ART REVIEWS : Jim Isermann’s Windows on the Imagination

When 35-millimeter slides became the basis of art history lectures, an inside view of masterpieces became visible to anyone willing to look. Whenever a slide of a painting is projected facing the wrong direction, what appears on the screen is a reversed image of the original. The sensation created is that the viewer has been magically transported to the other side of the canvas. From here, one is granted the privilege of being able to look back at reality through the surface of the painting.

Jim Isermann’s four abstract stained-glass windows at Roy Boyd Gallery are invulnerable to this imaginary violation. Hung perpendicular to the wall, his nearly 4-foot-square “paintings” are meant to be seen from both sides. With light shining through them, and reflecting off their simultaneously opaque and translucent surfaces, they turn vision against itself and flip logic on its head.

Like gigantic, physically resplendent color slides, Isermann’s brightly colored patterns of glass counteract the fact that photographic reproduction has usurped painting’s ability to create engaging illusions. His intelligent, humorous work plays havoc with art history, collapsing its neatly linear progression onto an indeterminate surface that seems to move in at least two directions at once.

Isermann fuses the originality of art with the easy repeatability of mechanical reproduction and marries both to the beauty of hand-crafted artifacts. His vibrant pieces undermine the tendency to enshrine abstract painting in an unapproachable sphere of religious sentiment.

His generous, accessible images conflate minimalist reductivism with low-brow decor; religious high-mindedness with rec-room amusement; and craft-fair authenticity with the flashy superficiality of Pop art. This grab-bag of referents harmoniously co-exists with a perverse yet sensible unwillingness to let his work fit into fixed categories. Isermann plays optical pleasure against conceptual challenge; feminine silliness against masculine severity; and the authoritarian power of the church against the unrepentant frivolity of Pattern-and-Decoration art.

Isermann’s irrepressibly animated stained-glass windows do not split the difference between these antithetical worlds as much as they bring their differences together. This unanticipated fusion allows the viewer to see--and feel--the interrelationships among various experiences and activities. Even more than his earlier works, which stunningly combined hand-woven shag rugs with geometric abstractions, these pieces reach back further into history as they make greater claims on the future of painting.

* Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-1210, through Oct. 3 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Parables of Pain: Melissa Hoffs’ 10-minute slide show and audiotape at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies tell a tale of compassion and betrayal. Titled “PSY/DEFECT V: JOB,” her moving, first-person narrative casts a life-and-death struggle within the consciousness of a contemporary individual. Personal integrity and self-deception replace the forces of good and evil in her down-to-earth version of an age-old battle.

Inspired by the biblical story of Job, whose earthly life was made miserable in a cruel test of his faith, Hoffs’ modern parable takes place in a world abandoned by God. Its soft-spoken protagonist recounts, from his bed in a hospital’s ward for the psychologically disturbed, how his life nearly unraveled when he lost his job as the White House janitor--his family abandoned him and his health failed him. As his story unfolds, images from advertisements in pharmaceutical magazines float by, depicting ordinary people whose realities are held together by pills.

Hoffs’ absurdly improbable drama is convincing because of its sensitivity to the nuances of our emotional lives. Filled with deft touches and astute observations, her writing evinces a profound understanding of the capacity to lie to oneself, to adapt to preposterous situations in order to distance oneself from suffering and pain.

It is impossible not to find yourself, at one time or another, empathizing with the narrator’s predicament. His unshakable determination to make sense of an irrational world is admirable, just as the desire to find his place in society is doomed. The voice of Hoffs’ tormented antihero is measured and levelheaded. Read by painter Jonathan Williams, his lines embody a sense of tragic sadness. We listen as his goals shift from learning the truth to maintaining a minimal level of comfort. We watch as the slides drift by, reminding us of the costs of this adjustment.

Hoffs’ low-key, audiovisual poetry shows that knowing the truth is not the same as knowing happiness. Her thoughtful mini-drama refrains from making pretentious claims or delivering hard-and-fast conclusions. Instead, her parable’s light-handed, dark optimism demonstrates its wisdom by poignantly fleshing out the yawning gulf that lies between knowledge and experience.

* L.A. Center for Photographic Studies, 1048 West 6th St., (213) 482-3566, through Oct. 8 . Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

The Shape of Things to Come: David Lloyd’s sprawling exhibition of 17 abstract paintings at Margo Leavin Gallery marks a bold departure for the L.A.-based artist. Only 18 months ago, he exhibited almost as many oddly shaped works on canvas and panel. Their loopy contours curved, swayed, bulged and drooped. The biomorphic shapes they (barely) contained seemed animate and restless, as if their movements forced the normal, rectangular shape of a painting to swell and distend into distorted organic forms with a visceral punch.

In his newest works, all painted on wood, Lloyd has limited his format to the rectangle. Its proportions are still extreme: two paintings measure 11 inches by 6 feet; another covers more than 160 square feet. This shift introduces the straight line into his art. Although hard edges weren’t absent from his earlier images, line wasn’t an essential component of their more fluid compositions.

An exploration of collage accompanies Lloyd’s use of sharp lines. Where his earlier paintings maintained the illusion that two or three fields flowed or melted into each other, his new ones include a dozen or more picture planes. They rarely fuse with one another but remain distinct, sometimes jumping from the surface or receding into illusionistic deep space.

More than any of these transformations, Lloyd’s facility with paint distinguishes his new work. He masterfully employs more techniques than before--spraying, stenciling, staining, pasting on cutouts of other paintings, building up encrusted surfaces and sanding them down. He also skillfully uses an impressive array of materials, including oil, acrylic, wax, plaster, varnish, computer-printed patterns, the bare grain of the wood, sequins and fake jewelry.

The results are dramatic, high-keyed paintings that build upon elements of his earlier images. Lloyd’s daunting ability to deliver a stunning compendium of painterly effects leads one to forget that these are transitional works, in the best sense of the term. Their straight lines, precise fragmentation and meticulous details give them a tightness, a sense of being under too much control. Even so, they embody the promise that this overwrought quality will loosen as it is integrated into the artist’s overall project.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., (213) 273-0603, through Oct. 10 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Reality Meets Fantasy: The foam-rubber fireplace in Meg Cranston’s latest installation generates the suspicion that you’ve stumbled into a weird world, one located somewhere between the comforts of home and those of the loony bin. At 1301 Gallery, a pristine white carpet, with a bright red heart at its center, suggests the presence of idealized dreams, cute Valentines and charming dollhouses. The 6-inch-thick foam pad underneath evokes, once again, the padded rooms of institutions, communal youth hostels and dingy flophouses.

Two cardboard guitars--slathered with plaster, covered with glossy black paint and chained together--add muteness and dysfunction to the picture. Four realistically painted wire-and-plaster Christmas hams, dangling weightlessly from a child’s mobile, confirm that the world you’ve entered exists at the intersection of reality and fantasy, where dim memories bump up against resilient hopes.

This is, of course, the world of art, a strange space in which adults are regularly allowed to act like children, and sometimes rewarded for it. Cranston, more than any other artist mining this hot terrain today, consistently taps into the pleasures and terrors of childhood. Her awkwardly crafted sculptures, often made from materials that recall kindergarten art projects, give this phase of life the reasonance and complexity it deserves.

Rather than revisiting childhood as an escape from the responsibilities of adulthood--and thus transforming it into a static cliche--Cranston’s loosely autobiographical objects treat it as a phase we never outgrow. Her highly personal, yet strangely anonymous sculptures intimate that experiences from childhood continually return to the present, often in unanticipated forms, and sometimes with unpredictable effects.

This refreshing work wastes little time reminding us that childhood was never innocent. Instead, it articulates more pressing questions about the relationships between freedom and failure, madness and creativity, the desire for change and the compulsion to repeat. The psychological ambivalence that drives love/hate relationships is at the root of Cranston’s dark, honest art.

* “1301,” 1301 Franklin St., Santa Monica, (310) 828-9133, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

Tabloid Tragedies: Laura Levine’s self-consciously naive paintings at Julie Rico Gallery depict famous rock ‘n’ rollers, forgotten petty thieves, anonymous members of clubs and momentary “stars” from trashy tabloid tragedies. Her simple images present a straightforward vision of the twisted forms fame takes in America. Intentionally flat-footed, her portraits outline the entertainment industry’s capacity to play with fate. Its machinations are captured by her brightly colored likenesses of superstars, nobodies and freaks.

On the surface of things, Levine’s modest paintings seem to play along with the powers that be, blithely recording the fact that some individuals become mythical characters essential to the nation’s psyche, while others disappear into utter oblivion.

Beneath this glib rendition of Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, lies a more disturbing, democratic fact: Like pictorial gravestones or modern memento moris, Levine’s paintings suggest that only death has the power to achieve an equalization that ultimately will unite us all.

* Julie Rico Gallery, 2623 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-1177, through Oct. 4 . Closed Mondays.