Sometimes when I feel unsure of what to do next, I go and sit on my porch and look at the house of one particular neighbor across the street. I don’t know who he is, but sometimes I see him roll up in his maroon Honda Accord at the end of a long workday, when the sun is approaching the tip of the horizon. He is an elderly Hispanic man; he is usually wearing a dark-blue colored uniform with a white nametag, red letters spelling out his name in cursive. I don’t know his name. I imagine he must be an electrician, or a plumber, or something union and practical, something that gives him a chance to work with his hands. There’s something comforting about his appearance, the fact that he has a routine of some sort, and that when I don’t know what to do, I can sit on the porch and innocently watch his house and hope to see him. I’ve also seen his dog, a small white bichon frise. I’m not sure we’ll ever meet.
When I do this sort of watching, gazing and imagining the feeling of longing to not-know a complete stranger, I feel like Miranda July. In these moments, I never experience any impulse to record, collect, or compose anything; if it’s a feedback loop of the same daily routine, it’s only one that happens in my head, unlike the physical art objects that exhibition such impulses to understand memory and time. Such objects are on view in Record. Collect. Compose.: A series of human decisions, an exhibition organized by LA artist Masood Kamandy, which runs through October 17 at Charlie James Gallery, that asks questions about the acts of making works of art using machines and other technical processes. Using photography as a starting point, Kamandy considers the inherent humanness of the machine and our desire to see and record rather than keeping it on our minds.
The exhibition occupies the basement level of this Chinatown gallery, with objects and images hung on the wall, sparsely decorated like one might imagine an older brother’s basement to be. Though the show is not entirely photography, there is a picture-imaging-like quality to every piece in the show — that is, you want to see it in a frame, framed, as if the camera came up with it. Veronique d’Entremont’s weathered door frame draped over slabs of wood, entitled Phantom Limbs: La Mirada (2014), hangs in the middle of the gallery, creating an obstacle that all must be aware of but not necessarily avoid. In her practice, Entremont locates debris from neighborhoods around Los Angeles, bringing a distinct sense of dislocation to each of the works, which is reminiscent of Abigail DeVille’s site-specific detritus installations.
In a similarly environment-specific approach to the world, Aaron Giesel’s photographs of the desert environment bring the external world inside. In his series Algonquin Moons (Flower Moon), 2015, the desert takes on a mystical quality, appearing as fantasy, a stark contrast with the debris promised by d’Entremont. Aspen Mays considers the tools that were used to make photographs in now-obsolete dark rooms, casting them as if they are silhouettes from a lower-tech, mostly forgotten time and place before Kodak went belly up. Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s pigment prints, such as Kitchen, Brooklyn, March 3, 2013-2015, mess with the passage of time. From the title of the work itself, one would think that neither of these cups or the magazine have moved much over the past two years, letting them sit to rot, or gather dust in a single location; Sepuya’s print acts like documentation of a memory, or a Dutch still life painting composed of fruit and other niblets. What role does time play in a photograph like this, and how relevant is time’s passage to such still objects? Similarly, Emily Sudd’s sculptures of what appears to be leftover studio materials lead one not even worry about the role that the human hand may or may not play in the making of this object.
The most mysterious recording of time happens in Rimas Simaitis’ sculpture and accompanying pattern visualizations. He built a four-wheeled rover-like, yet not rideable, vehicle with an Octoloop antenna that contains a 500-foot length of copper wire, which receives radio signals anywhere from 10 to 100 kilometres in length. The patterns on the neighboring wall become a data visualization of these waves, further challenging what it means to record time and space.
The least overwhelming, most familiar, and decidedly boring image comes from artist Marten Elder; PR 34 (2015) is a pigment print on fiber-based paper. Its image is extra LA ordinary, yet comforting in its predictability: A giant cactus casts shadows and occupies a front yard, somewhere in this vast sprawl of this place that we call home. For Elder, part of the allure of photographing is learning to understand how the camera sees, which is in effect a very John Berger-like idea (he is the author of Ways of Seeing), as illustrated by a quote like this: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”
That’s a charming quote, as is the premise of this exhibition — to understand the humanness of all these technologies that help the artists produce artwork. The works in this exhibition offer a much-appreciated curiosity and a broad use of media to do so, but it could use some fine-tuning. The premise is so loose that the show could include practically any artworks that in some way, either directly or tangentially, deals with time, memory, and the technology we use to record. That’s okay, but it leaves the viewer wanting a bit more direction, rather than just a sense of temporary pleasure gained from meandering toward and around each of the works in this show.
