Gently moving organic wonders
“These Carnations Defy Language,” a two-person exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, is a perfect pairing of local artists Alexandra Grant and Steve Roden.
Both have long been inspired by language, often using it to generate colorful, intensely heartfelt abstractions. Side by side in this gently moving show, their drawings and collages have something of a familial resemblance, deploying dense networks of grids, stripes and triangles with vibrant, organic energy.
The exhibition was inspired by both artists’ engagement with the prose poems of French writer Francis Ponge, who described everyday things like flowers, wasps and soap with unbridled jubilation. Still, despite these raptures (or because of them), he found language inadequate: The exhibition’s truculent title comes from him.
Grant’s and Roden’s works might be said to reverse-engineer Ponge: Where he attempted to capture quotidian wonders in words, they transform language into images that blossom.
Roden often uses textual or musical sources as a kind of “score” for generating imagery, and here he uses an issue of the Italian architecture magazine Domus published in the month and year of his birth.
The resulting drawings and collages often incorporate clippings from the magazine and refer obliquely to the sleek contours of modern architecture, although Roden builds his images through accretion and improvisation, which gives them a more relaxed, vernacular feel.
“The sky crying is” features triangular, peek-a-boo cutouts that reveal spare, architectural imagery behind a surface of drippy, handpainted, multicolor stripes. The image simultaneously evokes structure and defies it.
Especially intriguing is the video “lines and faces,” in which Roden arranges striped paper triangles over a magazine page depicting three famous writers. As Roden aligns and misaligns the stripes over the portraits, we understand the irreducibility of faces: They are always more than the sum of the lines — whether drawn or written — that describe them.
Grant was inspired by Sophocles’ play “Antigone,” whose female protagonist defies political decrees to honor her dead brother. Five large wall pieces are each titled with a line from the play, “I was born to love not to hate.”
Strong stripes and chevrons provide a structural component that plays against the messiness of Rorschach blots and the words of the title in Grant’s trademark mirrored writing. The blots and the words — both bilaterally symmetrical like a body — flicker between legibility and nonsense.
The juxtaposition of hard, geometric shapes and this more indeterminate imagery is an analog, not only for Antigone’s predicament but also for the way text works. Only hard, black letters on a page, it can evoke, as Ponge knew, so much more.
What Roden and Grant are really getting at is meaning itself: how it is made and transmitted and what becomes of it along the way.
Seeing their works together for the first time, I was surprised by their visionary, almost spiritual quality. Although they appear systematic and structured, there is always a human element that escapes description, defies our attempts to pin it down.
Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., Pasadena, (626) 5683665, through Nov. 1. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. www.pmcaonline.org
Slow down, or miss the moment
If you are old enough and fortunate enough to have grown up watching home movies on film, as I did, Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s installation of 10 16-millimeter films will strike a chord of nostalgia.
The darkened, angular space at REDCAT is filled with the whirring, clicking and flickering of real film projectors. The short pieces, running simultaneously on loops, are arrayed around the space like paintings; the effect is both stunning and a bit disorienting, like entering another world.
Most of the films were shot during a residency in Okinawa, yet the artists were not interested in standard tourist imagery. The moments they capture, often shot in slow motion, are more or less banal: leopardprint fabric spinning in a washing machine, a child playing in a public fountain, a group of people tending to a graveyard.
“Sleeping in a bullet train” depicts slumbering commuters as the landscape slides by outside. The train seems to progress at a normal clip, but then you realize that the scene is in slow motion: a privileged, otherworldly view of impossibly still people and a landscape that would otherwise be a blur.
The show asks us to slow down to focus on a particular moment and to contemplate the way that moment intersects with others. The medium of film gives the whole thing a physical presence that video could not; it feels like life.
Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., (213) 237-2800, through Sept. 20. Closed Mondays. www.redcat.org
The jungle, a la Curious George
In their latest collaboration, New York artists Margaret Lee and Emily Sundblad evoke a Curious George story in which the mischievous monkey transforms a room and its furniture (without permission, of course) into a jungle scene.
The spare installation at Hannah Hoffman is equally breezy and charming, invoking the joys of world building often at the heart of artistic endeavors.
Consisting of six painted roll-down window blinds and four chairs, whimsically decorated to look like animals, the exhibition gives us a schematic, fragmented view into George’s creation.
Each blind is painted to look like a window, through which we glimpse part of a zebra, a leopard or a palm frond. Painted in bright colors with a loose, confident hand, the imagery is mysterious and unmistakable.
The chairs have bodies painted like zebras but are furred in dried grass skirts that look like lion’s manes. They refer to George’s transformation of furniture into animal companions but possess a prickly life of their own as weird, intriguing objects.
In the end, the exhibition highlights George’s desire to re-create his birthplace within the walls of the city.
While there is an unavoidable colonial taint to the story, with its absolute contrast between wild jungle and civilized city, the exhibition celebrates a longing for home and the irrepressible impulse to make it anew.