A look into the genetic future

Eve was a clone. The fact that Adam’s rib is said to have produced a female, rather than another male, might suggest merely the precariousness of genetic mutation.

At the Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design, “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution” assembles work from the past decade by 35 artists that riffs on the contemporary phenomenon of genetic research, engineering and manipulation. No single point of view on the mind-boggling subject is advanced, and the miracles -- like Eve -- are few and far between.

The most compelling piece on view is a well-known photographic work by Keith Cottingham, titled “Fictitious Portraits.” His digitally constructed triptych fabricates a formal portrait of an adolescent boy with ethereal facial features, stripped to the waist and seated before a dark background. In the first image, he’s placed unusually low in the pictorial field, his head just below center, so that the surrounding darkness seems heavy and forbidding.

In the second, he’s been joined by a doppelganger seated at his side, which creates a conflicted effect. The twin-like similarity between the two boys makes you scrutinize them with suspicion. But the presence of a second boy also brings relief: At least neither one is alone in the oppressive darkness.

The third image adds a third seemingly identical boy -- this one standing behind and above the other two, staring straight ahead to meet our gaze. Suspicion and relief now give way to a mix of wonder and horror. Triplets? Or perhaps an ominous foreboding of a new master race subtly suggested by the placement of the third figure as a looming presence who now dominates the visual field, his neatly parted hair falling in Hitler-like bangs across his right eyebrow.

Cottingham manipulates graphic elements to powerful ends. Most of the art in “Paradise Now” is more bland, descriptive and inert.

Julian La Verdiere has composed a still life from plastic fruit, which is displayed inside a plastic contraption filled with recirculating nitrogen gas. Christy Rupp offers a wall decorated with plastic takeout containers sporting nondescript labels she’s designed: “Greed Beans,” “Genetically Messed With” and “Spin Control Brand.” Alexis Rockman’s large painting, “The Farm,” shows gross-out animal and vegetable mutations -- square tomatoes, a chicken with six wings, a cow with an immense udder and a green parakeet next to yellow and blue ones (essence of parakeet, deconstructed). These are works that replace ambiguity with assertion, asking only that viewers concur.

One subcategory, of which Cottingham’s triptych is a rare standout, uses the idea of a “genetic portrait” to bridge the realms of science and art. Nicholas Rule creates a horse-breeding chart whose linear pattern doubles as an abstract painting. Steve Miller makes dim Warhol-style portraits by silk-screening medical images -- CT scans, X-rays, sonograms, etc. -- onto canvas in Pop colors. Somewhere between lackluster and obtuse, these and other tedious portraits lag far behind the science of genetics in their degree of imaginative fascination.

Brandon Ballengee is at least aware of this potential problem. His installation -- and the word is used advisedly -- is actually a science fair project. Six tanks are lined up on a shelf under fluorescent lights, each tank containing little frogs and nutrient material. A wall text explains that Ballengee is “breeding backward” in an attempt to recapture surface traits of a frog species said to be extinct. In the face of weird science, pseudo-art seems a tacit admission of defeat.

Genetic research might in fact be “rewriting the definition of life,” as guest curators Marvin Heiferman and the late Carole Kismaric aptly put it. (They organized the show for New York’s alternative gallery, Exit Art, in 2000; a trimmed version has been touring since.) If so, the nature of human experience is also changing. One wishes more of this art explored that avenue, rather than simply functioning as sociological illustration.

In addition to Cottingham’s triptych, the worthwhile efforts include Laura Stein’s goofy “Smile Tomato,” in which a vegetable grown inside a face mold takes on an ominous clown-like appearance.

Frank Moore’s colorful gouaches transform mutation into wondrous play (imagine Van Gogh’s sunflowers sporting Big Daddy Roth eyeballs). In a group of documentary photographs of genetic material stored haphazardly in laboratory freezers, Catherine Wagner uses the strict, formulaic, typological format of photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher to surprisingly underscore the ad hoc, accidental nature of most human endeavor.

Finally, Bryan Crockett’s small sculpture, “Pinkie,” shows a grotesque yet cuddly creature that seems part rodent, part baby, struggling to raise a withered arm and hand in a desperate gesture of benediction. Carved, appropriately, from a block of cultured marble, the sculpture is like a Michelangelo “slave” or a Bernini satyr for the brave new world. “Pinkie” stands at the difficult intersection of science and spiritual faith, where the myriad questions around genetic research smolder most intensely.

Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (626) 396-2446, through Sept. 28. Closed Mondays.

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Seven sculptures,

seven perspectives

The late summer season of group shows is upon us. While many offer an opportunity to be introduced to young artists, a disparate group of seven sculptures by established artists offers much to consider at Michael Kohn Gallery.

On the quirky side is a brick wrapped in an Ace bandage by Bay Area artist Bruce Conner, as if it’s recuperating from injuries sustained after having been hurled at some unseen Krazy Kat. The show’s lone clunker is John Chamberlain’s linear tangle of painted, chrome-plated and crumpled automotive steel ribbons, which makes a bad joke of Jackson Pollock’s death by car crash.

In between are fine if familiar examples by Chris Burden (a cardboard model of a submarine), John McCracken (a blocky form like a tilted Monopoly house, lacquered in an indescribable fuchsia), Robert Therrien (a distorted keyhole shape in exquisitely painted and waxed wood) and Stephen Balkenhol (a little man standing atop a trailer, all carved from a single block of wood that doubles as its pedestal). But it’s the 1999 model for a public sculpture by Nancy Rubins that is the main attraction -- mostly because it shows what might have been.

The sculpture is a graceful archway made from boats -- toys in the model, actual boats if the sculpture had been realized. It was commissioned by a coalition of governmental agencies for a portion of Harbor Drive fronting the San Diego Convention Center. In the model, the jagged, knife-like cluster of boats rising above steel columns forms an entryway at once playful and ominous, suggesting both the joy and the danger associated with the sea.

This imaginative proposal, alas, was sunk by the efforts of a hostile port commissioner. Now, plans are afoot to erect instead a kitsch extravaganza by a local bronze artisan, showing Neptune harnessed to a gaggle of leaping whales. We know adventurous public art is nearly impossible to erect. But who knew classical mythology held persuasive meaning for San Diegans in 2003?

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088, through Aug. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Tibet, Aborigines in dream-like meld

In paintings by Australian artist Tim Johnson, Aboriginal dream time meets a Tibetan Buddhist plane of consciousness, all by way of Yayoi Kusama-style hallucinations. The result, in 10 works at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, is a local debut of unusual interest.

Johnson, 56, begins by painting a field of mottled color in oil and acrylic. Little images are then scatted across it -- planets, demons, Chinese landscape fragments, Roswell aliens, parachutes, clouds, etc. They hover at random around a central scene (often a Buddha).

Finally, Johnson fills the spaces between them with circular patterns of tiny white dots. Optically, the dots push your eye away from the pattern’s center, until it hits the next circular pattern. Your eye begins to ricochet around the painted field, like a proverbial pinball. The center constantly shifts in these engaging canvases, while peripheries are always in flux.

Spirit maps in a contemporary idiom, the paintings also incorporate witty asides. In one, a seated Aborigine paints a Color-Field abstraction on the ground, while the tiny silhouette of a stupa-like flying saucer hovers overhead. Johnson aptly renders modern experience as a delicate web of atomized fragments, autonomous yet interdependent, mysterious and fun.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 525-1755, through Aug. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.