L.A. hosts art fairs 'trifecta'

Art Business News, April, 2005 by Laura Meyers

LOS ANGELES -- L.A. is increasingly home to a varietal mix of narrow-profile, specialty art fairs as evidenced during one 10-day stretch in January when photo 1.a., the Los Angeles Print Fair and the new art LA were all being held.

The 14th annual photo 1.a., held January 20-23 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, attracted 86 exhibiting galleries and photography dealers, book and magazine publishers, and nonprofit photography organizations, while the 20th edition of the Los Angeles Print Fair, held January 21-23 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, presented a smaller band of 22 members of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA). The freshly minted artLA, an art fair for contemporary and new art, featured 59 exhibitors--many of them brand-new galleries--on the following weekend.

Taken together, the three expositions were a true bazaar of thousands upon thousands of artworks ranging from Old Master etchings and the earliest pioneering photographs of the mid-19th century, to experimental computer-generated digital art, computer-altered, lens-based images, and conceptual installations. And, of course, there were paintings, collages, lithographs and contemporary photographs. Prices ranged from as little as $50 for vernacular snapshots, to double and even triple digits for rare photographs or large-scale contemporary paintings, with most of the art on paper and contemporary artworks priced at $600 to $25,000.

All three fairs steered clear of the massive operations needed to fill venues like New York's Jacob K. Javits Center or the Los Angeles Convention Center, and instead worked to attract smaller, but devoted consumer and professional audiences, with a greater impact for the participating art dealers. More than 7,000 visitors trekked through photo 1.a., including many local art and photography dealers such as Robert Berman, William Turner and Craig Krull, who each own eponymous galleries in Santa Monica's Bergamot Station. The inaugural artLA boasted attendance of 4,500, according to show organizer Stephen Cohen. He said, "I'm very happy. The dealers are very happy. For a new show, if I had had 3,000 people I would have been very happy!"

Cohen, who also presents photo 1.a., photo new york and photo san francisco, is edging his art fairs more toward contemporary works, in part because, he observed, "there's definitely less vintage photography work available as more and more people have been collecting it. And, I have wanted more of a mix of work. I like vernacular and anonymous work, and work that's really out there."

Cohen took a page from the "out there" book himself, and devoted an entire wall to, well, a photographic "wall" installation, "The Family Tree," by San Francisco artist Michael Garlington. Garlington shoots portraits of ordinary Americans leading seemingly ordinary lives, yet with something awry--from a contortionist to a fastfood worker, from the disabled to a young patriot.

In keeping with his mission of presenting fresh material, Cohen invited many new dealers to his art fairs.

The three Los Angeles art fairs have something else in common this year: evidence of an emerging aesthetic trend. "There is a whole group of artists working on what is best described as repetitive pattern and obsessive mark-making," noted art dealer and publisher Bud Shark, owner of Shark's Ink in Lyons, CO. For example, Shark has published (and exhibited at the Los Angeles Print Fair) two print editions by painter Barbara Takenaga, whose abstract works are full of repeated, obsessive marks.

Takenaga's works were not the only precise, pattern-oriented images on display at the fairs. New York artist Suzi Matthews--represented at artLA by two dealers, Morgan Lehman and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, also of New York--creates intricately patterned collages she calls "Numeralisms" with pasted cutouts of numbers. And Bay Area artist Byron Spicer, whose work was shown at Woodland Hills, CAbased Sculptural Philosophy's artLA booth, calls his stacked and patterned collages "mosaics" because they end up having a sculptural quality. The artist paints 50 to 60 images simultaneously, working quickly on small pieces of paper. He then assembles them in layers onto a panel, arranging the now-stacked images into a three-dimensional grid.

At photo 1.a., Santa Monica-based Rose Gallery showcased images by artist Robbert Flick, who layers small images together in a pattern that becomes one oversized artwork, recording one photo on top of another, their junctions in the final photograph becoming both a chronicle of activity, as well as a celebration of what Flick calls the "simultaneity of events, the synchronicity" of life in the city.

Pan American Art Gallery of Dallas exhibited patterned work by both the Cuban photographer Elsa Mora, whose "Circulo Vicioso (Vicious Circle)" is a photograph constructed of roses and beetles in a spiral, and quirky Texas artist Rusty Scruby, a former aeronautical engineer, who literally weaves photographs according to a precise scientific formula. Scruby, explained gallery director Jada Wetherington, "starts with a single snapshot that he prints thousands of times. Then he constructs precise, interlocking facets, creating helixes that are not necessarily on the same plane. The patterns become a visual translation of musical rhythm."