Geesaman’s Photographs Cultivate Love of the Land

Almost two years ago, Lynn Geesaman exhibited a splendid series of black-and-white photographs of extravagantly manicured gardens and parks in Belgium, Holland, France, England and Italy. Meticulously composed and exquisitely printed, these pictures began where the gardeners left off: marrying artifice to nature in stirring compositions.

A new exhibition at Stephen Cohen Gallery combines 10 of those earlier works with 24 more recent ones, including five in color. The combination is lovely. It lets viewers see how Geesaman’s art has matured, gaining in complexity and resonance while still clearly articulating her love for beautiful landscapes and our place in them.

The new prints by the Minneapolis-based photographer are as masterfully crafted and formally rigorous as her previous images of well-groomed shrubs, neatly trimmed hedges, placid canals and perfectly vertical tree trunks lined up in taut, geometric patterns. What’s new is the looseness Geesaman manages to capture in idealized landscapes she returns to year after year.

Increasingly dramatic shifts in scale emphasize the arbitrariness at the root of the artfully designed panoramas she photographs. Within inches, views move from the mossy bark of an extremely foregrounded tree to the wispy silhouettes of distant forests. Trees leaning at odd angles, branches sprawling asymmetrically and foliage growing unevenly highlight the fact that even the best-laid plans cannot control the shape nature ultimately takes.

Geesaman’s earlier works usually depict off-center vistas from idiosyncratic points of view. Many of her recent photos instead locate man-made structures--a solitary gazebo, a single bench or an isolated cabin--at the image’s center, aligned with its vanishing point. Dwarfed by towering trees that twist wildly across the picture plane, these architectural elements appear to inhabit the calm at the center of the storm.

All of Geesaman’s work embodies the conviction that nature and culture belong together, even if their relationship is often antagonistic. This is especially evident in her color prints, which look more like 17th century Dutch paintings than anything made with a camera. These gorgeous images transform ordinary landscapes into dreamy visions that offer abundant evidence that just because something is fabricated, like a park or a picture or a point of view, doesn’t mean it can’t move you.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525, through March 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Isolated Concept: An initially good-looking show of works on paper and canvas by Udomsak Krisanamis and Frances Stark wears thin pretty quickly, demonstrating that when Conceptual art’s linguistic structures are transformed into personal languages, the social goals of that style are irredeemably betrayed. At Marc Foxx Gallery, mindless decoration takes the place of rigorous thinking.

Of the works by the two young, self-involved artists, Krisanamis’ five abstractions are less hermetic. Each consists of bits of newspaper that the Thailand-born, New York-based artist has glued to four- or five-foot-square canvases. He’s used a black marking pen to blot out everything except the spaces inside such letters as “a,” “b,” “d,” “o,” “p” and “q,” plus lowercase “e” and “g.” Viewers are left to decipher random constellations of variously sized disks and ellipses.

Krisanamis’ canvases are mildly attractive but not nearly as interesting as his earlier altered newspapers. Those resulted from his efforts to teach himself English, crossing out the words he knew and leaving visible the ones he had to look up in a dictionary.

The problem with Krisanamis’ new images is that they shift from linguistic signification to visual depiction without acknowledging the fact that vision doesn’t function linguistically. Learning a language is not the same as learning the history of contemporary art.

Stark’s art is more egregious. Her five handwritten works, in English and German, are carbon copies of typewritten texts, including times, dates and events traced from biographies of the Beatles or other anonymous sources. There’s not much to look at and very little to glean from a reading.

By treating Conceptual art as an empty form in which to insert private meanings, both artists return to a conservative version of personal expressionism. That style’s desire to communicate directly is further short-circuited by the cool detachment Krisanamis and Stark embrace, leaving their work doubly cut off from viewers.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 3026 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-2841, through Feb. 24. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.