Exploring Metamorphosis and Ephemerality

Colombian artist Oscar Munoz was an unforgettable standout in “Amnesia,” the 1998 show of new art from South America organized by Christopher Grimes Gallery. His work there had sensual immediacy and profound implications.

In one group of images Munoz transferred photographic portraits onto mirrored metal disks. The faces could hardly be seen until you literally breathed life into them, the resulting fog briefly intensifying the contrast between image and background surface. In another piece, Munoz floated photographic images of body parts in dark powder on the surface of shallow trays of water. Periodic drops from faucets above gently eroded the images, while evaporation gradually reduced them to a filmy residue.

Mortality, contingency and transiency converged exquisitely. What wasn’t ephemeral was Munoz’s own insight into time’s power, and its command over physical form and psychological comfort.

His first solo show in L.A., now at Iturralde Gallery, more than affirms his technical and philosophical gifts. The show, called “Trans figuraciones,” contains photographs, videos and sculptural installations. Metamorphosis of spiritual and mythical import is invoked here, though the work also speaks powerfully on a basic, physical level, echoing the body’s passage from wholeness to decay.

In one series Munoz used a silk-screen-like process (as in the “Amnesia” work) to transfer a photographic self-portrait in coal dust onto the surface of water in a shallow clear plastic box. In time the water evaporated, and what Munoz exhibits here is the thin, gray crust that remained in the box, forming a ghostly, diffused image of the artist’s face.

Through this stunning process Munoz triggers multiple, overlapping associations. The photograph’s relationship to the body photographed feels palpable. And if the photograph is a physical trace of the body, is this dry dust the trace of a trace? The grainy images in these trays bring to mind the famous Shroud of Turin, said to bear the imprint of Christ’s body. The debate over authenticity only serves to remind us how much belief--or at least the suspension of disbelief--strengthens the claims of presence and likeness.

In photographic sequences and two videos, Munoz tracks another type of transformation, as powdered portraits and self-portraits floating in a sink full of water are sucked down the drain. As the water level lowers, suction corrupts each face’s features into a discontinuous mess, a Rorschach blot of indeterminate meaning. The coherence of the form succumbs to randomness. Personality devolves into base matter. The real and immediate shrink into memory.

Such is our common fate as animate beings. Vanity vexes the process, though, and, like Narcissus, for whom Munoz titles many of these works, we cling tragically to what affirms our own beauty, resisting the tug of the drain.

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through Oct. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Potter’s Assemblages:

A Film of Meaning

Carter Potter’s new work at Angles sets in motion a scramble for definition. Are these paintings? Are they sculpture? Are they gimmicks or something more?

Potter attaches strips of 70-millimeter film to a frame the way a painter might stretch a canvas, creating a continuous, image-bearing surface. The film he uses is castoff leader, either clear, opaque brown or tinged with painterly spills of cyan, magenta and gold. Though earlier works by Potter (and one anomalous piece here) use film from the prime of a reel, imprinted with figures and scenes, the rest of the lengths used here are purely utilitarian, marked only with technical notations and countdown numbers.

Like many assemblage artists who recycle found materials, Potter stages a reincarnation of sorts, investing detritus with a new purpose and even a modest degree of beauty.

The clear passages of film allow us to see straight through to the stretcher bars and the wall, while the more opaque lengths reflect back our own image stuttering vertically down the banded surface.

Some of the works have the rough dimensions of a door; others are substantially larger. All are composed of paired panels that seem to bend at the waist, the lower section resting on the floor, leaning into the wall, and the upper portion flat against the wall. The leaning calls to mind the plank sculptures of John McCracken, but the form also conjures up the more pedestrian shape of a collapsible patio lounge chair, slats and all.

Potter seems to have something more serious in mind, courting references to stripe paintings and Finish Fetish slickness. But these “Test Results,” as he calls them, are mixed. They can seem facile but, then again, crisply patterned and luminous. Ultimately they settle into that vast middle ground between the banal and the transcendent.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Oct. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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An Accumulation of the Everyday in Fors’ Works

Jose Fors is a poet of the physical world, a collector of bits and pieces, scraps and memories. Even when his work is not at its most potent, as in his current show at Couturier Gallery, it still exerts a soulful pull.

“Fallen Leaves” is the title of the show and one of its installations, but it is also an apt metaphor for the photographs Fors uses--tokens of life turned into brittle, brown memories. In the most understated and affecting of the works here, “Las Ventanas” (The Windows), Fors mounts more than 300 photographs, small as postage stamps, in neat rows along one long wall of the gallery.

Toned in nostalgic browns and with marks of abrasion that push them deep into the past, the pictures coalesce into a diary of memories: family scenes, posed portraits, but also fragments of leaves and trees, a ball of yarn, the slats of a fence, a feather, an eye. Each is, indeed, a tiny window, framing a view of both the external world and internal experience.

In the central installation, “Hojarascas” (Fallen Leaves), Fors places 18 vitrines in three rows on the floor, each plastic box filled with dried leaves and, typically, a tied bundle of yellowed papers and pictures, topped by an object--a doll’s head, a cracked plate, an old metal keepsake box. The combinations seem unusually forced for Fors, but the work has an elegiac edge. Passing through the rows feels much like wandering among tombs.

In his last show here, Fors presented a spectacular, giant wall-mounted blossom built petal by petal from his toned and manipulated photographs (their size a solution, initially, to the shortage of photographic materials in his native Cuba).

Here he retains the same format, with all of its radiant ebullience, but replaces the photographs of small, ordinary things with the things themselves. “El Circulo: Los Objetos” (The Circle: The Objects) is a diary too, a record of the humble things one touches over time--the buttons, coins, toys, shells, jar lids, paper clips, keys and bottle tops.

There’s something tender about Fors’ devotion to such mundane matter, his elevation of the inconsequential. But most of the objects verge on the generic, so the assemblage as a whole carries less of the deliciously bittersweet emotional weight of its counterpart in photographs.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 933-5557, through Oct. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Collier’s Photographs

Detach From Reality

The visual richness of life is unavoidable, but passionate expression about it isn’t. Conscious detachment has blossomed--or, more accurately, metastasized--into a mainstream preoccupation.

In contemporary art, emotional minimalism is hot by virtue of its extreme coolness.

In her new color photographs at Marc Foxx Gallery, Anne Collier practices a deadpan realism that traces its roots back to Walker Evans and William Eggleston. The style has far too many contemporary cousins diluting the line, straddling the juicy and the dry, printing large, vivid color scenes of nondescript banality.

At its best, this focus on the unheralded vernacular and domestic coheres into cultural commentary--acute, savvy, ironic. But much of the time, such work feels merely, though intentionally, flat.

Collier’s images are distanced, but not always vacant of feeling or meaning. She addresses the suppression of emotion more than she simply practices it. In “Mother and Son” and “Daughter,” for instance, she photographs two other photographs, lovely, sentimental portraits typical of commercial studios.

They sit among others on display in the portrait photographer’s shop window, icons of familial bliss. Collier backs away from them enough to suggest, somewhat wistfully, that the sentiments represented within are several steps removed from her not just physically but also emotionally.

In another image, Collier herself sits in the empty stands of Dodger Stadium, an emblem of alienation within an implied crowd. The vibrancy of the grassy field and the bands of colored seats dwarfs her tiny figure, but not with any great metaphorical force. Two other pictures, of people waiting in lines for a concert and an exhibition opening, lack any visual spark and invite only superficial comparisons between the demographics of the groups involved.

Collier, a recent UCLA graduate now living in Berkeley, allies herself most provocatively with photography’s relentless clarity in an image of a set of self-help cassette tapes. Eight tapes sit neatly in their white plastic case, each one labeled with an emotion addressed within: fear, anger, despair, guilt, hope, joy and love. Here again, is the juicy stuff of life, but in dry, dispassionate form. Collier’s uninflected gaze allows these products of isolation and yearning to speak for themselves--and perhaps for her.

Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5571, through Oct. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.