“Living & Dying” at Second City Arts
Long Beach
This is a show curated
by MOCA’s Assistant Curator, Michael Darling, the one
who recently had it that Liz Larner, a mild art
instructor, had “completely revolutionized art in Los Angeles.”
The show opens with some daubs by Jorg S. Dubin: a woman and her
sex toy (with commiserative note by the painter), a rotten avocado. There are a
lot of charming bits of this and that, such as an “Urn” in the form of a
ceramic handbag.
Everyone has seen the comical mock-woodblock
prints of Japan invaded by McDonald’s. Moira Hahn, on the other hand, paints
some large inquisitive watercolors full of more satirical insight into the
Orient than has been seen for quite a while. All the cartoon subtlety of the
Japan we know today is there, with a certain authenticity drawn from her
devoted study of Oriental art and real skill with a brush.
Rhoda Holabird is
a great manipulator of pastels. Two large abstracts here are considerable works
in themselves, very swift and sure concretions of
color, memorials of events in the artist’s life related to the theme. But being
pastels, these “fixed vertigos” are fairly monumental, as vivid as they are.
Two acrylics from Heather Lowe’s Attack and Decay series employ
afterimages. Green Egg & Ham is a
large fried green egg with a yellow yolk. By staring fixedly at it for thirty
seconds, and transferring your gaze to the blank space next to it, you will see
“the rest of the picture.” Live and Let
Die is an homage to the title sequence of the
James Bond film: charmingly painted red poppies which, similarly, show another
face, and also evoke a visual phenomenon recorded by Goethe in his Theory of Colors, an effect of
afterimage.
He was walking through a garden just at
twilight when he saw a tinge of contrasting color next to some flowers in his
peripheral vision. It’s one of the many arcane and mysterious things he noted
and analyzed, and makes a great picture.