ART REVIEWS : Vasulkas’ Installations a One-Two Punch

Steina and Woody Vasulka’s tandem video installations at LACE are engaging, his-and-her meditations on the slippery relationships among technology, nature, men and women. Greater than the sum of their parts, the two single-room displays of shifting, electronically generated images work in concert with one another to create a solid, one-two punch whose collective power builds as it echoes off its partner’s strengths.

On its own, Woody Vasulka’s “Brotherhood, Table III,” made up of war machines scavenged from Los Alamos, would seem to settle for rehashing tired stereotypes about connections between male alienation and technological violence. But next to Steina’s simultaneously seductive and daunting “Borealis,” his high-tech spectacle appears to be almost as soothing as it is destructive.

Your eyes take a while to adjust to the engulfing darkness when you step off the street into Steina’s immediately disorienting piece. Projected onto three, see-through screens suspended from the ceiling of the darkened main gallery, her looped videotape and soundtrack of crashing surf and other scenes from nature intensify the sense that you’ve lost your bearings.

The Iceland-born, Czechoslovakia-educated and U.S.-based artist’s 10-minute piece of video theater seems to stop time from passing in its usual manner. It also turns your experience of space inside-out. Nearly all its images are tipped on their side: Sunsets over the ocean become pulsating, vertical abstractions as cascading waves defy gravity and flow across (rather than down) your field of vision.

The most mesmerizing component results from a single video projection that the artist has duplicated and reversed, by projecting it through a translucent mirror, to produce an identical pair of images that move at perfectly synchronized cross-purposes.

In this richly confounding work, it’s often impossible to determine whether images are coming at you or drifting away. It’s also difficult to know whether scenes are following a natural progression from past to present, or being manipulatively replayed in reverse.

Woody Vasulka’s more compressed installation consists of a mechanized table that multiplies video and slide projections, sending them in six directions at once: onto four screens, the floor and ceiling. His imagery resembles the pixilated, computer-generated representations of high-tech war games, in which death and destruction appear as colorful yet bloodless abstractions.

Together, the Vasulkas’ installations undermine oppositions between culture and nature as they dispose of distinctions between men and women. By linking their distinct, mutually supporting pieces, they refute the idea that technology is masculine and intrinsically aggressive, and that nature is feminine and essentially nurturing. The Vasulkas’ synergistic approach to collaborative work propels viewers into a realm where art demands active engagement.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 957-1777, through Sept . 4. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Out of Focus: At Cerritos College Fine Arts Gallery, “Object of Metaphor” is a hip, 11-artist exhibition that includes interesting work by a handful of talented young artists--but still manages to be boring.

One problem is that its premise lacks sufficient focus to sustain an exhibition. Every thing that exists already embodies metaphoric meaning. An exhibition of art must do more than baldly state that objects convey significance. It must inflect these meanings in specific directions, emphasizing how individual works complement or contradict one another.

Another problem is that the approach to art-making the show supports, in which artists use found-objects to trigger a viewer’s memories and evoke poignant associations, feels increasingly cliched and outdated. A glut of fussed-over objects whose main significance lies in their literal, art-school references has diminished, rather than bolstered, the power of literary metaphors.

* Cerritos College Fine Arts Gallery, 11110 Alondra Blvd., Norwalk, (310) 860-2451, ext. 2612, through Sept . 15. Closed Friday-Sunday.