Peter Frank

Swiss-born photographer Corina Gamma displays a foreigner's wonder in her photographs of Los Angeles, delighting not in the "L.A.-ness" of her chosen subjects, but their "USA-ness": amusement-park rides, their elaborate structures set against wide-open spaces; and housing developments, seen as repeated forms marching through space. In the former, Gamma looks......

Given his fertile mind (not to mention sure hand), Gifford Myers doesn't show enough in Los Angeles. The works in his latest sculptural series — fabricated in good finish/fetish fashion from automotive paint on (or in) resin — are as simply drawn as they are provocatively conceived. Their M&M colors......

Ronn Davis hurtles through numerous disciplines (paint­ing, sculpture, collage, as­sem­blage), subjects (water, insects, figures) and effects (textures, compositions, tones) with a virtuosity that seems at once spontaneous to the point of improvisation and deliberate to the point of crafted. There is a powerful pictorial logic at work, but Davis uses......

Ron Griffin's work relates to several now-classic tendencies in local art, from Finish Fetish to the oblique Pop of Joe Goode and Ed Ruscha and the assemblaged expressionism of Ed Kienholz; but there's a noir quality to Griffin's art that ties it even tighter to the Southern California ambience. Employing......

A young Polish artist working at the famed Dusseldorf Kunstakademie, Angelika Trojnarski infuses her paintings with a hefty dollop of middle-European angst and alienation without falling victim to myriad cliches. Her palette may be dank and dreary, but it glows like fog with a diffuse light and establishes a compellingly......

Nobuhito Nishigawara and Hiromi Takizawa, Japanese artists living and working in the Southland, both manifest their sense of distance from cultural roots in their craft-rooted sculpture. Nishigawara fashions his figures out of clay, and here he pairs two disparate subjects to mock — and thus exalt — ritual and custom......

Barbara T. Smith’s two multipartite pieces from the late 1960s on view in Chinatown predate the performative work for which she is best known. But they are dynamically interactive, effectively turning the viewer into something of a performer. Very much of their time (embracing minimalism and kinetic art, for instance),......

Long a favored technique for the young and/or disaffected, assemblage was the medium of choice among the Bohemian artists of postwar L.A. And they were rather more numerous, and diverse, than we now readily acknowledge. Gordon Wagner, quiet formalist in among the wild ones, could construct elegant, almost architectural structures......