Female-centric salute written in the stars
Lia Halloran’s big, beautiful maps of stars and other astronomical phenomena at Luis De Jesus gallery pay tribute to a little-known group of female scientists dubbed the Harvard Computers. Annie Jump Cannon, Cecilia Payne, Henrietta Leavitt and others were predecessors of the female mathematicians lionized in the film “Hidden Figures.”
Beginning in the 1880s, the women worked at the Harvard College Observatory analyzing glass photographic plates of the night sky. They calculated the relative size and distance of the stars and developed a stellar classification system that is still in use today. Smithsonian magazine characterized their work as providing “the empirical foundations for larger astronomical theory,” but they have been neglected by history.
Halloran worked with the Harvard University Archive to identify and select plates used by the women. From these, she made large drawings in dark blue ink on translucent paper and used them as negatives to make cyanotypes, or blueprints. The prints were created by exposing the photosensitive media directly to the sun. They are prints of the stars made by a star.
The images of nebulae, comets and star clusters are enclosed in circles or ovals, evoking not only the lens of the telescope but also more inward views: ova, or perhaps Petri dishes. These circular frames are surrounded by washes of ink that has been allowed to eddy and pool in natural, liquid formations.
In some cases, the unpredictable properties of the ink and cyanotype chemicals interfere with the stars. In “Orion Nebula, After Henrietta Leavitt,” traces of liquid form a wing-like shape across most of the image. The effect lends the work an air of animate mystery, as if there is a ghost in the machine. — Sharon Mizota
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd. Through May 20; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 838-6000, www.luisdejesus.com
A shell game verging on the devotional
Earnestness and intimacy aren’t the first attributes that come to mind when you think about art of a conceptual bent, but Mark Roeder’s show at Michael Benevento gallery softens the heart before it gently prods the mind.
Roeder, based in L.A., has sculpted hundreds of seashells out of clay and painted them in acrylic and ink. They rest on low pedestals topped in pale gray and on similar panels mounted like pictures on the wall. Many of the sculptures bear the colors that match their counterparts in the natural world, mostly subdued umbers and rusts, creams and taupes. Others, however, are painted in monochrome, setting off an optical alert that something curious is happening here.
Roeder has replicated, in three dimensions, 56 of the photographic plates in a 1968 book, “The Shell: Five Hundred Million Years of Inspired Design.” His arrangements — type and number of shells, and their positions — mimic those in the reproductions. What was printed in color is painted in color, and what appears in black and white remains so. He reconstitutes the subjects according to the way they look in the photographs, not with fussy illusion, but faithful to details like how, in a picture, a patch of light hits a shell’s curve and bleaches out its color and pattern.
Walking through the show feels a bit like a game of telephone, in which each round of transmission entails some change and distortion. Roeder’s project, however intellectually wry, has the quality of a private act of reverence. Extreme yet humble, it verges on the devotional. — Leah Ollman
Michael Benevento, 3712 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Ends Saturday. (323) 874-6400, www.beneventolosangeles.com
The ghost of Goya rises in Chinatown
At Coagula Curatorial, Manuel Ocampo and Irene Iré combine their talents in an exhibition that feels like a three-artist show. That’s no mean feat, especially when the third artist is Goya.
Although none of the works by the Spanish Romantic are in “Monument to the Pathetic Sublime: Resuscitating Goya or an All-Out Attempt at Transcendence,” his presence is palpable.
Each of Iré’s six paintings is a hallucinatory stew that takes your eyes on a wild ride through the past before spitting you out in the present. Expressionist gestures and graphite scribbles can be seen beneath layers of fluorescent paint, which themselves have been partly covered with blot-it-out brushwork.
Iré’s winged monsters, fanged beasts and demons seem to be memories with minds of their own — and the power to never let you forget it.
Ocampo takes different liberties with Goya’s figures. First, he extracts them from the nightmarish netherworld so efficiently evoked by finely etched lines. Then he slams them into a space that resembles a demented coloring book. And he adds his own characters: a cartoon flamingo, a jack-o’lantern and a mouthless man whose face is eggplant purple.
Three paintings, on which Iré and Ocampo have collaborated, are even stranger. The artists’ strengths are intensified because they generate friction.
Goya, like many artists, had a problem with authority. He did not get on especially well with others. But this exhibition suggests that if he were still with us, he’d like Iré and Ocampo and their own irreverence for all forms of authority — including artistic. — David Pagel
Coagula Curatorial, 974 Chung King Road, L.A. Through May 21; closed Mondays and Tuesdays. (323) 4807852, www.coagulacuratorial.com