More is less and less is more for Steve Roden. The thick paintings in “Lines and Spaces” at Susanne Vielmetter Projects seem succinct despite their wrought under-painting, the layers melting together to become a single, indulgent experience.

The main gallery is filled with mellow, full-bodied oil and acrylic paintings, all of which have idiosyncratic, music-inspired titles. “when sun is like rain. when rain is like sun,” hung at the back of the space, looks like what might happen if Karl Benjamin’s carefully controlled hard-edge paintings married Julie Mehretu’s frenetic environments. Except that Roden’s work has more life than both Benjamin’s and Mehretu’s put together.

In “when sun is like rain”, wide vertical stripes slide open to reveal a quieter crevasse filled with cooler, smaller stripes that join together to form miniature asteroids. Roden’s paintings often seem to imagine a fictional cosmos and the bodies that occupy it. In “the same sun spinning and fading . . .”, a globularly elegant body of color moves off into a dreary expanse of brown like an animated alien caterpillar encountering earth for the first time.

The problem with Roden’s show is that its three different addendums seem severed from each other. The paintings hung in the main gallery are an entity onto themselves, demanding attention and transporting viewers into an odd sensorial world in which stripes and colors define sound, space, and taste. But the drawings in the installation gallery have much more to say about language and narrative than otherworldy sensuality.
“Quartet 1” and “Quartet 3”, both done in ink, pencil, and collage, inescapably reference how phrases or words come together.

In the second smaller side gallery, a circular video monitor on a floor-level stand plays a whimsical short in which lines move in and out across a cavity of color. A dense curtain of hanging wooden blocks fills a third side room, a three dimensional rendition of the worlds Roden creates wit paint. If all these strains had been able to interact with the paintings on an equal footing, without seeming like offshoots, the dynamism of Roden’s more-less-more sensibility might have been even greater. But this element disjointedness doesn’t undermine the net effect of Roden’s painterly explorations.

Roden systematically responded to a musical score when making work for “Lines and Space.” The paintings are decidedly visual experiences, but they do mimic music in one unforgettable way: they have the sensorial power to suck away inhibition and make you want to move.

*(Images top to bottom:Steve Roden, "when sun is like rain. when rain is like sun.", 2008, Oil and acrylic on linen, 72" x 72", Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer; Steve Roden, "quartet 3", 2008, Ink, pencil, collage on paper, 27 ½" x 22 ½" framed size, Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer; Steve Roden, "if dunes dream and reds sleep in pairs...", 2008, Oil and acrylic on linen, 48" x 35", Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer)

Multidisciplinary, collaborative, interactive exhibitions have the potential to be hazardous. Even those of us who are contemporary art world regulars tend to feel uncomfortable about touching artwork and we don’t always like to be asked to read a pamphlet or listen to a recording when we came to look. We, a cleverly energetic exhibition at Lizabeth Oliveria, Gallery, takes this problem on with gusto.

Curated by Jen Lui, We includes work by nine international artist collectives. The exhibition valiantly tries to be more than an exhibition, but it doesn’t try so hard that it denies the restrictions of the gallery dynamic. It meets its audiences on a variety of levels—the space is inviting to those who would rather just look but it eagerly anticipates those who will pick up the pamphlets and put on the headphones.

The L.A. based group OJO drove a 1979 Corolla into the gallery on opening night, playing eerie music from inside the small car and using a smoke machine to add to the ambience. Now the car and its accompanying soundtrack make for a sturdy anchor, ensuring that everyone who walks through the door knows that this exhibition is trying to do something a little different.

To the left of the Corolla, an erratically lettered sign reads On Produceability. The installation below it resembles a lush, off-kilter novelty store, with a shimmering teal blanket hanging seductively from the wall and a shrine-like wooden box filled with ephemeral trifles. A handful of the objects in the installation are actually priced to sell, like the T-shirts and temporary tattoos. A collaboration between the Dusseldorf group Nuans and the Istanbul based Alti Aylik, On Produceability takes a lighthearted but earnest stab at cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary unity, endeavoring to change the way artists and producers interact.

With its movie posters, archives, reading stools, monitors, and temporary tattoos, We is a haven for counter-culture enthusiasts. Its inclusive vibe, like a distilled contemporary version of Black Mountain College in its heyday, suggests that making culture—generating objects, interactions and ideas in hopes of changing the way people think—is still a viable project for artists, despite any post-post-modern malaise.

A crisp c-print lying on a crate in the main gallery highlights a discussion of exhibition narration: “There is still the insistence in the impossibility of escaping certain narrative parameters.” To the extent that they can, the artists in We try to evade those parameters—they’re giving their audiences something to do and they’re making work that functions outside of the “art object” context. But since they embrace the exhibition format, its viewer-looks-at-object storyline and all, they avoid alienating audiences as they launch their ideas out into the world.

(Images from top to bottom:  We, installation view, 2008, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; OJO, Love Letter, 2008, 1979 corola, smoke machine, speakers, audio cd, paper)

Culver City’s ever-growing arts scene is as lively as ever this summer and the Music Festival is a fun low-key way to get in on the action. Featuring a diverse span of community-friendly artists, from a ‘70s rock band to progressive bluegrass group, the concert series is celebrating its 14th year. Concerts will be held in Culver City’s City Hall Courtyard every Thursday night at 7PM through August 28th

More info at: http://www.culvercitymusic.org/index2.html