Exhibit Focuses on Fringes of Photo Technique : Unusual approaches such as ‘greaseprints’ can be seen in show of emerging artists’ work

Pushing the boundaries of what is typically considered photography, the Gallery at 817 has organized “Los Angeles Emerging Artists Exhibition,” a show of photography-based work by 13 artists, half of them women, who are not formally represented and have not exhibited extensively in the Los Angeles area.

For this show, the gallery put out an open call for slide submissions in Artweek and at colleges and art schools in the area. “We knew that there was good work out there that we weren’t seeing,” said Catherine Whyte Rhodes, gallery director. “We keep ourselves open to people who have never exhibited before,” added Randall Scott, the gallery’s assistant director.

The ideas and images of the artists’ work are as disparate as the photographic processes that have been employed. Most unusual is Kristy King’s sculpture of a female torso, “Polarities Passages Transformation I,” made of fired clay, dirt, sand, and photographic paper that holds the image of a landscape. Rhodes said the concern was not whether the sculpture--which weighs more than 300 pounds--belonged in a photography show, but whether they could get it up the stairs to the gallery.

Carol Dresser creates her “greaseprints” without a camera. Placing grease-covered subjects--for this show, her own body--on photo paper, the images appear on the paper when it is put in developing solution much as a standard print comes to life.

In contrast, Terry Konrath works in a familiar mode, taking snapshots of her family and herself. “I am interested in the idea of repetition, how we grow up learning certain behaviors from our families and repeat the same mistakes in our relationships,” she said.

Mark Beaston’s black-and-white photographs resemble abstract drawings. Daniel Marlos displays his various images of human interaction in a serial format. Teal Rocco’s superimpositions of people, places and objects are small and personal, and Hans Proppe presents mixed messages about such events as the Gulf War through large superimposed pictures from news and entertainment media.

John Watson uses watercolors to enhance his depictions of the world of intimate relationships. Large color prints by another artist, Falling Leaf, contrast the majesty of national parks with the plight of homeless people. Doris June Jew incorporates hieroglyphics into her color desert landscapes, and Howard Smith uses ancient symbols in his photograms.

Laura London’s humorous color photograph, “Days of the Week,” in which a headless woman wears underwear marked “Wednesday” and is surrounded by pairs of underwear labeled with the other days of the week (minus Sunday), comments on outdated notions of women through its composition and faded tones. And anybody aware of a bowler’s love for bowling should get a chuckle out of Christine Pan’s nine personalized bowling balls, photographed in brilliant color.

“Los Angeles Emerging Artists” at the Gallery at 817, 817 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, through Aug. 24. Open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Call (213) 933-5614.

Many modernist artists studied Japanese art and incorporated its styles and techniques into their own work. At the Bryce Bannatyne Gallery in Santa Monica, one can see the effects of such study on more than 30 California artists in “From the Japanese Aesthetic to the Hard Edge Movement: Woodblocks and Drawings in California,” a show of more than 50 woodblock prints and drawings, most of them from before 1940.

Japanese art aesthetics as well as those of the various European art movements of the first half of the 20th Century have been applied to quintessential California images. A stylized “California Hills” (1935) by Swedish-born painter and printmaker Anders Aldrin, presents a dry landscape with rolling hills and a few trees, a common Southern California scene. Gustave Baumann, a German-born artist, settled in Santa Fe, N.M., but made several trips to California that resulted in woodblocks of such scenes as “Redwood” (circa 1935).

Vernon Jay Morse lived for about six years in San Francisco before he moved to Pasadena in the late 1920s. His stark, black-and-white “Chinatown” woodblock depicts a Chinatown that is at once mysterious and ordinary. Helen Hyde, whose two woodblocks most closely re-create Japanese images, lived in Japan from 1899 to 1912. She became a U.S. pioneer in the making of Japanese woodblock prints.

Alexander Calder lived most of his life on the East Coast, but he is represented here with his 1934 watercolor and ink, “Flying Figures,” because he spent part of his youth in Pasadena and San Francisco. The exhibit also includes work by three well-known Los Angeles modernists: drawings by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, lithographs by Henrietta Shore and pastels by Hans Burkhardt.

The show, says Chris Hebert, manager of the gallery, “gives you a sense of the development of ideas in the modernist movement--how it moved out of the somewhat precious 19th-Century Japanese style into a more rigorous and intellectual modernism.” It also complements the gallery’s furniture, ceramics and other objects from the 20th-Century Design movement by Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene & Greene, Gustav Stickley and others.