "Backward Text," Kandel transcribes a long excerpt from her father's testimony, writing it by hand, in reverse. The pain of the story itself is echoed in the strain of reading it. This isn't information easy to receive or deliver. In her performative videos, Kandel negotiates her inheritance of a fractured past in concentrated, evocative vignettes. Trauma is laced with levity. In "Dress Up," she puts on clothing associated with her mother, her father and others (even a Nazi) that played roles in the formation of her family's story. She physically assumes the layers contributing to her own identity. In another video, of unlikely objects deliberately stacked in piles, she refers to the stacking of peat squares in the German labor camp as well as to the broader notion of identity as multilayered, compressed, geological in its stratification. Kandel's family history is powerful raw material. Through her strengths as both storyteller and image-maker, she gives it further dimension and relevance, extending its power to the present.
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