THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Although artists often curate exhibitions in smaller contemporary art spaces, they rarely get the opportunity to do so in museums. Especially when they have access to large collections, such activity draws the attention to the artists' interests without showing their own work. In the second installation of its Houseguest exhibition series, the UCLA Hammer Museum invited Los Angeles artist Francesca Gabbiani to curate an exhibition using objects from the museum's collections. She selected lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, drawings, and livres d'artistes from the Renaissance to the present.

Known for her meticulously executed and colorful cutout paper collages, Gabbiani has long had an interest in the depiction of the "dark side of life," or, better, the aesthetics of horror. Since her "rebuilding" of the POV-shots of Stanley Kubrick's rooms and corridors in his film The Shining, Gabbiani has been drawn to the density of set design, the use of color, and specific perspectives to investigate whether the notion of horror can be represented in a still image. It can: even without motion or music, visual imagery can trigger the imagination to a sense of foreboding.

For her Houseguest exhibition, Gabbiani sought depictions of witchcraft and sorcery in art history. Presenting woodcuts such as the Bewitched Groom (1544) of Hans Baldung Grien, Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etching of imaginary prisons (1749-78), and Paul Klee's lithograph The Witch with the Comb (1922), she showed that the notion of witchcraft has inspired artists throughout centuries. Gabbiani also curated a film program in which the subject of sorcery and the idea of documentation, fiction, and imagination were constantly intertwined. Thanks to the exhibition's elegant presentation, with its bordeaux-colored walls and golden letters, Gabbiani's selection glowed in a festive -- yes, bewitching -- atmosphere, resonating as an uncanny aesthetic experience.

Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from LA addressed the topic of narrative in general and biography in particular, including artists whose work could be said to tell life stories (although not necessarily the artist's own). This is a rich vein of material, with room for work in a variety of media potentially touching on a range of topics. On those broad points the exhibition delivers; it's on the specifics that things start to fall apart. As an overall experience, the collection is a bit slick - not stylistically, but in the sense of Teflon; after the big-bang opening of Lynn Foulkes' dramatic entryway piece The Lost Frontier (1997-2005), with its rail line, smoldering ruins of, one assumes, Disneyland, shining zombie city between the hills, the dead body in the foreground, and the Puritan sentinel with the shotgun and its Mickey Mouse head. Foulkes uses dimensionality to the point of bas relief, and his color choices induce shimmering optical spasms. His work should have been installed last rather than first; it feels like a communion, a weaving together, a climax, and in its wake, the rest of the show more or less just slides right by.

Hirsch Perlman's giant black and white photographs put one in mind of crazy cat ladies as inflected by Robert Longo, beautifully made but a little embarrassing from a psychoanalytical point of view. Speaking of which, Kari Upson's The Grotto (Playboy Mansion version) is disconcerting and rather unresolved despite its ambitious scale. A large, cumbersome rock fountain with audio and visual components referring to illicit sex sounds better than it is, Upson's piece shares some of its more compelling content aspects with Charlie White's American Minor DVD, in that both address madcap, awkward sexuality, but in opposing aesthetic modes, as characters in each tale take extreme actions in order to get their hands on some real womanhood. Lisa Anne Auerbach follows twin threads of subversive craft and extreme urban bicycle lifestyles in her pamphleteering and knitting-based actions. Like an "SDS of Benetton" ad;,Auerbach's suite of politically-charged knitwear is self-consciously cool but not particularly transgressive. The 9-11 knock-knock joke pullover would make for an awesome sweater to wear, but as a gesture it seems already co-opted by mainstream fashion.

Jeffrey Vallance presents one of his many quasi-religious object collections, revealing his obsessive accumulation of proof of his American experience. As comments on absurd ritual, it's entertaining and funny--a much needed oasis at the midpoint of the show. Julie Becker's mixed media drawings and relatively small-scale assemblage sculptures, like Vallance's, are all about treasured memories and memorabilia. They are mementi mori of inscrutable origin, meditative in spirit and, while light-weight in form, are heavy in their souls. Charles Irvin takes a refreshingly straightforward approach to visual narrative: illustration. His alt-comic influenced ink drawings and more psychedelic, yet rough-hewn, mostly abstract Technicolor works on paper privilege content without sacrificing mystery, and express emotion without awkward self-regard; they are raw but not naïve, and encapsulate LA's contradictions..Victoria Reynolds' paintings of raw meat have more to do with the art historical construct of the Male Gaze. All our feminist theory has finally done little or nothing to assuage the male appetite for flesh, and as such, these luscious and visceral canvases may as well be by Ingres or Botticelli, a reference made more explicit by Reynolds' ornate framing.

Crosscurrents and correspondences between works abound, from the topic of sexuality to the use of animal avatars. Many works tell not just stories but fairy tales, revolving around sentimental objects that are in turn invested with meaning by their author/gatherers. But no one here touches the nexus of craft, idea, experience, and meaning like Llyn Foulkes. There's a reason the curator built the show around him. His work is the friction that gives this show what spark it has. But, then, maybe that should have been the first clue. Because when Llyn Foulkes is the voice of reason and patience, you pretty much know you're in trouble.

Oranges and Sardines examines how art illuminates art, and explores the impact of approaching it through the eyes and minds of artists. Six contemporary abstract painters -- Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool -- select one of their own recent paintings as well as works by other artists who have been significant in their thinking about their own work. Six different galleries will contribute pieces in a constellation of diversity that includes the work of Paul Klee, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Pablo Picasso, Dieter Roth, and artists lesser known to the public.

The artists' choices have developed through conversations with curator Gary Garrels about issues regarding their work, their studio processes, their appraisals of art history, and the status of contemporary art. Throughout this entire process a distinct distillation of choices has developed for each artist that is wide ranging but very specific. Both figurative and abstract paintings have been chosen, as well as some sculptures and works on paper. These will be juxtaposed with historical as well as more contemporary works. Shown together, these works will engage in a "conversation" with each other, provoking fresh insights into well-known artists and opening a consideration of artists that may be more obscure.

The title for the exhibition is borrowed from Frank O'Hara's poem Why I Am Not a Painter, which reflects on the elusiveness of the creative process -- one that often results in a finished work that bears no resemblance to its initial inspiration. Oranges and Sardines hopes to offer manifold examples of abstraction's inventive potential and will suggest various reasons why it remains vital and essential to contemporary art. The works of the six artists who have developed the exhibition may then be viewed with more complex appreciation and insightful understanding.

For a guy who claimed to despise Los Angeles, architect John Lautner did more to realize a vision of Southern California's love affair with sea, sky, and killer vistas than just about any other designer that comes to mind.

Like his peers Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, Lautner confined his work almost entirely to private residences. Unlike those mid-century modernists, Lautner had little interest in rectilinear modules. Instead, he embraced the shell, the cave, the stem, the wave, and other organic forms to craft curvaceous dwellings that nested humans amid nature setting with uncanny grace.

Fourteen years after his death at age eighty-three, the Hammer Museum's Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner exhibition (through October 12) honors the designer's legacy with an understated array of sketches, models, architectural renderings, photographs, and film.

Leading into the space, a panoramic color photograph of the northern woods snapped by Lautner evokes his childhood in Michigan's upper peninsula, where he built a log cabin by hand with his German immigrant father. A yellowed color pencil sketch speaks to his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright at the master architect's Taliesin colony, which prepared Lautner for the launch of his own Los Angeles-based practice in 1947.

Back-lit text blocks dispersed throughout Hammer's two-gallery layout spell out Lautner's design philosophy centered on a desire to "sublimate the domestic, and domestic the sublime."

The core of the show, curated by historian Nicholas Olsberg and architect Frank Escher, draws from archival assortment of drawings, architectural renderings, and simple cardboard study models that offer glimpses into Lautner's creative process. On a yellowed rectangle of paper is a hand-sketched floor plan for his 1968 Stevens Houses, on which Lautner impulsively scrawled "Dense, yet human living houses." A 1946 design for the Mauer House (pictured) demonstrates how Lautner cleverly borrowed the idea of boomerang-shaped struts from aircraft hangar design to provide structural support for a model house aimed at capitalizing on the post-war housing boom.

Skipping over Lautner's early commercial work on roadside diners pioneering the so-called "Googie" style associated with '50s-era space-age kitsch, Olsberg and Escher focus attention on six Lautner houses with large cut-away models of the Pearlman, Walstrom, Elrod, Turner, Marbrisa, and iconic 1960 "Chemosphere" homes. The houses demonstrate Lautner's ability to sculpt free-flowing interiors oriented, invariably, to awe-inspiring exterior views.

The exhibition's secret weapon is neither paperwork nor models but short movies. Beautifully shot by documentary filmmaker Murray Grigor, footage from each key residence is projected onto the walls of the dimly-lit gallery. Taking the viewer through Lautner's ocean-front Marbrisa house in Mexico, the camera caresses serpentine walkways and sun-kissed interiors while a band of sun-kissed water undulates outside the living room like a silver ribbon.

Shots of Lautner's best-known work, the hexagonal "Chemosphere," still dazzle forty-eight years after it first sprouted like a flying saucer-shaped mushroom from an embankment in the Hollywood Hills. "Pearlman Cabin," built in Aspen, Colorado, demonstrates how adeptly Lautner adapted his central theme to suit the site. Again, we get the glass-walled enclosures that marked most of his work, but he matches the landscape with a multi-story vertical thrust of wood panels that mimic the majestic mountain evergreens.

Watching the silent movies flicker on the walls, it's easy to understand why these telegenic homes played supporting roles in movies like Body Double, Diamonds are Forever, and The Big Lebowski. It may be, as essayist Jean-Louis Cohen reports in the companion catalog, that the sometimes cranky architect found Los Angeles "so ugly it made me physically sick." His own buildings, situated somewhere Between Earth and Heaven, offer a spellbinding remedy.