KRISTI ENGLE GALLERY

L. A. Weekly
December 4-10, 2009

Signs of Intelligent Life

A slightly darker take on pop seriality and gender can be found in Michael Arata's latest group of paintings, collectively titled "Remember" on view at Kristi Engle Gallery in Highland Park. Arata, whose work often hinges on outrageous humor or (as with his wall-creeping modular contribution to the "Some Paintings" L.A. Weekly Biennial) playful interactivity, has shifted into a more solemn - though hardly less edgy- mode, appropriating the images of 54 anonymous women whose photos were found in the apartment of LA-based serial killer, William Bradford in 1984. Bradford had lured several other women to desert campsites with the promise of producing fashion photography portfolios, then raped, strangled and mutilated them. The 54, all photographed by Bradford, were understandably seen as further possible victims. In 2006, the LAPD finally released the photos on the internet, leading to some identifications - and attracting the attention of Arata.

Arranged on one wall in a lozenge-shaped cluster, the 54 small acrylic-on-panel paintings give an almost innocuous first impression, even if you are aware of the source material. With their features blanked out, leaving only their distinctive period hairstyles - ranging from Farrah Fawcett to Mary Lou Retton - "Remember" possesses some of the handmade taxonomic charm of West African barbershop signs, a large part of which derives from the reclamation of mass-produced visual language into the realm of the conspicuously handcrafted.

In Arata's case, this erasure of quotation marks takes a further, less congenial complexities as the already problematic scenario of the pictorial framing of a female countenance for possible consumer distribution (talkin' about the Gaze) collides with the actual circumstances of the creation and ultimate distribution of the source photographs, and the unsettling literalness of the subjects' "removal"

The removal of (non)identifying facial features from the source photos further translates conceptual motif of framing into a literal one, as the fussily rendered coiffures become ornate filigreed borders for negative spaces. You almost expect to see a little card in the middle of each, reading "Removed for Preservation" Which is, in a sense, what Arata's work does, channeling a new embodiment for the complex and heartbreaking contradictions of these erased identities, disincorporated victims of systems of visual representation gone very wrong, passing them through his own eye and hand, daubing at their absence with tinted unguents on discarded scraps of wood to condense into a cloud of haunting evaporated humanity.

-Doug Harvey

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