The two exhibits contrast reverence for nature with the heavy hand of development.
Rushing or crawling on Southern California freeways most of the time, few will pay attention to the buildings they are passing and what role they might play in revealing the fascinating aspects of our region’s visual and social history.
Flat-roofed boxes housing offices and warehouses, mini-malls, gas stations and, historically still fairly new, high rises invite little contemplation when keeping one’s eyes on the road and perhaps also elicit grousing about the loss of rolling hills and other wonders of nature California is known for.
Now, two concurrent exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum are putting the bucolic past and architectonic present of the Southern California environment into a new spotlight: “Silence and Solitude: Conrad Buff, Painter of the American Southwest,” curated by Deborah Solon, shows landscapes and a selection of still lifes and abstract paintings by an individualistic and noteworthy but not widely known painter of the majestic Southwest.
“Eternal Construction: Photographic Perspectives on Southern California’s Built Environment,” curated by Tyler Stallings, features black and white and color photographs of vistas modernized by man such as the Luke Erickson images of the Los Angeles River transformed from natural waterway into a concrete channel or once verdant hills bulldozed to house new suburban subdivisions as photographed by Laurie Brown in a panoramic shot titled “Civitates” (Latin for cities).
Buff, a Swiss-born (1886-1975) painter who wound up living in Laguna Beach at the behest of his friend Edgar Payne, is recognized for a Modernist style that has also been classified occasionally as Impressionism and Pointillism but does not really belong into any set category. His style is strictly his own. (For example, his unique cross-hatching technique will have viewers riveted onto landscapes that define the lure of the Southwest or his native Alps, for that matter. (“Topographies Phoenix Colorado River” and “Matterhorn Amtower”).
Besides landscapes often featuring strong geometric shapes and brushwork, he has also painted murals, masterfully realistic portraits and delicate floral arrangements before veering into primary colored architectonic abstractions. Overall, his paintings speak of a reverence of nature as something to cherish and preserve, along with unique creativity and continuous artistic growth.
The museum’s chief curator between 1999 and 2006, Stallings guest-curated “Eternal Construction” at the invitation of museum director Julie Perlin Lee.
His career accomplishments are too numerous to list here, but they include curation of several acclaimed photography-based exhibitions in Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties and publication of a book of collected personal impressions of desert landscapes titled “Aridtopia: Essays on Art & Culture from the Deserts in the Southwest United States.” He also observed the fascinating process of “The Great Picture,” a photograph created by The Legacy Group (a group of six local photographers) in a hangar of the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. He included a small replica of the photograph, said to be the world’s largest, in the show.
Stallings chose works by photographers from the museum’s permanent collection including Lewis Baltz, Brouws, Laurie Brown, Erickson, Jacques Garnier, Marcia Hafif, John Humble, Barbara Kasten, Jeremy Kidd, Tom Lamb, Deborah Oropallo, Julius Shulman and Robert von Sternberg.
For the most part they document what Stallings calls “controlled human intrusion” into nature — and intrusions they are: Cranes and shipping containers along desolate Long Beach streets, angular gas stations like Jeff Brouw’s 1988 example in Ludlow, CA. Then again, Lamb’s fascinating aerial shots, here of airport runways, straddle the line between realism and abstraction. Hanging out of helicopters, he shoots his vistas and then makes only few post production alterations to render the works highly intriguing. “Marks on the Land” is indeed an apt description.
Von Sternberg’s views of trailer parks and gas station show that beauty is truly in the eye of a beholder, in short everywhere. Humble’s shots of cranes and shipping containers on Barracuda Street on Terminal Island make a similar point.
To offer a perspective of nature at its most revered, Stallings intersperses landscape photographs by Ansel Adams (“Tetons and the Snake River,” 1942) and a painting by Albert Bierstadt (“Among the Sierra Nevada, California,”1868).
Inclusion of these California icons buffets his point that runs through the combination of both exhibitions: “… artists are in dialogue across time, exemplified by the juxtaposition of the Conrad Buff retrospective and Eternal Construction which has created an evocative conversation about changing depictions and perceptions of the landscape in the Southwest and Southern California. The exhibition also highlights how photography can uniquely reveal the complexities and contradictions inherent in how we inhabit and reshape our environments,” he said.
To offer stylistic variation, he also included a carefully staged abstract photograph by Kasten and an abstract photograph by Oropallo.
Stallings also said that in the 1975, the year of Buff’s death, a photo show opened at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, titled “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” “That’s where Eternal Construction picks up. Instead of illustrating reverence, these photographers turned their camera toward suburban tracts, industrial parks and engineered rivers — Instead of eternal beauty, they showed banality, control and human intrusion.”
With this show, Stallings might also convince viewers that beauty not only transcends time and place but mere definitions of it while leaving enough room for dialogue and quests for more continuation.
Laguna opens its doors with free admission in November
Thanks to a generous grant of $50,000 to the museum by the office of Orange County Supervisor and Vice Chair of the Board of Supervisors Katrina Foley, the Laguna Art Museum will offer free general admission to its galleries and community programs to all visitors during November. The grant will make it possible to view the above exhibitions as well as the upcoming 13th annual Art & Nature program running from Nov. 6-10.
“Free admission in November is about welcoming everyone into the conversation around art, environment and community,” said Lee, the museum director.
“For Laguna Beach, artistic expression is the name of the game. Now, for the first time in the Laguna Art Museum’s more than 100-year history, all admissions will be free for the month of November because of my office’s $50,000 grant,” said Vice Chair Foley.
What: “Eternal Construction: Photographic Perspectives on Southern California’s Built Environment” and “Silence and Solitude: Conrad Buff, Painter of the American Southwest”
When: Through Jan. 18-25
Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Dr. Laguna Beach; Phone: 949-494-8971
Hours: Monday-Thursday from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Wednesdays.