LA WEEKLY
August 30-September 5, 2002

"Review: 2002 California Biennial"
by Peter Frank

Even when they try to be, biennial surveys are notoriously un-cohesive. This one, however--perhaps by dint of its geographical focus, perhaps because it is relatively small, but most likely because its curators just picked up on something--has a powerful thread running through it.

All the art here looks at contemporary life with a dark, incisive wit that, however ominous or poignant, dispels rather than imposes bleakness. It's the next step after postmodern cynicism: neo-modern hope. Even Charlie White's by-now-notorious gruesome photo-allegories and Kristin Calabrese's paintings of ruined interiors celebrate something enduring in the human spirit, while the arch social commentaries of Yoram Wolberger (who punctures middle-class values by enlarging stereotypical toy figures to life size) and Yoshua Okon (who prompts his photographed subjects to behave in manners aberrant to their backgrounds) propose a kind of sitcom surrealism that is, if anything, the antidote to TVšs "reality programming." It's all programming, these artists are saying, and there ainšt no reality.

Tom LaDuke's seemingly innocent topographies, painted and sculpted, are inflected with touches of magic and mundane realism, while Rebeca Bollinger compiles her studies of urban landscape with a stylized, hiply rhythmic digital installation. The outside world gets churned even further into, or toward, pure form by Chris Finley in his large, seemingly inside-out images (video turned into painting) and by Evan Holloway in his unlikely, work-intensive sculptural embodiments of music (and sonic embodiments of objecthood). Joe Solašs video proto-documentaries and his compilations of cinematic tropes, visual (explosions) and verbal ("go go go!" for instance, mouthed by a multitude of actors in action films) play Costello to the pristine but subversive Abbott of Kelly Nipperšs formal (but loaded) photos. And above it all soars a giddy balloon-thing by Roman de Salvo, at once a celebration and an almost scatological up-yours gesture.

The most fascinating talent in this engrossing statewide (if SoCal-biased) roundup, though, is Stephanie Syjuco, who dicks around with issues of function, taxonomy and architectural design and comes up with curiously old-fashioned compendia of device parts, clustered like diatoms, as well as faux household entertainment machines (the one here, paneled as usual, looking like a small phonograph tuning into a building).

At the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 N. Sycamore Ave., Newport Beach; (949) 759-1122; thru Sept.