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13/10/2006

They Do Not Always Remember

Bamboo Lane Gallery, Los Angeles

Art by Long Nguyen, Cindy Suriyani & Luis Becerra

This powerful exhibition at the Bamboo Lane Gallery this fall, full of tender violence, is both deeply personal and grounded in the shared cogent concerns of war, heartbreak, and the potent bittersweet of contemporary existence. As critic Michael Duncan wrote, "the tragic consequences of September 11, 2001, have only confirmed the importance of reconnecting art practices with the concerns of both the personal and collective heart and mind." At a time when most examples of contemporary art are drained of their acquired or inherent cultural emotional associations, this exhibit is steeped in collective and individual memory, at times of outrage, sometimes unremitting sorrow, and always glimpses of renewal and revelation.

Viewing Long Nguyen's glowing, golden large-scale oil paintings and small sculpture, is according to San Jose Museum of Art's JoAnne Northrup, like participating in an archaeological dig. As in the process of excavation, layers are revealed over time. His childhood recollections of the Vietnam war are central to his work and provide a key to understanding its significance. Nguyen remembers, "standing on a rooftop and seeing tiny bombs dropping. And I would count one or two seconds and then feel the heat from the bombs hit my body." Nguyen summons the past in both a conscious and an unconscious level, incorporating themes of landscape and the human form, travel and transition, organs and fragments of the body, and aspects of nature, most significantly water, fire, and cyclones. Strangely beautiful, gritty, and tough, his paintings bathe an aureate glow, like indelible reminders frozen in amber.

Cindy Suriyani's work act as Rorschach tests for the viewer, conjuring up abstracted ghosts and perceptions from memory's deep recesses. In this series of photographs and multimedia paintings, there is a delicate paradox between beauty and discontent, joy and self-destruction. In the photo-essay "when may I if only for a moment," bees have set up a hive within a building through its destroyed roof. After the workers repaired and sealed the roof, the entire hive in a frenzied suicidal act collides into a closed window, brightly lit with the outside world. These images are interwoven with scenes of children playing in the dark, archetypically clad as cowboys and dancers. We sense the tenuousness of a civilization, a tribe, an individual, and the limitation of placing a hierarchy on different types of life.

Luis Becerra's long standing oeuvre of politically charged, dynamic paintings and sculptures, are in this new work reconfigured using elements of the everyday discarded and retrieved -- clocks, barbed wire, marble stone, patinaed like architectural ruin, crude and bearing substantial weight. His sculptures are trapped within thick walls of broken pine, like the victims of war that the work alludes to, within prisons and coffins of human carelessness and conscience. Becerra's work at once manages to conjure connections to historical artifact, such as the Easter Island Heads, Mayan statuary, and ancient sacred burial objects, while at the same time brutally but lovingly reminding us of the terrible consequences of mass commodity and human cruelty. In a disposable society he has saved the detritus and made it once again precious.

Reception: Saturday, October 14, 7-10pm

Bamboo Lane Gallery
418 Bamboo Lane, Chinatown - Los Angeles
Hours: 12 - 6, Wed. - Sat.

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