Farrah Karapetian: Stagecraft at Von Lintel Gallery

2685 S La Cienega Blvd (between Alivar and Cullen streets)
January 17 to February 28, 2015
Los Angeles, 310 559 5700

When I was a child my father would delight me by playing Ken Nordine’s word jazz. We’d listen and laugh along with the absurdist poetry delivered in Nordine’s mellifluous baritone accompanied by bebop improvisations, breathy flute trills, the swish of a brush across a snare drum. I’d close my eyes and stare with my ears at the scenes Nordine sketched with words — short, jokey stories brimming with onomatopoeic ornamentation and witty little rhymes. His 1966 album, Colors, is a collection of 34 roughly one-and-a-half-minute vignettes, each characterizing a color with anthropomorphic anecdotes: ecru is a critic, for instance; burgundy is bulging and fat; lavender is an old, old, old, old, old lady.

I thought briefly of Ken Nordine after seeing Farrah Karapetian’s exhibition of new photograms and sculpture, “Stagecraft,” at Von Lintel Gallery. The comparison is perhaps a bit corny, I admit, but there is some correspondence to be found between Nordine’s evocation of colors through words and music, and Karapetian’s evocation of music through shape and color. There are shared elements of playfulness, improvisation and mood; with both, our mind fills in what the eyes do not see. While earlier works alluded to subjects with political weight (portraying riot police, protestors, guns and contraband), this series uses the accoutrements of music and performance as a vehicle to investigate the mutability of perception and the rhythmic possibilities of light, color, and space.

Karapetian began with bronzes and blues — the colors one feels listening to jazz, according to what Karapetian’s father revealed to her about his own sensations when listening to music. In Got to the Mystic (all works 2014), we see her father as a ghostly figure playing a skeleton of a drum kit, his face obscured by the hi-hat; the drum stands and rims and closures and cymbals register a stark white against the ruddy ground of the photogram.

Karapetian’s painstakingly crafted replica of her father’s drum kit — minus the skins and shells, leaving just the armature, the metal lugs, rods and stands — sits in an adjoining room. The cymbals are formed from glass, allowing light to pass through. A spotlight positioned on the floor of the gallery illuminates the sculpture from below, casting its shadow against the wall, and revealing the apparatus at play in Karapetian’s photograms. Many artists go to lengths to conceal their processes, but Karapetian, in the service of transparency, divulges her sources, shows us the “negative.”

The viewer, however, does not get the full experience, rather just a glimpse of how things work. In Three Muses one can clearly see the three bodies in space, but one can only imagine the haptic experience of three people trying to position themselves in a completely dark room, waiting for the flash of light that would inscribe their shadows on the paper. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Pause. Flash.

Karapetian spoke to me about the primacy of physical interaction in her work, from situating her subjects in the darkened space to the handling of the paper and processing. The viewer sees only the final result, limited to the perspective of the paper itself. We see only what the paper sees, as it mutely records the impression of shadow and light across its surface. It bears other marks, too, though. Around the edges, little fingerprints are indelibly smudged, and the pricks of the push pins that held the paper in place are visible. The prints hold a remarkable texture, impossible to capture in the jpegs you’d see online.

There are bronzes and blues — but also crimsons and yellows and indigos and deep, resonant greens. Yes, resonance: the colors here have it, just like sounds do. Light waves that linger. My memory of the electric greens and cyans of Kräftig — the color is so pure, so saturated and intense — challenges the colors I now see in the digital reproduction of the piece on my laptop and in the exhibition catalogue. Strange, how variable color is in real life and in reproduction. Stranger still, to think of these vibrant greens and blues produced by red and magenta lights. In the darkroom, the gap between perceived and resultant color becomes a playground of improvisation and experimentation, “a very present tense experience,” as Karapetian put it. Like a jazz musician mounting the stage, she may already know the riff, but where the song goes from there will always be a surprise.

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January 10 through February 22, 2015
60 N 6th Street (between Wythe and Kent streets)
Brooklyn, 718 599 4884

In the event that it ever becomes possible to X-ray the human imagination, the results will presumably look a lot like Susan Bee’s “Photograms and Altered Photos from the 1970s.” The dozens of small, unframed works included in this exhibition feature hand-drawn squiggles, primal daubs, imperfect patterns, and bleached silhouettes of found materials that reach out of darkness like weeds or the dreamy remnants of a half-formed thought. All rendered within a dense yet fluid spectrum of surprisingly nuanced (if yellow-tinged) grayscale, the images could also just as easily be isolated stills from a tenderfoot animated film or snapshots beamed from some corner of the Universe where the earpiece of a rotary telephone or pair of scissors float amid other random bits of cosmic detritus. A number of pieces are also whimsically hand tinted, embellished by thin pastels and near-neon hues that scrape and bundle their way through an eerie not-quite black-and-white world. Overall, the collection is inquisitive and crisp, containing something of the prime quality W Somerset Maugham once ascribed to rum punch: it has “the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics.”

The works are presented in clusters of series, each marked by its own thematic and aesthetic parameters. One sequence, shown on the gallery’s north wall, is reminiscent of the gangling, angular microbes one might find under a microscope and the patchy cultures grown in a Petri dish; others, on the south wall, evoke Anna Atkins’s botanical impressions of plant life and the Impressionists’ proclivity for employing thick upward strokes to capture the bloom and sway of a vertiginous sweep of lawn. Untitled (ca. 1979) is especially energetic, its many blurred, fern-shaped cross-sections flushed with soft cerise, peony pink, rheumy chartreuse and cornflower blue. Another series, this one pinned to the east wall, is more formal and austere, containing only a few colorless overlapping triangles of various weights and sizes. Here, each photogram focuses intently on the interaction of forms and subtle shifts in tone, not unlike Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series. This attention to relationships between items anticipates the careful relationships Bee now establishes between figures in her current painting practice. One can see the connection, but also the distance travelled. Who knew that addressing how one triangle converses with another, or how two equilaterals act when forced to lean into each other and share a single space, could be so tender, or so telling?

Despite their many differences, these works all have one thing in common: they are, first and foremost, exploratory. Created during and after the time Bee was writing her graduate thesis on the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, many of the images feel like direct echoes of those she studied so intently, made using whatever objects she found lying around her studio. The process has the effect of making even the most mundane office supplies appear ghostly and phenomenal, giving everything from nuts and bolts to tape dispensers and unruly tangles of wire a second life, or perhaps only the shade of a life. Yet their mimicry is not a flaw, but rather the key to their distinction. These works designate one phase in the career of a deeply curious artist who makes in order to understand, producing works that feel kinesthetic and engage in a pedagogic dialogue with their source material. They are tests — then for the artist to make, and now for the viewer to observe. They are a game, an exercise, a puzzle that not only challenges you to ask, “What is that thing?” but then dares you to go ahead and fill in the blank.

In this critic’s opinion, the photogram is a dramatic but inherently limited medium, very much in the line of “you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all.” But here, the singular experience of viewing and time traveling with the artist slices right through the material’s potential shortcomings. These works are the unassuming glimpses of a younger, more uncertain self, the apt pupil who holds the camera and looks right past us and into the future in Untitled (1977). We don’t know what she sees, but perhaps we can begin to imagine.

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