Turning Impulses Into Works of Art

by Holly Myers

In dealing with the difficulties of daily life, everyone resorts to fantasy from time to time. On
the freeway, perhaps you imagine a super car that could sprout jets and whisk you out of
congested traffic. At work, you refashion a difficult boss into your personal assistant. In a
long grocery store line, you invent a dark secret life for the clerk at the register.

"Das Spyder-Man," a group exhibition organized by LACE director Irene Tsatsos, looks at
how a number of artists have translated these sorts of fantastical impulses into art. The
result is a curious opportunity to glimpse the familiar--common objects, local landscapes
and ordinary circumstances--through the lens of another's imagination. (The exhibition's
title--the relevance of which isn't exactly clear to me--is said to be a conflated reference to
a pair of summer blockbusters: the movie "Spiderman" and the German art fair
Documenta.)

It is an interesting collection of work. Several of the most memorable pieces elaborate on
elements of the natural world: Violet Hopkins' intricate, vaguely Gothic colored pencil
drawings of cave interiors; Brian O'Dell's videos of apparently organic but entirely
unidentifiable and somewhat grotesque surfaces; and, Patrick Lakey's "Fragments from
an unlikely narrative" (1997-2001), an evocative series of photographs taken in a
nondescript wooded area.

Other artists work from personal history. David Miller's eerie, constellation-like
photograms, apparently made from the cremated ash of deceased acquaintances, posit a
life after death in both metaphoric and material terms. The dozen or so architectural-style
drawings in Alexander Morrison's stirring "Every House I've Ever Lived in Drawn From
Memory" (1999-2002) read like blueprints of the artist's past. Dane Picard's "Portraits, IDs,
2nd Snapshots #2" (2000)--a video in which a chronological series of photographs
depicting the artist from infancy to the present morph into one another at a rapid speed--is
like a magically animated photo album.

Equally fascinating is Picard's "Sunset Utopia" (2000), another video in which a drive down
Sunset Boulevard breaks down into hallucinogenic fragmentation.

Also set in a familiar region of the city is Greg Kucera's delightful three-channel video "Line and Flight" (2001),
which drags the viewer, led by a flock of animated birds, away from a pedestrian crosswalk
downtown on a wild, upside-down ride through the streets of L.A. As with many of the
objects and places represented in this show, you will probably never think of that
crosswalk the same way again.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323)
957-1777. Through Aug. 24. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.