With humor and subtlety, “Picture Industry” highlights such illusions of filtered perception. A careful yet generous selection of photo-based and sculptural works gives pause to our ability to see what is there before our eyes, always slightly clouded by the haze of the iconic surroundings. Spread across Regen Projects’ two spacious showrooms under the banner of the ever-looming Hollywood sign, the works on display here—chosen mainly from a familiar roster of conceptual trendsetters—self-consciously echo or mockingly double the embedded landscape of the dream factory.
Drawing directly from this context, Abraham Cruzvillega’s meticulous ballpoint facsimiles of movie posters—Belle du Jour, La passion de Jeanne D’Arc, Blow Up—are the literal tracings of cinematic products drained of their culturally-canonized flesh, color, and grandeur. Less anemic and more slapstick, Tony Conrad “preserves” 16mm film stock (complete with vinegar, vegetables, and spices) in his trio of pickling jars set atop a dainty white shelf. These pieces—much like the non sequitur of Michael Krebber’s surfboard neatly cut up into a sculptural frieze evocative of Jaws—are the détourned props of Tinseltown detritus. They speak to an inescapable cultural residue.
The show’s two-dimensional works are more forcefully abstract. Paired side by side in both galleries, the photographs of Josephine Pryde and Eileen Quinlan borrow the cinematic idioms of the close-up and the long take, collapsing them into one. Pryde’s magenta-tinted, wide-angle shot of a craggy cliff side is juxtaposed next to Quinlan’s pink-hued studio portrait of foam, mirrors, and refracted light. This indoor/outdoor dichotomy carries over to their black-and white versions. Swatches of lace and tulle create elusive texture in the photogram-like shadows of Quinlan’s Everything moves, everything shimmers; whereas Pryde’s telescopic A Year Ago Today is a lunar microcosm of black holes and decimated rock.
This “faking” of depth via a confusion of scale and surface is found elsewhere. The trompe l’oeil creases of one of Tauba Auberbach’s “wrapping paper” paintings complement Seth Price’s bow-tied gift printed on iridescent film smoothed over acrylic. Liz Deschenes’ homage to Bridget Riley is a C-print remake of Op-art’s precisely dizzying swirls. Details spring into disorienting 3-D as the viewer comes face to face with these supremely flat riddles of vision. Simple yet mesmerizing in effect, the best works in “Picture Industry” are like sophisticated Magic Eye puzzles that challenge us to stare at them long enough to see something—but what exactly? Leaving the gallery the world outside appears, contra Adorno, re-filtered into something startlingly concrete: a result of the hard looking demanded by the mirages inside.
Picture Industry (Goodbye to All That)
Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA, July 17-August 21, 2010
