Principal Juror –Connie Butler, Curator
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Juror’s Comments - OUT THERE

Viewing painting from the left coast is a disorienting and mind-altering experience. The history here tracks a narrative infused with influences as diverse and unique as Native American sand painting, surf culture, Chicano Art, Light and Space, Disneyland and the kind of Joan Didionesque tension which comes from inhabiting the histories of both coasts at the same time. Artists of the Pacific Coast run the gamut, of course, in terms of a relationship to the just-past. The hybrid practices in contemporary art are reflected here in works of all scales, on canvas and paper, and the diversity of the group of artists represented in this publication is no exception. Sophisticated, rigorous and wildly diverse, these artists are engaged in the international language of painting.

Politically and culturally the Pacific Coast looks forward and out towards the Pacific Rim it occupies. A number of artists in this selection address issues of cultural diversity in works that masquerade as a kind of pop pluralism. Lana Amauba’s altered photographic portrait of a woman who, the title leads us to believe, is a S.W.A.T. team member, appears as an urban warrior. Her gaze confronts the viewer as she dares to be crossed. Laura Ball’s Rainbow Riders represent another subculture. The teens, who wrestle with the paint as they cavort with merry-go-round horses, challenge the adult viewer and the authority of the gaze. A solitary figure of a man, half-dressed and confined by a straight jacket, seems resigned to his plight in a poignant and mysterious work by Jonathan Solo called “Straight” Jacket. Similarly diminutive and strange is the tiny shootout by Ty Ennis titled The Time Will Come for All of Us. 

Clearly figuration is alive and well here––as it is everywhere––and there are several examples that inspire with their clarity and direct formal approach. Matthew Buckner’s Depth, Flatness and Self is a study of light and shadow in the guise of a man’s profile. Simple and quiet, this self- portrait is both nostalgic and iconic. Another example of a portrait which is conventional in its execution but remarkable in its resonance is Rachel by Gloria DeArcangelis. A woman cloaked in red stares out at us, her face partially shadowed like a Caravaggio. Jennifer Poon and Yuri Shin each deal with the female nude to very different effect. Poon’s Accidental Meeting, is a psychologically charged face-off between a young girl and a dog. Shin’s Bathers extend the subject in a lovely, abstracted study of color and form. A very different study of form is realized by Patrick St. Clair, whose Pedestal is actually a figure of a woman, facing the wall, and standing, statue-like on a pedestal.

Another strain where convention is hybridized with technology and other diversions is that of landscape. The tradition of landscape painting is strong on the west coast, given the physical presence of the natural environment. Matty Byloos exploits the infamous white light of Los Angeles to beautiful effect in Hancock Park #7, and Timothy Cross’ Seaside Drawing appears to be infused with a watery, shimmering light as well. Susan Logoreci’s Studios is an essay of light and the abstraction of the yellow and gray industrial environment of the back lots of Los Angeles. More mysterious is John Herschend’s Last Ditch, or Patricia Hagen’s Lobe, in which biomorphic shapes inhabit a hazy, surreal desert scene. Haunting are Gail Dawson’s Race, a landscape constructed from a blur of movement on a distant horizon, and Justin Dahlberg’s untitled street scene, as viewed from the interior through the lens of a magnificent stained glass window.

A number of artists involved with abstraction manipulate color and form with both brush and computer. David McDonald’s colorful shapes dance and play like hanging Japanese lanterns. Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Starkweather, and Kathryn Van dyke create a kind of architecture with planes of color that structure architectonic compositions. Laura Ricci’s architecture is a mix of high-tech forms dynamically colliding in a galaxy of swirling shapes and colors. Jessica Snow also explores a fantasy architecture in her Furthest Shore of Yesterday. Expanding the definition of painting perhaps the furthest is Chris Natrop, whose lacey, hanging curtains occupy the gallery like maps from another century.