Call it the latest wave or most recent crop -- either way, the influx of emerging artists in Los Angeles has become wonderfully daunting. The community of image-makers keeps increasing in numbers and energy. So do both reasons and opportunities to showcase it.
In 2001, L.A. Louver launched its "Rogue Wave" series to focus on emerging local artists. Eleven appeared in the first iteration, and 19 crammed the second, in 2005. "Rogue Wave '07" presents an even dozen, and though it is neither as random nor as formidable as its namesake (a huge, unpredictable ocean swell that sometimes travels at an angle to prevailing seas), the show abounds in freshness and vigor. Its contents are insistently visual, materially inventive and thoughtfully subversive -- rogue in the best sense, playfully mischievous.
The show starts at the street, with Joshua Callaghan's "Futility Poles" clinging to the gallery's exterior as if strewn by hurricane or flood, angles askew, wires dangling. Next to the gallery's entrance, Amir Fallah has installed a ramshackle shelter painted in camouflage pattern on the outside and radioactive orange within. A small cactus garden grows there, like an improvised seed bank assembled to withstand a cataclysm.
Disaster and its aftermath thread through this show the way they have dominated the headlines in recent years, infusing our speech with time-release buzzwords that seep pain and questions: 9/11, Iraq, Katrina. Joseph Biel's monumental watercolor, colored pencil and graphite drawing "Compound" reads as a stupendous topical metaphor for the trouble we're in. Heavily charged odds and ends referencing the military, organized religion, torture, ritual and play litter the bleak landscape. A truck unloads a cargo of skulls onto a sandy hillock; another skull fills in as a tetherball attached to a pole planted deep in a pile of bricks. There's a set of Torah scrolls half-buried in the dirt, a bomb in a baby carriage, a toppled Christmas tree. Smack in the center stands an abandoned, dilapidated house, at once artist's lair, prisoner's cell and survivalist's refuge. In the distance, off to the left, the presumed occupant shuffles away, heading far from the house as well as the cityscape on the opposite end of the horizon.
Like Biel, several others in the show marry consummate craft with an acute political and humanistic consciousness. Ben Jackel is another standout. His three stoneware sculptures are elegant and mournful. One pairs an adult elephant with its fallen young. Another looks like a warship mounted vertically on a wall but sinking into it in a strange, slow fade.
