ART REVIEWS : Irony, Ire in Roper Conceptualist Photographs

The conceptualist-based photo bundles of Craig Roper strongly suggest the sled bundles by Joseph Beuys, which used their materials to summon associations of personal comfort and security. Where Beuys used fat and felt, Roper uses roofing tar paper and felt carpet padding to pull in all the associations a home and shelter can offer the American psyche. He sandwiches these materials behind black and white photographs and carefully packages up the American dream of comfortable security into something easily bought and sold.

In this tightly bound context, the photos hint, everything is a commodity--biscuits like Mom used to make, the woods on the other side of the road, water that irrigates the fields, even the family plot. Not surprisingly, Roper is also aware that making art about this subject plays right into commodification. It’s hard to know from the results if the artist finds that complicity in the capitalist process a joy or a stigma. Certain pieces pay somewhat tortured tribute to Andy Warhol and other icons of the marketplace. Other bundles contain paintings wrapped in thick black plastic. Like tightly folded flags taken from a military coffin, their bulk and shape signify honored demise. Mounted on pallets which gives them a suggestion of cash and carry, they seem to mourn art’s commercialized status.

Yet Roper also tends to appreciate the collectibility of art. Pieces like the large “Bowl of Bundles” and “Two Dozen Landscapes Photographed From a Moving Truck” rejoice in presenting for sale abundant, pocket-sized fragments of memory and Americana. The exuberance that ignites these collections calls into question all the solemn breast beating present in pieces like the ominous “Devil’s Painting.” Ultimately we’re unsure if there isn’t more irony than ire behind Roper’s attack on commodification.

Richard/Bennett Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 16.

Maglich’s Odd Moments: There is a good deal of witty satire in Michael Maglich’s “Found Objects: Time Lapse Sculpture.” And some odd moments of fumbling confusion. Clearly the artist has found a way to make time an experience both ancient and contemporary. His small, sequentially presented figurative “clay” artifacts mimic ancient statuary yet, depictions of frogmen or paratroopers are clearly from the present. These small figures silently lining up to do deep knee bends or spin in simulated free fall are entertaining parodies of modern ritualized warfare. They suggest narrative battle drawings on Greek vases. Seen from the suggested “future” which makes these items seem antiquated, the hints at the annihilation of present civilization form a subtle, dire warning.

But Maglich has such a great time piecing together the artifacts and rituals of this vanished civilization that it takes a while to sort through the play and collect his point. Tin cans, old soles, and electric irons all become religious relics in this fashioning of pseudo history. By inserting all this phony religious connotation we are diverted from the artist’s main point. To reinforce that point, that this world is in real danger of extermination, the artist constructed a hard-edge, checkered target out of collaged photographs from Arizona Highways magazines. Unfortunately, the gambit misfires and comes across heavy and hokey.

The way Maglich uses time is fascinating. His sequential statuary creates a mental movement through real time as interesting as the time-traveler reality he is carefully constructing with his premise. But painter Victor Hugo Zayas in the next gallery moves more easily in the present, allowing the architecture of Los Angeles to speak of fading dreams and aging grace. Zayas’ romantic views of the city’s vaulting bridges and freeway overpasses are a curious blend of unfettered love and unvarnished reality. Strong but somewhat sweet, the aging spans leap across each canvas. The compositions are good but it is the color and paint that are most surprising. Zayas’ palette is subdued, almost grubby with the patina of age and industry. The paint handling is quick and assured, so that the glossy paint seems freshly done even while it encases the scenes in a kind of airtight preservative. Across the bottom third of most of the paintings, which were done on site, the artist has boldly written the location and date directly into the wet oils. This touch is startling not only because it gives the painting the directness of a workbook sketch, but because the inscription disappears so quickly into the slippery surface of the work.

Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Feb. 9.

An Engaging Mix: The sculptural objects of Richard Rezac are an oddly engaging mix of organic biology and industrial manufacturing. On the one hand the forms are purist, leaning toward geometric, nonrepresentational, formalist perfection. On the other they are cozy, medium sized forms that nag the edges of awareness with vaguely familiar shapes that seem pulled from old factories or biology class.

Rezac’s refined minimalist-based forms have much in common with Erik Levine’s mathematically designed plywood constructions, which make scientific and art theory a decidedly sensual encounter. But where Levine’s scale overwhelms, to play smartly with issues of weight and mass, Rezac’s pieces are intimate. His materials too are more varied. Objects are cast in bronze or hydrocal or constructed of plywood or cardboard. As a result each piece has its own identity, suggesting its own organic life form.

Additionally, each piece seems to be working privately on themes of openness, containment, interconnection, mass or spontaneous animation. That makes the work appear to zip around, changing form like a shape shifter seeking refuge in an abandoned factory. As we glimpse the softening of the machinery in pieces like the amoeba-like bronze “Ring” or admire the undulating rhythm in “Untitled,” a circle of four connected, white plaster-like bladders, everything mechanized or hard and fast in the Minimalist vocabulary seems to loosen up and breathe a bit on its own.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, to Feb. 16.