Metro Pulse/Artbeat/New Angeles

Comment
on this story

What:
New Angeles

Where:
UT's Ewing Gallery Art & Architecture Building, 1715 Volunteer Blvd.

When:
Through Dec. 18 (call 974-3200 for hours)

Contemporary Los Angeles-based artists leave much to be desired

by Heather Joyner

My first exposure to L.A. attitude was when I shared a suite with a loopy Valley girl in boarding school. She'd play T. Rex, wander around topless, and say things like, "Cop a squat...let's scarf!" Although we came from very different places, I shared in her lighthearted fun—in an insouciance still pervasive in southern California. Oddly enough, that brand of funky wildness is lacking in New Angeles, the Ewing Gallery's current show.

Including 19 artists now living in L.A., New Angeles serves up a variety of paintings, photographs, video art, installations, and sculpture. Says Illinois State University-based exhibit curator Bill Conger, "Los Angeles has become a destination for many young artists who would have at one time located to New York. The mass of midwesterners who have infested the digs of Chinatown and Echo Park have almost certainly brought with them a tinsel-town fetish."

Maybe so. But the majority of artists represented in New Angeles often seem uninspired...more careless than carefree. Most works smack of insincerity and/or look like they were slapped together in less than an hour. Insouciance again, but with a bad French accent. For instance, a curled piece of wood wrapped in fabric rests innocuously against a gallery wall. Another object by Samara Caughey, measuring no more than a yard in length made from scraps of wood adorned with a knitted yarn "sleeve" occupies significant floor space, although it resembles a reject from the craft room of a mental institution.

Charles Irvin's video showing a baby playing with a gruesome fabricated head is amusing, but Dwayne Moser's video titled "Exposure" (featuring a self-conscious and annoying guy whom I'd avoid talking to in a bar, let alone willingly subject myself to via television) is trying at best. The man's whiny voice, within earshot of a recording of Chopin performed on a reverse piano, blaring from two speakers, is enough to drive one over the edge. Then again, the cacophonous sound—and colors like lime green and bubblegum pink—perhaps evoke the spirit of L.A. as much as anything else.

In case the above diatribe seems the result of a bad mood or disdain for the West Coast, I'll say this: there are a few pieces in New Angeles that reflect real talent and suggest that their creators have an inkling of what possibly matters in life. But there aren't many. Materials such as plywood, foam, and unprimed canvas attempt to lend work a casual air but instead look shoddy and incomplete.

Exceptions to the general mess are a series of 120 drawings by Robbie Kinberg. Titled "The First First Person," they present type-written sentences alongside images that go beyond a cartoon format. Reading various phrases, all beginning with the same words, one is both entertained and admitted to a private world of thought. One card says, "[You're not the first person] to feel more like a plane and less like a pilot." Another reads, "[You're not the first person] whose punishment for not believing in reincarnation is just that." Yet another says, "[You're not the first person] to jerk off to a worst case scenario." Kinberg's cleverness, rather than being smug, is endearingly earnest.

Paintings by Daniel Mendel-Black called "Idle Thought" and "When The World Was Young 2" employ metallic and regular acrylics on wood in unexpected colors. A lovely tension between line and fragmented form keeps the compositions buzzing. Jacques de Beaufort likewise paints on wood, and his "Mustafa Mattra" has a vibrant, seductive surface. Also of note is Rob Keller's sculpture with a mummified snake wrapped around a fiberglass "branch" and mounted like a hunting trophy. Compared to Mary Weatherford's chalky and hastily painted canvases with sea sponges, starfish, and shells or Moser's boring photographs of mailboxes, the aforementioned pieces shine.

Robert Gunderman (a.k.a. Floyd Claypool) exhibits what might be the most interesting work of all. His numerous birds molded from sculpey, accompanied by pencil drawings and watercolor on paper, have a forlorn presence that is somehow quite moving. Akin to things collected by someone very old, Gunderman's assortment projects an uncommon vulnerability.

Every now and then, it seems that art is thus labeled simply because no one knows what else to call it. As with Jerzy Kosinski's character Chance (the gardener played by Peter Sellers in Being There), we sometimes give inscrutable things a bit too much credit. But it's always valuable to see what's out there, good or bad. In that sense, New Angeles serves its Knoxville audience. Says the show's curator, "There are questions begging to be asked regarding how relevant a regional exhibit can be in such a rapid-fire age of communication and information in which we are all influenced by the same magazines and websites." I, myself, cannot help but wonder how relevant New Angeles is, period.