THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Jessica Curtaz's series of eleven graphite-on-panel Vanitas drawings, depicting objects at various stages of their useful product life cycles, occupies the space between abstraction and representation. The artist works from direct observation, yet the internal relationships within the drawings raise them well above mere hyperrealism; Curtaz draws so as to induce an air of artifice, purposefully engaging the pictorial plane as reality.

Curtaz's drawings have a weighty presence. She coats her fastidiously prepared panels with multiple layers of gesso and sands them to a satiny sheen. More durable than paper, and seeming like boxes perched on the wall, these smooth, gleaming surfaces prove suitable grounds for Curtaz's delicate, mirage-like images, which exert a gravitational pull. The lightness of the imagery requires close examination, and the drawings exude an elusive quality that plays nicely off the panels' geometric heft.
The objects in the drawings -- chicken wire, chain link, plastic bags, and articles of clothing -- appear like figments of the imagination, as if they straddle the worlds of objects and ideas. They possess a slightly aged look; in particular, the plastic Target bags, devoid of the consumer goods they are designed to contain, appear like empty vessels. Three drawings of Target bags, Vanitas 4, 5, and 6, depict the empty plastic sacks in various configurations, creating the impression of a useless discard being whipped about by the wind. Meanwhile, the interlocking threads of a carelessly cast-aside cable-knit sweater provide the intricate patterns and visual texture of Vanitas 11.

Curtaz draws on the Renaissance tradition of Vanitas, still-life paintings of everyday objects that function as reminders of human mortality. Yet her drawings intersperse lightness and levity with their seriousness. Viewing them, one feels almost able to float above the floor, much like the plastic bag that serves as her main protagonist.

Robert Reynolds should by rights be considered a conceptual artist, in that ideas -- especially difficult and subversive political ideas -- comprise the foundation of his multiform works. Nevertheless, he gives form to those ideas with a patient and resourceful craftsmanship, applied to masterful tilework; innovative, large-scale mixed-media assemblage and sculpture; confidently rendered figure painting; satirically rendered commercial design; and a more than passing familiarity with Eastern and Western art history. Reynolds's most recent work brings the full gamut of his formal repertoire to bear on a suite of large sculptures that takes aim squarely at the most profound evils our government has to offer: fear-mongering, anti-Islamism, evangelical hypocrisy, the dominion of economics over spiritual grace, and our overall complicity in the closing of our own minds.

W/M expresses Reynolds's suspicions toward commercialism's hegemony and the cheapening of age-old cultures in a faceless, globalized economy. A four-sided monolith derived from a traditional Japanese goodwill totem is covered with calligraphy (executed with finesse by Harold Shih) that, instead of proclaiming peace, shills for professional services from lawyers to car dealers to landscapers. Without translation the work appears majestic, even affecting, testifying to both the enduring power of ancient amulets and the disruptions of modernity. The rustic hominess of Democracy, on the other hand, belies its almost vitriolic Op-Ed content. The most ingenious, incisive and, oddly, romantic work on view was the masterful Faith Machine, a row of one-room-schoolhouse wooden chairs with decorative but sturdy cast-iron legs set on a raised platform, which, when activated, billows white smoke generated by an overlarge leather fireplace stoker at the rear. References to incense, ritual, and meditation give way to more fearful conjurations of indoctrination and suppression, fogs and mysteries.

The amazingly prolific and versatile Dame Darcy will exhibit paintings and works on paper that represent a selection of the original illustrations made for her graphic novel Gasoline published by Merrell Books. This show has been timed to coincide with the release of the book and will be followed by a companion exhibition at Sloan Fine Art Gallery in New York in November. Darcy is a celebrated fine artist, musician, performer, and the creator of the well-loved, long-running, insanely antic Meat Cake comic book, published by Fantagraphics since 1993. She majored in film and animation at the San Francisco Art Institute where she studied with George Kuchar and Kathy Acker, amongst others, and was influenced by both underground cartoonists and illustrators in the Victorian tradition like Sir John Tenniel and Edward Gorey. Darcy is nonetheless an immensely talented graphic artist with her own distinct style, peculiar to her own time and stylistic sensibility. Her albums, short films, animation, and comics collaborations have been released in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan, and previous graphic novel projects include Frightful Fairytales (Ten Speed Press) and The Illustrated Jane Eyre (Putnam Penguin USA). Additionally, her paintings and works on paper have been exhibited at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles, The Comics Art Museum in San Francisco, Bellwether Gallery and Sloan Fine Art in New York, CWC in Tokyo, and Gelatin in Austria. There will be a book release party at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday, October 18, at 9pm and a closing reception and book signing on Saturday, October 25, from 4-6pm.