Movie-Inspired ‘Place’: Going to the Picture Show

“A Sense of Place” is an 11-artist exhibition of mostly color photographs of interiors and exteriors, and it makes you wonder what happened to such genres as landscape and still life. At Angles Gallery, this tightly focused group of 37 pictures suggests that these old-fashioned categories no longer tell us much about modern life, which is so permeated by mass-produced imagery that the best way to depict the world is by treating it as a movie.

Nearly all of the show’s handsome prints have the presence of film sets. Edward Ruscha’s grid of nine sunlit swimming pools (adapted from a book he made in 1968) and Walter Niedermayr’s multi-frame views of Italian ski resorts resemble the work of location scouts--the first in search of a setting for a scene from a ‘60s road movie and the second looking for the backdrop for an action-packed thriller.

John Baldessari’s eight snapshots taken on the streets of National City could be similar studies for almost any movie set in a city, if not for the big circle of acrylic paint the artist has applied to each image. As such, his suite recalls both scene-by-scene storyboards, which block out the action in advance, and the labor of an overworked editor, who eliminates flaws one frame at a time.

Aside from its size and the fastidiousness with which it was printed, Howard Ursuliak’s close-up of three suitcases could be mistaken for a snapshot taken by a continuity assistant, to ensure that props are in the same place when one scene ends and the next one begins. A pair of Cibachromes by James Casebere, which depicts right and left views of a tabletop model of a castle’s grand hallway, looks like props made by special effects departments.

For their part, Andrew Bush’s interiors of old Irish homes recall quasi-Gothic settings for retro murder mysteries. And Willie Doherty’s chilling depiction of a brightly lit chain-link fence at night has the presence of a real crime scene, as portrayed on the nightly news or a big-budget docudrama.

Strangely for a show of this scope, which includes artists from the United States, Canada, Japan, Ireland and Italy, “A Sense of Place” is made up entirely of work by men. It’s even more troubling because L.A.-based artist Cindy Bernard covered this same territory in a 1989 series titled “Ask the Dust.” Depicting the locations of key scenes from famous movies--long after their sets were struck, their crews dispersed and their stars went on to other roles--Bernard’s photographs would have provided “A Sense of Place” with an appropriate sense of history.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Sept. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Group Effort: “Drawings IV” is a good old-fashioned group show with something for everyone and still more left over. At Koplin Gallery, this 40-artist exhibition features 77 figurative drawings that are, for the most part, extremely straightforward. Various strands of Realism predominate, while a smattering of Surrealist-inspired renderings adds a charge of psychological drama.

Six large, meticulously constructed images anchor the main space. You can almost feel the weight and density of the black in Susan Hauptman’s two velvety charcoal drawings, a cool self-portrait and a bare still life that depicts a small cake, a sheet of wrapping paper and an antique vase. Colored bright red, yellow and blue, the cake’s three frosting rosebuds radiate an uncanny spectral energy, and contrast dramatically with the otherwise completely gray drawing.

Similarly, the adolescent girl and young man in Bill Vuksanovich’s two larger-than-life-size portraits are endowed with so much sentient energy that you’d swear they were looking right at you. On their own, each of these images embodies a potent combination of vulnerability and toughness. As a pair, they compound this emotional complexity, undermining oppositions without canceling out either aspect.

Mark Wethli’s pair of interiors depicts light as if it were a solid substance. “One O’Clock” and “Messenger” glow with warmth as sunshine pours over a desk and rakes across a wall.

Other notable works in the main gallery include Steven Assael’s refined nudes, which seem to come from another century, and Martha Mayer Erlebacher’s lovingly rendered women, who appear to be perfectly at home in the moment. Robert Schultz’s icy-white study of a supine nude celebrates painstaking scrutiny and complements Masami Teraoka’s boldly graphic depictions of women serving sushi or eating ice cream. All precision and decisiveness, Teraoka’s linear drawings provide a telling contrast to Nicola Tyson’s Pop pastels, which are as lumpy and bulbous as Teraoka’s pictures are sleek and efficient.

Animal imagery fills the back gallery, transforming it into a menagerie of real and imaginary creatures depicted in a compendium of styles and techniques. Aside from Sarah Perry’s feathery image of a fierce wolf, drawn on a pair of open textbooks, and F. Scott Hess’ eulogy for an opossum and paean to a wild boar, the best animal pictures are the most abstract or the most anthropomorphic.

Standouts include Howard Warshaw’s washy collages on acetate, which outline a hellish, inhuman world, and Rico LeBrun’s “Horse of the Apocalypse,” whose sculptural presence belies the modest size of the inky collage.

Likewise, Laurie Hogin’s winged dogs maintain their intrigue. Running swiftly on their hind legs, as if they were human, these muscular beasts look fierce and frightening--until you notice that they’re fleeing from something even more terrifying than they are. Like the best works in “Drawings IV,” these works get you to see more than is visible on their surfaces.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Sept. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Abstract Views: “Painting Language” is a remarkably fresh and surprisingly coherent 15-artist exhibition. At L.A. Louver Gallery, this rewarding roundup of consistently idiosyncratic works brings together a handful of abstract painting’s usual suspects with a large contingent of gallery artists and a few very strong newcomers.

The downstairs gallery could not be more tautly installed. Anchored by Jim Isermann’s 8-foot-square “Shag Ptg.” and Ingrid Calame’s 24-by-20-foot expanse of Mylar that covers an entire wall and spills onto the floor, the installation begins by emphasizing the various roles decorative patterning plays in contemporary abstraction.

Isermann’s brightly colored work depicts a quadruple loop-the-loop, half executed in hand-hooked shag carpeting and half in hand-painted enamel. Made in 1989, it stands as a precedent for many of the show’s other pieces, nearly all of which were made over the past two years.

Dazzling plaid patterns, painted with iridescent pigments, cover Heather McGill’s sleek Fiberglas forms that jut from the wall like an odd airplane’s tail. A pair of canvases by Beatriz Milhazes combines a riot of graphic designs from the 1960s with even older wallpaper patterns, resulting in poignant compositions that are both melancholic and optimistic.

Habib Kheradyar and Jessica Stockholder use printed fabrics to create 3-D pieces that are as optically puzzling as they are physically engaging. Setting up repeating patterns in their modestly scaled paintings only to interrupt them, Suzanne McClelland and Juan Usle create fluid rhythms that circle back on themselves.

The show’s centerpiece--a four-part painting of incredibly detailed shapes Calame traced from stains she found in the street--looks fantastic next to Tony Berlant’s two paintings made of colorful sheets of tin nailed to plywood panels. Both artists transform random accidents into patterns that may not be logical, but make even more sense in their unpredictable serendipity.

Upstairs, a rainbow of supersaturated colors links a looser group of works that look good individually but don’t play off one another as synergistically as those downstairs. Standouts include Dario Urzay’s hallucinatory diptych, Lydia Dona’s potent window onto outer space and Fabian Marcaccio’s shiny canvas that resembles a mutant flag.

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* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Sept. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.