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In Between

ANNE COLLIER, BRIAN FAHLSTROM, EVAN HOLLOWAY, CARTER MULL, STERLING RUBY

Marc Foxx

6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048

January 12, 2008 - February 9, 2008

At first, the current group show at Marc Foxx offers little in the way of a theme or “hook.” However, the juxtaposition of works that seem to have been randomly chosen to show together, other than the fact that they are all large-scale pieces, is ultimately rewarding rather than frustrating. The gaps left between one artist’s work and that of another are productive in that they lead one to actually try to put the puzzle together, rather than simply “read” the show along a pre-determined path.

In spending some time with the show, two relationships between very different kinds of work slowly emerge. The first of these is a kind of “limbo” state between representation and abstraction that much of the work falls within, though to very different ends. Sterling Ruby’s and Brian Fahlstrom’s large-scale mostly abstract paintings, for example, suggest abstract expressionism’s golden era, but representation slowly emerges from the work—and in both cases, it’s in the interplay between each of the two pieces the artists have in the show.

Fahlstrom’s large and superficially similar paintings become more unlike each other as you look at them, and from this dissonance human and architectural forms start to emerge and suggest a narrative or scene teasingly just out of the viewer’s reach. The same case goes for Ruby—a very large spray-painted canvas starts to accrue meaning when seen in the context of a sculpture that looks like a struggle to create a 3D (or 4D?) peace sign—the bronze in both works starts to suggest links to industrialism and the iconic “bronze medal” that enriches both works.

And most of the other work is no less initially perplexing, though just as rewarding.

The second “theme” to emerge from the show is the tension between subject matter or source material and final form. This can best be found in Evan Holloway’s enormous and incredibly detailed forest of number trees of tiny sculpted faces (and that description will make sense to you when you see the piece itself), and in Carter Mull’s photographic abstractions, in which the titles, such as Los Angeles Times, Oct. 19., 2007, pull hard against prints that are even more abstract than the nearby canvasses.

In saving the best for last, though, both of these kinds of “themes” are present in Anne Collier’s two brilliant photographs, each of which are worth a trip to the show just on their own. The two large photographs of books manage not only to raise questions about what seeing and taking pictures is and does, but about the psychological space of representation and record-keeping, something rendered especially haunting in the empty pages of the book photographed for My Goals For One Year. That the pages are untouched and yet highly suggestive is a good model for imagining the show as a whole. And whether you agree with my attempts at explaining an underlying theme(s) or not, the show is definitely worth checking out.

- Nicholas Grider

(*Image: Brian Falstrom, Evan Holloway, Sterling Ruby, Carter Mull; Brian Falstrom, Evan Holloway, Sterling Ruby, Carter Mull, Anne Collier; January 12 - February 9, 2008; Marc Foxx Gallery, Installation View, 2008, Courtesy of Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles.)

Posted by Nicholas Grider on 1/20/08

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