Art Around Town: Daniel Dove, M.A. Peers and Takashi Murakami

Also, Carmine Iannaccone, Soo Kim and Sandeep Mukherjee

Comments (0) By Christopher Miles Wednesday, May 21 2008

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Soo Kim at Sandroni Rey

Imagine a poet of the sort who is inclined to go back over the same line again and again, and tease meaning out of it each time through slight manipulations, armed with a camera and an X-Acto knife, and you have something of an idea of Soo Kim’s latest project at Sandroni Rey. Wrapping around the main gallery are 12 framed color photographs, each unique, but each showing the same basic scene of a young woman slouching over a glass table and drawing on the surface with her finger. Perfectly reflecting the girl’s upper body, backlit window and drapes behind her, the glass converts each photo into an abstraction, symmetrical along a horizontal axis. Carefully cut into each photo are patterns, some seemingly intended to harmonize with the composition, others perhaps interpreting a state of mind or being. Interspersed in the room are five photos of trees reflected in the windows of the Lloyd Wright–designed Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes. Kim’s photos suggest something unexpectedly profound located within the ordinary, known only when subtly different moments are understood not as redundancies but as unique iterations shaping context for one another. Sandroni Rey, 2762 La Cienega Blvd., L. A., Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru June 14. (310) 280-0111 or www.sandronirey.com.

Sandeep Mukherjee, Untitled (Long Gold Spiral) (2008)

M.A. Peers, Found Yuppie (2007)

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Sandeep Mukherjee at Sister and Cottage Home

There probably aren’t words for how I felt when looking at Sandeep Mukherjee’s paintings in acrylic ink and other media on variously etched and embossed Duralene (a translucent plastic sheet material), currently on view in Chinatown at Sister and just up Broadway at Cottage Home, a much larger space operated jointly by Sister and a group of other small galleries. You don’t have to be a romantic or a spiritually inclined person to have a romantic or spiritual experience with these paintings, which simply trigger something of both. It isn’t by way of image, symbol or narrative. Yes, Mukherjee often deals in radiant bursts, luminous glows and spirals that are suggestive of mandalas, mandorlas, sunspots and the cosmic abstractions of the late, great Los Angeles painter Lee Mullican to whom Mukherjee is an artistic heir, but his ability to make you exercise contemplative muscles you might not have known you have isn’t about reference or allusion. Rather, it’s about his awe-inspiring command of line, movement and luminosity. At Cottage Home, a large composition of wispy lines, which defines a perceptual experience something like looking into hazy sky from within a thicket, is at once woozying, liberating and haunting. On view at both spaces, Mukherjee’s compositions of overlapping, intertwining, interrupted and unfinished spirals, daubed in translucent strokes that turn the Duralene surface into a kind of inked mosaic, are what the phrase “poetry in motion” was meant to describe. I will make a point of returning to this exhibition during the coming weeks, and when it is over, my summer will feel the lesser.Sister, 437 Gin Ling Way, L.A., Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m., and Cottage Home, 410 Cottage Home Rd., L.A., Wed.-Sat., 12 a.m.-6 p.m.; thru June 21. (213) 628-7000 or www.sisterla.com.

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