The Bish, The Fish and The Fantastic Four

Mark Todd, a former student of Ebner's, offers a less clear-cut version of appropriation and collage in "Juggernaut," the next-to-last show at Billy Shire's Culver City digs before the operation folds back into a renovated La Luz de Jesus space on Hollywood Boulevard. Todd's work has evolved quickly and confidently over the past few years, successfully taking on the scale and materials of contemporary painting that have proven too daunting for many accomplished small-scale collagists — of particular significance in Todd's case because his subject matter/source material, comic book covers, particularly those of Jack Kirby dating from the '60s and early '70s, has an explicit size, loaded with formal and psychological baggage.

Todd handles all this baggage (and more) like the bellhop at Hotel Rauschenberg, playfully inverting the relationship between the textual and visual content of the originals into something new and strange. In some cases, the original layout is barely altered, but the scenes of battling mutants have been garbled beyond intelligibility. In other examples, layers of collaged, appropriated or invented material jostle vigorously with hand-copied fragments of story titles, nearly obscuring their low cultural origins in a modernist compositional choreography. In fact, Todd's formal gifts — he's a remarkable colorist, with some very interesting black-on-near-monochrome experiments, and he often teeters on the brink of the decorative (now there's a '60s supervillain!) — threaten to undo the delicious sense of queasy disorder informing his garbled pop transmissions.

MARK TODD, PURPLE CLOTH (HULK) (2009)

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More About

• Mark Todd
• Ginny Bishton
• Tim Ebner
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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What prevents this, and ultimately makes the work exceptional, is Todd's deep familiarity with the semiotic vocabulary of the comic book medium, and his ability and interest in treating this inventory of graphic and textual symbols as material. This isn't entirely unprecedented: Swedish political/pop artist Oyvind Fahlstrom and San Francisco hermeticist Jess dipped their toes in the deconstructed–funny page pond, and Aaron Noble (an associate of Wilde) has been putting recycled Kirbyisms to good — but very different — use for some time. But Todd's work transcends the often snobbish condescension that mars much pop appropriation of comics (you hear me, Lichtenstein?) to accomplish the much touted but elusive erasure of the boundary between high and low culture. These are the kinds of paintings I like to see, and they look like the covers of comic books I've only seen in my dreams.