State of the Art ’05

Michael DuncanArt in America’s man in Los Angeles and Weekly contributor Michael Duncan is turning into one of the most interesting local freelance curators, specializing in forgotten movements like Post-Surrealism, underappreciated regional talents like Sister Corita and Richard Pettibone, and his own quirky surveys of the contemporary “Post-Cool” scene. Currently, “Semina Culture,” Duncan and Kristine McKenna’s show on “Wallace Berman & His Circle,” is on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through November 26. (DH)

Sam Durant Durant’s many-layered multimedia remixes of Robert Smithson, ’70s rock & roll, and insurrectionist politics have — surprisingly — resulted in a burgeoning acceptance by the art-world establishment. Durant, named this year’s prestigious CSULB Zeitlin Lecturer, has new gallery affiliations with Paula Cooper in NYC and Gagosian in London. All power to the people! (DH) Miriam Dym Ever flip through your Thomas Guide just to look at the lines and shapes? Miriam Dym obviously has, but in her paintings, drawings and objects she never loses sight of the map’s syntactical coherency, symbolic intricacy and landscape properties. Without visual tricks, but with a lot of conceptual play and a powerful sense of design, Dym brings us places we could never imagine existed. (PF) Tim Ebner In the ’90s, Tim Ebner shifted from Finish Fetish works to lush paintings of storybook animals, with an emphasis on rich color, expressive brushwork and upbeat fantasy. Vanquished heroes of slightly unsettling fairy tales, Ebner’s animals are oddly moving, mysteriously charming fantasy surrogates anchored by a kind of psychological urgency. (MD) ECF Art Center My favorite source of great cheap art is the ECF Art Center just east of the Magic Johnson Theaters at Crenshaw and King. Artists with developmental disabilities churn out awesome and inspired visual treats five days a week. Their annual holiday sale is on December 10 from 1 to 5 p.m., 3750 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Los Angeles; (323) 290-6030. (DH) Merion Estes Estes’ retrospective at Pomona College Museum of Art next year will reveal the fresh relevancy of this longtime master of visual extravagance. Estes creates alternate universes of hyperdecoration civilized by color, texture and fertile excess, in which ornamentation is the means to unleashing imaginative fancy and enhancing everyday reality. (MD) Nancy Evans One of L.A.’s most consistently inventive abstract artists, Evans is returning to the scene with new paintings and a surprise — bronze figural sculptures cast from augmented segments of leaves and pods. With an experimental exuberance that rivals that of Ed Moses, Evans toys with the intersection of the organic and the abstract, creating a new synthetic nature. (MD) Bart Exposito Are we finished having fun yet? Young artists may actually have gotten serious again. When they turn to idealistic models such as Constructivism and make them their own, you begin to think Neo-modernism is around the corner. By turning that corner with a forceful (almost Pop) compositional vocabulary and an abiding ability to surprise, Exposito doesn’t just follow in Mondrian’s and Kelly’s footsteps, he leaves tracks of his own. (PF) Shepard Fairey Shepard Fairey heads a media empire launched in 1990 by the now-ubiquitous face of Andre the Giant. Originally an experiment in “phenomenology,” the OBEY GIANT and ANDRE HAS A POSSE sticker revolution led to sold-out gallery shows of hand-screened prints. Meanwhile, the Fairey phenomenon evolved into a design studio (Studio Number One), a quarterly lifestyle magazine (Swindle) and a streetwear line (Obey). In his spare time, he nurtures new talent in his own gallery space (Subliminal), directs a new urban branding agency (Project 2050) and books regular DJ gigs as DJ Diabetic. Oh, and that graffiti thing — he still throws up to keep up. What does this have to do with art? Paraphrasing ’60s cultural media guru Marshall McLuhan, the Giant’s motto is “The medium is the message.” Fairey makes no bones about his capitalistic intentions, but believes his commerce is done with integrity and helps him achieve loftier goals, such as perpetuating the myth of the Giant image on the street and contributing to social and political causes. Now in his mid-30s, he can keep up the pace. He does what he loves and surrounds himself with smart people at the top of their game who can carry out his vision — and their own. (Shelley Leopold) Llyn Foulkes The Lost Frontier — Foulkes’s astonishing new 8-foot-tall panel depicting the bleak L.A. basin — conveys a powerful sense of an urban society run totally amok. Commanding viewers with its shimmering light and sense of sublime vastness, this major work invokes a new kind of terribilitĂ , inspired by waste, hubris and human indifference. Foulkes desires nothing less than ?to reinvigorate painting with the moral seriousness of Renaissance religious art. (MD) Charles Garabedian Most artists peter out or at least hit a plateau once they reach 80, but Charles Garabedian just keeps getting better. His two massive, dreamlike island scapes, September Song and The Spring for Which I Longed, are both hauntingly elegiacal and riotously sensual, among the best artworks to surface in the past year. (DH) Invisible Glass(2005) Courtesy Janie Geiser Puppet Master Janie Geiser At the moment, Janie Geiser inhabits a little house facing a palmetto forest in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, with crickets and birds chirping outside. The recipient of an Atlantic Center for the Arts residency, Geiser is using the time away from her busy life as the director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts to work on several new projects set to premiere next spring. Geiser is known for a host of deliciously rich and sensuous animated films that often combine objects and cutouts seemingly plucked from the past. These things are set in evanescent landscapes, and the films frequently feel like shadowy memories or murky dreams. Lost Motion(1999), for example, features a little metal man searching for a woman who is supposed to arrive by train; he stumbles through a desolate downtown built out of scraps of metal, looking and looking, but in vain. In just a few minutes, the short film captures a sense of deep melancholic sorrow. “I like the way inanimate objects are able to speak,” Geiser says, and her films are a testament to the ability of these objects to communicate. The same power resonates in Geiser’s puppet theater, in which wood, wire, paper and other materials become utterly real, speaking to us about love and loss. In her newest work, Geiser is combining puppetry, live performance and film. “They reflect on each other in a great way,” she says. Geiser is currently collaborating with Susan Simpson on an adaptation of Frankensteinthat borrows from, among other things, the history of 19th-century painting and will be staged as a kind of panorama. (Holly Willis) Giant Robot's Eric Nakamura Photo by Kevin Scanlon Robot vs. Munky Just over a decade ago, Giant Robotwas a punk rock zine — less punk, more rock — cut, pasted and stapled together by two Asian-American college guys, one of whom had a thing for mechanical Japanese robot toys. Today, Giant Robotis a glossy lifestyle, arts and music magazine with an international readership of 60,000. And it is a small network of stores/galleries in New York, San Francisco, Silver Lake and West Los Angeles that sells underground comics, stickers, fire-breathing Godzilla Gama-Go T-shirts, cats-dressed-as-food toys and Marcel Dzama ghost lamps. Now, there is even a Giant Robot cafĂ©, Gr/Eats, a block from the flagship store on Sawtelle Boulevard (see Counter Intelligence, here). “When we started in 1994, there wasn’t anything around dealing with the cool, interesting aspects of Asian life,” says founder-publisher Eric Nakamura. “We wanted to fill that void.” Nakamura oversees the stores and curates the art shows, while his business partner, Martin Wong, edits the magazine. Nakamura likes taking chances on young unknown artists. His was the first store to carry David Horvath’s scary-cute plush line of Ugly Dolls. Kozyndan and Ai Yamaguchi had their first shows there. Barry McGee, Yoshimoto Nara and Seonna Hong have appeared in group shows. Giant Robotmay not have discovered Asian-American youth, but it certainly helped put us on the map. Two years ago, another gallery/store began to court the same demographic. Chinatown’s Munky King is SoCal’s first toy store devoted exclusively to the sub-sub-subgenre of urban vinyl art. Inside Patrick and Chanda Lam’s store is a small army of customized collectible action-figure critters (called Qees), each as unique as the artist who painted it. A little competition isn’t a bad thing. When it’s Robot versus Munky, everybody wins. (Gendy Alimurung) Jeff Gillette Gillette rivals only the great Llyn Foulkes as L.A.’s most trenchant political artist. His bitterly funny works skewer the shibboleths of religion and commerce that have made the Bush era so heinous and dumb. Casually disregarding any semblance of a careerist path, this Orange County high school teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer is the ruling anarchist of Dirt Gallery, the brainchild of artist Rhonda Saboff. Gillette’s beautifully articulated paintings of Bombay and Calcutta slums deliver a dark satiric bite: Vast landscapes of shanties extending into a distant horizon are interrupted only by single small signposts, a shimmering banner for Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonald’s arch. Other recent works update traditional Orientalist themes of desert exoticism with accouterments of Imperialist Pop: an Afghan camel rider sets off to deliver a Domino’s pizza; a turbaned insurgent sips a Starbucks double latte. Gillette augments the paintings with off-the-cuff collages stuck in thrift-store frames — simple interventions of Sunday-school illustrations with cut-out cartoon characters. His grinning Mickey cast as Judas, Peter Rabbit denying the dead Christ, and the Grinch leering at a stolen crucifix skewer the myths of both Bible thumpers and the Disney Channel. Gillette is a sanctimony-seeking missile, and in other collages he hilariously tweaks the sacrosanct values of art history, leveling the playing field. Playboy cartoon nudies pose alongside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; Archie and Veronica explore “gender issues” inside an installation by Barbara Kruger. As incisive and tough as Raymond Pettibon’s early drawings, Gillette’s work takes no prisoners. (MD)