Art Lies, Volume 60, Winter 2008 Page: 112

                                
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L. Xana Kudrjavcev-DeMilner, Standing, 2005; collage; 8 x 63/5 inches
R. Michael Dee, negative star (black), 2008; Lightjet on Fujiflex; 16 x 24 inches;
photos courtesy See Line Gallery, Santa Monica

SANTA MONICA
Surface Sounding
See Line Gallery

To create See Line's Surface Sounding exhibition, gallery director Janet
Levy invited ten curators, artists and writers from Southern California to
chose one artist each whose work addresses the concept of surface--a
convenient theme broad enough to encompass any number of aesthetic
propositions. With ten artists present and ten curators looming in the
wings, it would seem impossible for See Line, a relatively small gallery,
to accommodate so much work and so many personalities without the
exhibition becoming an incomprehensible mishmash. Thankfully, what
could be a "too many cooks in the kitchen" scenario is in fact more like a
jubilant potluck dinner party, with each curator bringing an artist as both
date and dish.
For her selection, curator and arts writer Emma Gray includes John
Bucklin's Remote Control Covered Wagon, a rickety, cobbled-together pio-
neer wagon with lopsided handcrafted wheels, indented with marks from
the artist's fingers. For most of the show, the pathetic-looking contrap-
tion, complete with antenna and remote control, is encased in a Plexiglas
vitrine on a humble plywood pedestal. During the opening, the artist took
it out for a spin, making it limp feebly along like an injured insect at a
hobbled pace. In presenting this shoddy pioneer wagon, injected with the
entertaining trappings of control, Bucklin actively proposes a witty and
critical take on the legacy of Manifest Destiny and how such an ideology
of conquest is suffused into common children's toys, the didactic playtime
tools that teach us about American history.
Injecting a welcome breath of serious ocular pleasure into the show,

art critic, curator and author Shana Nys Dambrot presents viewers with
three of Michael Dee's Negative Star photographs, puzzling images of
gelatinous black, purple and pink globules congealing together in richly
hued constellations. The work looks almost Photoshopped, like digital
pictures of glass dildos adorned with a neon glow filter. Yet to make these
works, Dee bypassed the computer and instead went old-school, tweaking
the Rayograph process, making images by capturing directly on a negative
the light that passes through his signature phallic sculptures made of iri-
descently hued, melted whiskey tumblers. Like the objects they are made
from, these sculptures and their indexical photographs hold an intoxicat-
ing potentiality; they are unabashedly drunk on their own beauty.
Curated by Los Angeles artist Alexandra Grant, Xana Kudrjavcev-
DeMilner's work may not be wholly radical or new, but there is something
aggressively ambiguous and a little annoying in her collages. The first
time I saw Kudrjavcev-DeMilner's collages of nature photographs mixed
with silhouettes of stately interiors and pictures of fabric from old fashion
magazines, I admit I was overly skeptical of their message and their critical
import. I thought, Do we really need more pretty pictures made from the
visual detritus of a consumer-obsessed society? What is important in this
work? There are so many other artists out there doing this kind of thing
(and with greater effect) that these works, at first, seem redundant.
Yet, weeks later, these simple collages were able to worm their way
into my memory, like an itch I couldn't scratch. In Standing, a stumpy sur-
realist figure swathed in fuchsia and bubblegum-pink tweed promenades

112 ART LIES NO. 60