Grant Mudford at Rosamund Felsen

Since he moved to Los Angeles from Australia in the late 1970s, Grant Mudford has composed photographs that crisply examine the streamlined geometries of West Coast architecture and landscape. Mudford has zeroed in on the abstract formal relationships lurking within the designs of gas stations, strip malls and apartment buildings. The geometrical arrangements highlighted in his photographs of the masterful modernist structures of Rudolf Schindler and Craig Ellwood have disclosed a link between their midcentury architecture and the contemporaneous hard-edge abstractions of L.A. painters John McLaughlin and Lorser Feitelson.

In his shimmering new largescale color photographs of Frank Gehry's soon-to-be-completed Disney Concert Hall in downtown L.A., Mudford distills the building's baroque essence, presenting its burgeoning, in-progress architecture--torqued grids, angled I-beams, curvaceous cladding--as a dense, intricate hive. Devoid of humans, the photographs display the building's guts as a complex organic system that portends its imminent service as a busy gathering piece. The intricate, multiangled vectors of ductwork, scaffolding, lattices, building cranes and raw beams conjure a kind of teeming energy field with light at its core.

Two shots from within the future auditorium seem to tunnel through scores of crisscrossing scaffolds toward the stage as light filters down through swooping ceiling tarps. In another photograph, scaffolding that flanks a staircase sets off gridded skyscrapers surrounding the construction site. Five bright yellow cylindrical garbage canisters in the foreground contrast with the skyline's rectangular solids to create a composition that suggests an abstract still life.

Another pair of images features the linear play of beams that support one of the building's soaring planes. Suggesting shipbuilding, the site's arklike cavities become fantastic constructivist studies in torsion. Unlike Andreas Gursky, Mudford is never disengaged or at arm's length from his architectural subject. With light, color and sharp focus, he draws viewers into this elaborate structure to imply the potential social energy humming within Gehry's stainless-steel facade.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group