ART REVIEWS : McMillen: Whispers of Loneliness

“All things of the Earth go back to the earth,” observes Michael C. McMillen, whose current exhibition at the L.A. Louver Gallery, “Engine of Mercy,” takes a metaphysical look at the themes of time, transformation, decay and mortality. An ambitious show that includes 30 sculptures and a massive installation, this haunting show is about time, yet it seems to exist outside of time, residing instead in a dreamer’s world where the pace is languid and slow. In this, McMillen is evocative of David Lynch. More often, however, his painstakingly crafted sculptures fashioned out of recycled debris and new materials which are artificially aged, put one in mind of Paul Klee or Joseph Cornell. There’s a similar poetic fragility about McMillen’s work, a whisper of loneliness and despair that seems to echo the wistful song one imagines Klee’s twittering birds on a wire to be warbling.

The brooding undercurrent of McMillen’s work sort of sneaks up on you; after all, his pieces look like toys at a glance. An inveterate pack rat who travels the alleyways of Los Angeles on a bike collecting discarded materials which he transforms into art, McMillen invests his work with a boyishness evocative of William Wegman, however, his love of child’s things--vaguely sinister antique toys, spooky carnival attractions, Egyptian mummies--is a mask for deeper paradoxical qualities.

McMillen has always been entranced by the mystery and sense of discovery of science, and though his work has a warm, handmade quality, it examines themes of technology and industrial production. And, though his work has the look of jerry-built contraptions put together with spit and baling wire, McMillen actually has a highly sophisticated sense of composition and color rooted in abstract painting. Appearing guileless and naive at a glance, the work has a cinematic quality, (McMillen worked in the movie industry as a model maker for a spell) and alludes in a knowing way to themes of artifice and illusion.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a reworked version of “The Pavilion of Rain,” an installation McMillen created in memory of his father. First installed at Cal State Northridge in 1987, “The Pavilion of Rain” could be described as a sort of decrepit houseboat anchored in a shallow pool in a dark, damp room, where one has the sense that a rain shower just passed through. This nuts-and-bolts description hardly conveys the brooding, heart-broken beauty of this ineffably lovely piece.

(L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd., and 77 Market St., to Oct. 13).

Photographs of Fire and Ice: In “Jargomatique,” a new body of work by Susan Rankaitis on view at the Meyers-Bloom Gallery, the L.A. based artist continues to develop themes that were central to her show at this gallery last year. Essentially an abstract painter who develops luminous high-tech surfaces by painting on photographic paper with chemicals, Rankaitis transforms motifs and textures evocative of the space industry into shimmering meditations on man’s troubled place in the machine age. Alive with the conscienceless power and deadly beauty of science, Rankaitis’ work glows with an unearthly light that’s compelling yet utterly cold.

Oddly shaped images framed under glass, Rankaitis’ work often features faint photographic images--of rocket parts, a crashing jetliner--that are barely discernable beneath the veil of smoky turbulence that floats in the foreground of the picture plane. Toying with photographic conventions as it comments on man’s evolving relationship with space and time, the work’s central weakness is its ethereal loveliness; it’s easy to forget the content of these images in the rush of pleasure afforded by their lush surfaces.

Meyers-Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, to Oct. 20.

Baldessari Redux: Basking in the glow of his recent retrospective at MOCA, John Baldessari reprises his recipe for art making with an exhibition of prints at the Maloney Gallery. With a firm grounding in media theory, Baldessari is a master of Post-Modern ennui, and he has a knack for combining the visual flotsam and jetsam of modern life in such a way that his images seem to heave a colossal, collective sigh of resignation and faint regret.

We see various images culled from mass media (chiefly recycled movies stills), black and white photos punctuated with cryptically positioned flourishes of color, and elements of kitsch--pictures of teddy bears and Mickey Mouse turn up here, adding a Koonsian pinch of schlock. Most of the pieces are triptychs combining three or more images that are related in a loosely ironic way, and the viewer compulsively struggles to puzzle out exactly what the connections are so as to get Baldessari’s point.

Michael Maloney Contemporary Art, 602 Colorado Ave., to Oct. 13.