Mandarin Gallery’s current exhibition is a conundrum. You, Whose Beauty Was Famous in Rome, curated by young LA art scene figures Andrew Beradini and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, is both wily and gapingly tender, leaving you torn between the charm of the appropriated imagery and the works' darker side. 

Much of the dapper collage and photography by the show’s eight artists has the same fugitive allure as the defaced books that got 1960's British writers Joe Orton and Kenneth Haliwell into trouble. Orton and his lover Haliwell enhanced the Islington Library’s collection by borrowing books and then returning them with altered jackets. The risqué, comic alterations were visually quite gripping, but they landed Orton and Haliwell in jail. Haliwell’s 1967 murder of Orton and subsequent suicide seems like the tragic conclusion to an initially mirthful lovers’ escapade.

You, Whose Beauty Was Famous in Rome similarly seems like a tender escapade that somehow—nothing in the show tells us exactly how—became weighted down by tragedy. Elad Lassry’s sleek photographs, 3 Variations on a Bob, might come off as lighthearted if not hung so near Hedi El Kholti’s All that Heaven Allows—two C-prints that recall the sort of nightmarish dreams in which nothing ever happens, but your whole life seems to be crowding in on you.

William Jones’ film montage may be the exhibition’s most unnerving element. The video, shown in its own suite of the gallery, repeats fragmented film segments again and again until you feel as though you know each segment inside out. You’ve committed the inseam of an actor’s jeans to memory, but you have no idea where he is going when he exits the frame. This sort of immediacy coupled with pending doom makes You, Whose Beauty Was Famous in Rome a remarkable collaboration. The exhibition’s lively sleekness only makes the pervasive sense of loss more pronounced.

- Catherine Wagley

(*Images, from top to bottom: Group Show, You, Whose Beauty Was Famous in Rome, February 9 - March 22, 2008; Mandarin Gallery,  William E. Jones,  Film Montages (For Peter Roehr), 2006, Video, color, sound; 10 minutes, Edition 4 of 4, Courtesy of the artist and  David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.  Group Show, You, Whose Beauty Was Famous in Rome, February 9 - March 22, 2008; Mandarin Gallery,  Elad Lassry,  3 Variations on a Bob (Silver Grey), 2006,  11 x 11 inches, Courtesy of the artist and  Cherry & Martin Gallery, Los Angeles. Group Show, You, Whose Beauty Was Famous in Rome, February 9 - March 22, 2008; Mandarin Gallery,  Hedi El Kholti,  All That Heaven Allows #7, C-print, 9.375 x 6.125 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Mandarin Gallery, Los Angeles.)