The Westside of the Eastside

At the Pink Gallery in Echo Park, an exhibition of landscape photographs by Carla Jo Bailey is similarly intimate, but speaks of the solitary, personal experience of nature rather than the emotional tangle of human relationships. The images carry the viewer all across the city -- from the beaches, to the mountains, to downtown -- on what feels like a wave of youthful enthusiasm for beauty and light. The images are impulsively captured relics of time and space: an abandoned dock in Playa del Rey, a deteriorating Broadway movie marquee, a scrub-covered hill tumbling down to a Malibu beach, a curved road near Lake Hollywood, bathed in golden afternoon light. Color prints of enlarged Polaroid images, the works are one step removed from the immediacy of snapshots; they are like snapshots that have been enlarged and softened by a mystical process of contemplation. The modest printing process (the works are basically color Xeroxes) is surprisingly effective in bringing out the exquisite subtleties of the Polaroid color and giving the work the precious tint of old post cards. The afternoon mountain scenes are deliciously golden, the beaches dreamily white. In one of the only close-up shots, each stalk of greenery looks as though it were lit from within by a creamy and magical light. Not all of the pieces are as breathtaking as these, but the exhibition is none the less for it. This is a modest body of work on the whole -- a humble presentation of exuberant observations -- but the fact that it was given the space to show is fortunate, for the artist and the neighborhood. It’s somewhat surprising that these small galleries are able to stay in business at all. But offering as they do a space for introduction, experimentation, community and possibly failure (with relatively low stakes), they‘re a great gift to the cultural life of the city.#