ART REVIEW : Capturing Multiculturalism in New Light

At the annual Santa Barbara fiesta, two blond children drift by in a taco-shaped float. In Mexico City, not far from the Liverpool Pub, the Mexican Fab Four pose in Sgt. Pepper uniforms, the glow of the electric lights behind them obscuring their oddly sober expressions. In Panajachel, Guatemala, a Statue of Liberty is silhouetted against a turquoise sky, as a mangy dog strolls by, uninterested. At South of the Border in Dillon, S. C., a one-stop theme park, diner, motel and souvenir shop boasts a Sombrero Tower, as tragically flawed as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Ruben Ortiz-Torres, whose new photographs are at Jan Kesner Gallery, specializes in eye-popping, impossibly contradictory, Pop-flavored sonnets to the cross-cultural. The saturated colors come straight out of Saturday morning cartoons, while the blazing neon and flashing electric lights double as auras, endowing Ortiz’s image bank of dazzling incongruities with near-religious significance.

These are manically beautiful pictures that illustrate a new world order, wherein purity is no longer possible. And while they hardly mourn the loss, they possess a nervousness, a twitchy energy, that suggests how it all will come out in the end isn’t clear.

In addition to startling use of color, deadpan compositions and witty reworking of documentary traditions, what makes this work interesting is the way it willfully fails to reconcile exhilaration with trepidation. Ortiz accepts uncertainty, dislocation and the creative compromises endemic to things, peoples and places--and only very cautiously revels in their possibilities. Moving deliberately across borders and genres, he figures a world in transition and begins the difficult work of reanimating the discourse of multiculturalism and the politics of identity.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.