Quiet but slow force
The 10 sculptures in Ricky Swallow’s show at David Kordansky occupy their spacious gallery quietly but potently, releasing their force and intelligence over slow deliberation rather than at a glance.
Swallow works in bronze, casting objects he has fashioned from cardboard, wood and rope. The casual, utilitarian nature of the original materials lingers in these handsome forms (all from 2015) like a fondly regarded past life and spurs the frisson of illusion, the tactile ventriloquism of one surface passing as another.
In “Double Zero With Rope,” Swallow stacks two mustard yellow block numerals, joining them with humble twine to form a figure 8, empowering the zeros to add up to more than the sum of their parts: Nothing plus nothing now equals something. The coy play of signs mimics the play of materials. Swallow patinates the surfaces to appear worn, aged, suggesting the sculpture as an assemblage of found cast-offs, raised, synergistically, to elegant significance in enduring metal.
The L.A.-based Swallow engages in serious mischief again and again here. A stretch of cherry-red molding cast from conjoined cardboard tubes of different diameters registers as a long italicized dash, punctuation scaled to the room.
In three tabletop sculptures that give the show its name — “/SKEWS/” — he sends fat white rope meandering through structures that slant open. The pieces induce a shiver of art historical resonance, back to one of the milestones of art incorporating “the real,” Picasso’s 1912 cubist collage encircled by actual rope. There is also a tinge of the surreal to these semi-wrapped fetishes, as well as straightforward association with the nautical. Swallow works fairly small, but his sculptures never stop expanding in the mind.
David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Place, Los Angeles, (323) 935-3030, through Oct. 31. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.davidkordanskygallery.com
Deep respect for down-to-earth
The presentation of Japanese ceramics at Blum & Poe is spectacular, but two other aspects of the current show are also noteworthy.
The first, and most likely to get visitors through the door, is its guest curator: Takashi Murakami, the most recognizable name in contemporary Japanese art and a major figure internationally.
Maker of flagrantly exuberant political pop in a wealth of forms (painting, sculpture, installation, as well as Louis Vuitton handbags), Murakami traffics in humor and history, sex and death in his work, mining traditions both Eastern and Western.
One thing he is not typically associated with is quiet elegance, in which this show abounds. A serious student of Japanese culture, Murakami has been, for the last decade or more, immersing himself in the Buddhist-based rituals and implements of the tea ceremony. He has been supporting contemporary ceramic artists whose work draws from those traditions through shows staged in a cluster of Tokyo galleries he operates. The Blum & Poe project reveals, tucked within Murakami’s expansive enterprise, a deep respect for the humble and the down-to-earth.
The second remarkable aspect of the show is its stunning installation, designed by Murakami with the three featured artists: Kazunori Hamana, Yuji Ueda and Otani Workshop. Islands of moss, bark or stone serve as bases for works on view, these natural materials underscoring the earthen origins of the clay sculptures and vessels. Shelving in worn, repurposed wood does much the same. A lacquer-red wall-mounted metal circle segmented into a grid of shadow boxes neatly offsets the subdued palette of the dozens of objects showcased within.
The exhibition checklist has 52 entries, but a far greater number of pieces fills the gallery. The shelving features clusters of tiny cups, along with tea bowls, plates and little human and animal-based figures. These aren’t individually attributed. Together with the installation itself, this further reinforces the common sensibility shared by the artists, one favoring rustic imperfection and simplicity.
Many pieces have rough textures, their surfaces fissured and peeling like parched earth. Tones tend toward ash and stone. One large vessel by Hamana, its exterior matte white and gray like a delicate charcoal rubbing, has a gaping split at the bottom. Ueda shows several ruggedly cracked glazed panels that read as pure, dense records of the scorching heat and energy of their firing. Standing near the center of the room is Otani’s huge “Child With Stripes,” a kokeshi-doll of sorts with a serene expression, tree trunks for legs, and a basic garment of heavy canvas.
Such reductive form is characteristic of the work here, whether figurative or functional. Throughout, the artists nod reverently — but also with boldness and a sense of mischief — to Japan’s rich, long history of pottery, from ancient terracotta burial figures to everyday domestic objects imbued with the aesthetic of grace, humility, incompleteness and impermanence. An exhilarating show.
Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 836-2062, through Oct. 24. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.blumandpoe.com
In a dance of surrogate souls
Photographer and sculptor Mary Beth Heffernan has had an abiding interest in skin — as identifying surface, as delimiting membrane, as evocative metaphor.
In “Blue,” her mesmerizing series of cyanotype photograms at Sloan Projects, a man’s suit and a woman’s dress are the skins in play. These spectral garments are surrogate souls, characters in a dance both intimate and emblematic.
Heffernan excised the suit’s solids, leaving only the seams, and she had the dress made from diaphanous fabric. For the 10 pieces in the 2011 series (five are on view here), she posed the clothing on 8-foot-high sheets of photo-sensitive paper.
Light darkened the surrounding areas to a luscious deep blue and seeped through the thin gown, yielding images of white, frayed-edge skeleton entwined with slithery ghost.
The dress reads as aqueous — a drifting jellyfish — one moment and a fragile, rumpled spirit the next. The suit’s postures bring to mind Robert Longo’s 1979 drawings of “Men in the Cities,” frozen with backs arched and limbs akimbo.
In one piece, the personages unite in a twisted jumble, a cyclone down the length of the sheet. The “Blue” series resonates as well with the power of Floris Neusüss’ full-body photograms, tempered by the delicacy of Anna Atkins’ mid-19th century cyanotypes of botanical and aquatic specimens.
Heffernan makes especially poetic use of the photogram’s nature as physical trace, akin here to sloughedoff skin.
Sloan Projects, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (424) 744-8625. Through Oct. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.sloanprojects.com