David Pagel

David Pagel is a Los Angeles-based art critic who writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times. He is an Assistant Professor of Art Theory and History at Claremont Graduate University and is an adjunct curator at the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston. In 2002, he was a Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia and in 1990 he received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Contemporary Arts Criticism. He has organized numerous exhibitions, including Plane/Structures, 1994; Jim Isermann: Fifteen, 1998; Painting from Another Planet, 1998; The Dreams Stuff is Made of, 2001; L.A. Tap, 2003; The Raw and the Cooked, 2004; Populence, 2006; and Painting <=> Design, 2007.

Juror Statement

The impulse behind "High Five" is profoundly American: canvass the country to find out what its artists are up to right now - before they have been endorsed by high-brow institutions, established trademark practices for themselves, and become famous. At the same time, the one-of-a-kind project is perfectly happy to help advance their careers, to lay the groundwork for a future in which works by a generation's best and brightest reach larger audiences. It combines good old-fashioned field research - testing the waters in various cities as if polling the populace or gathering data - with the judgments of experts, whose opinions and experience transform the project from a random sampling of a little of this and a little of that into a knowledgeable assessment that puts a priority on merit. Both pragmatic and idealistic, "High Five" appeals to the democratic openness on which the United States was founded and to its citizens' enduring love of winners. Although American lives are beginning to have second acts more frequently than they did in F. Scott Fitzgerald's day, we still don't like coming in second, and we have no time for losing.

Known for our ingenuity, Americans are increasingly busy people. No one I know has the time to travel to five cities, visit hundreds of artists' studios, come to terms with their work, and then contemplate what it all means. But teamwork makes just such a journey virtually possible. "High Five" provides not a digital trip around the country but instead generates a big-picture view of what's out there by bringing a selective sampling of paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, and videos from the studios of perfect strangers, who know nothing of one another's works, into one place, and one catalog - and inviting viewers and readers to experience a condensed and intensified version of the national survey. It is a highlights-only endeavor unified not by theme, genre, medium, or material but by a felicitous blend of individual talent and subjective assessment.

This is a peculiarly American way of forming a group, of building a collection, and of coming to terms with the shape and texture of our times. It is a project plagued neither by the compromises of committees, by the red tape of bureaucracies, by the like-mindedness of communities, nor by the cold calculations of the bottom line. In going out of its way to make room for the idiosyncracies of subjectivity - for individual whims, hunches, inklings, intuitions, and real independence of informed opinion - "High Five" brings the most important feature of art-making into the collecting, presentation, and display of art: unfettered, free-wheeling individualism. What's here is not a grand encapsulation of everything out there or the authoritative final word on the most notable art of the moment. It is simply an optimistic proposition, an opening up of a dialogue, a forward-looking attempt to see the world through the eyes of artists and curators who have been paying close attention to recent developments, care deeply about the way the world looks, and not only have something to say about it but have dedicated their lives to doing just that.

Here's how the project took shape. Rick Frey chose five curators from five cities: Regine Basha from Austin, Texas; Ben Heywood from Minneapolis, Minnesota; Matthew Higgs from Brooklyn, New York; Kathryn Kanjo from Santa Barbara, California; and Kristin Kennedy from Portland, Oregon.

Each curator chose five artists. Basha selected Austin artists Elaine Bradford, Johanna Fauerso, Justin Goldwater, Jessica Halonen, and Dario Robleto. Heywood picked Minneapolis artists Ryan Chamberlain, Kristen Scheile, Xavier Tavera, Lex Thompson, and Eric Ullanderson. Matthew Higgs opted for Brooklyn artists Matt Keegan, Joshua Shaddock, and Greg Smith. Kathryn Kanjo selected Santa Barbara artists Eric Beltz, Jenn Figg, Christine Gray, R. Nelson Parrish, and Teja Ream. And Kristin Kennedy chose Portland artists Brad Adkins, Chandra Bocci, Alex Felton, Corey Lunn, and Adam Sorenson.

Their works were shipped to Los Angeles and installed in the halls and reception lounges of the CW network's offices. Then I selected a piece from each city to be purchased for the "High Five" collection. From Austin: Justin Goldwater's "Desert Maneuvers 3 and 4," a two-part picture of a morning-after moment on a road trip. From Minneapolis: Kristen Scheile's "Conference Room," a painting of an abandoned corner-office in a high-rise overlooking a generic, derelict downtown. From Brooklyn, Greg Smith's "The Shoe and the Umbrella," a video about the irrepressible inventiveness of against-the-odds creativity. From Santa Barbara, Teja Ream's "In Medias Res," a sculpture of three angel-white unicorns emerging from the walls. And from Portland: Adam Sorensen's "From the Ledge," a painting of a rose-tinted world with a post-apocalyptic twist.

The plan for "High Five" is to repeat this process every year, focusing on different cities and building a collection that dips into different times and places and quickly adds up to an evolving portrait of contemporary art in the United States.

To my eye, it's off to a great start. One of the first things that becomes clear is that its works are not regional. Not so long ago, works that were made in art centers looked different from works made in the provinces. Today, it no longer makes sense to think in those terms. Art centers have multiplied and the global world in which artists live is far more connected, resulting in more informed, urbane, and up-to-the-minute work being made all over the nation, not to mention the world. Over the last generation or two, American art has become more inextricably intwined with, and a more vital part of, the culture at large. It is less of a specialized endeavor focused on its own history. It is more engaged with more diverse forms of popular entertainment, such as movies, music, and television, as well as architecture, design, education, and science.

In the old days, artists made works that responded to works other artists had made, criticizing, complementing, and commenting on the claims of their predecessors. Today, the discussion has opened up. Artists criticize, complement, and comment on all sorts of issues directly, without filtering what they say through the formal features of earlier works. Politics is prevalent but more obliquely than before. It enters the picture indirectly, with unexpected twists and slants that make for more subtle, suggestive, and effective works than those that simply declare their politics point-blank, and leave viewers with an either-or choice, agree or not. The present is too complicated for black-and-white absolutes, and aesthetics and politics cannot be so easily segregated. Art's ambiguities capture this state of affairs, giving compelling form to its multilayered complexity.

One way to think about the inaugural installment of "High Five" is in terms of nouns. Not verbs (because they suggest activities that are too prescriptive, controlling). Not adjectives (because they are too closely tied to matters of taste). And certainly not adverbs (because they are too flowery, incidental, inessential). Describing the works in "High Five" as nouns accounts for their blunt, factual materiality, their simple, here-I-stand actuality, their undeniably physical impact, and, most important, their accessibility. Although it is undoubtedly impossible to understand everything about every work in the show, not a single piece requires any specialized knowledge for viewers to be on intimate terms with it. Art isn't rocket science, and all these pieces demand is that you be alert to the world, aware of your surroundings, and curious about your place in it. Having a little patience - or not needing instantaneous gratification - helps, as does an active imagination.

The works in "High Five" fall into three categories: people, places, and things. This says something significant about the present. These artists are not telling viewers what to think or providing all the answers in works that are meant to compensate, from afar, for the world's shortcomings. On the contrary, they are striving to put things into the world, that, by their presence, will have some consequences. They are not merely commentating on social problems, as if they occupied a parallel universe, from which they could see society clearly. And they are not dressing up dreamy ideals in pretty, ornamental forms. Instead, they have made things that make viewers see more, from different perspectives or points of view. Their works demonstrate that art is not a spectator sport designed for the distracted pleasures of looky-loos or for the fascination of souvenir gatherers, but a participatory event that requires active engagement and rewards sustained commitment. The meanings that emerge from their works are neither preordained nor predictable, but a matter of ongoing interaction. Puzzling and wondering are part of the process, vital signs that their works are working their magic on individual viewers who are equal parties to the results that unfold.

Six of the artists focus on people. But none makes portraits. Capturing uniquely singular identities is not the point or the purpose of their works. What matters is that viewers are drawn into the picture, that our subjectivities are lured out of hiding and into the action. Think of these works as pronouns, not proper nouns. Used interchangeable and repeatedly, pronouns function in various contexts, with various speakers, and a wide range of subjects.

Matt Keegan's "That Was Then, This Is Now" is an eccentrically framed photographic collage that replaces facial details with an "empty" silhouette. It uses a tried-and-true Surrealist trick, transforming the human face into something else to shock and give pause. Keegan casts the drama in terms of revelation: his faceless figure throws back a curtain or sheet to reveal the truth: an indeterminate expanse of flesh, an open collar, a dramatic shadow. In the background, a pillow and rumpled sheets suggest that we are in an individual's bedroom, a place where anonymity gives way to intimacy.

Xavier Tavera's "Piloto Suicida" features a costumed free-style wrestler, a shamelessly theatrical character whose identity is hidden behind a red, blue, and silver mask complete with mirror-glasses. Posed as if he is ready for action, the human cartoon calls on the human imagination to play the role of the superhero: to do what is otherwise impossible and a lot more exciting than the daily grind. Since well before Romanticism began a couple of centuries ago, that has been art's job, and Tavera brings it up to the moment.

Eric Ullanderson's "I Am My Parents' Son" is a carnivore's delight: slabs, slices, and chunks of raw and cooked beef, pork, and chicken, jammed into the silhouette of a figure vomiting a cascade of glittery blue beauty. Using ordinary marking pens, Ullanderson has drawn concentric pink, yellow, green, and blue lines around his collage of supersize meat. His digitally printed picture gives deliciously excessive form to the cliche: you are what you eat.

Johanna Fauerso's "Ground Support" is a four-panel watercolor, each section of which depicts a pair of people lifting a third. Their strenuous activities remain mysterious. They recall competitive cheerleading, but are too graceless to be such a well-rehearsed diversion. They resemble crowd behavior at concerts, but lack the rambunctious, free-for-all chaos. Medical emergencies come to mind, particularly disaster-relief efforts, but Fauerso's images lack their urgency. Her title suggests military operations, namely the grunts on the ground who do the dirty work and see the unspeakable stuff. These deceptively simple pictures leave a lot to the imagination, where they support all kinds of action, both literal and figurative.

Eric Beltz's "Now I Am Dead! What Shall I Do?" takes the form of a 19th- century naturalist's journal to ponder unfashionable ideas about the afterlife - not to mention the meaning of this one. Beltz's format, which combines exquisite draftsmanship, impossible details, thorough notes, sustained narration, and quirky marginalia, allows his work to address big, existential questions, without getting heavy-handed or inviting immediate dismissal for being pretentious or out of its league. Beltz's ad hoc composition draws on the structure of graphic novels and the ethos of Everyman accessibility to tap into the grand cycle of birth, death, and renewal that is his subject.

Greg Smith's video "The Shoe and The Umbrella" takes viewers on a fascinating journey without leaving the room. The unexpectedly expansive story unfolds in a cramped apartment, its down-to-earth hero never moving more than a step or two from his modest bed. Whiling away the day - smoking, pacing, and staring off into space - quickly gives way to obsessive restlessness - pouring bowls full of sugar onto bowls of sugar-coated cereal. That quickly mutates into irrepressible creativity: crafting the mundane stuff around him into props and characters and abstract compositions that look good on camera as they get quickly reconfigured into open-ended snippets and scenarios that are as delightful as they are strange, as suffused with oddity as they are matter-of-fact.

Eight of the artists make works that depict places or otherwise convey ideas about certain locations. Their subject, generally speaking, is the landscape, but few give form to the specificities of a particular, identifiable place. On the whole, they create imaginary, psychologically charged worlds grounded in the real one. Their often consummately crafted works provide sufficient realistic details to make their fancifully fabricated places believable, without being tied to the strictures of Realism or the duties of straightforward documentation.

On first glance, Brad Adkins's ready-made sculpture appears to be a thing - not a place. But the title of his newly cut, gold and silver keys, "Keys to My Parents' House," takes them out of the world of mere objects and deposits them in the world of places, his parents' home. It's not important that we do not know the details of Adkins' upbringing, whether his folks still live in his childhood home or if these are the keys to their new digs. What matters is the bittersweet poignancy of our own ideas of home, which are inevitably shaped by memories of childhood vulnerability that lie just beneath the well-heeled appearances of adulthood, neighborly behavior, and polite privacy. Scratch the surface of domestic life almost anywhere and charged emotions come rushing out.

Lex Thompson's untitled photographs use the trappings of Realism - clarity, legibility, coherence - to tell melancholic stories about being out of place, out of step, out of service, out of luck - without, in any sense, appealing to the sappy sentimentality of abjection. His image of recreational boats parked for the winter and covered with a fresh layer of snow finds beauty in in-between moments, when normal functions are shut down and silence and stillness come to the foreground. His picture of a early suburban multiplex slated for destruction triggers nostalgia for a past that was not all that beautiful, but, nonetheless, had its own charms - which now seem quaint, endearing, almost heart-warming.

Chandra Bocci's "Gummy Big Bang II" is a low-tech, homemade, DIY version of the big budget, Hollywood studio special effects so common to summer movies, in which spectacular explosions get bigger and bigger and audience members consume mass-produced candies, like Gummy Bears, by the fistful. Bocci's labor-intensive installation simultaneously transforms the make-believe destruction and violent mayhem of movies into an even more explosive instant of creation: the origin of the universe. Her sweet, sugar-fueled fantasy, in bright yellow, blazing orange, and fiery red, brings the Romantic idea of an artist's god- like powers down to earth - and up to the minute - where the obsessive yet mundane work of model-building illustrates a scientific theory that does not appeal to godly omnipotence. The Big Bang is the place where everything started, and Bocci claims that sublime space for her accessible art.

Christine Gray's "Dolmen Model" is a two-dimensional image of a three- dimensional model of an ancient stone marker. Her lushly painted canvas is a still life masquerading as a landscape. It takes viewers to distant lands in the distant past by way of school-kid crafts - using construction paper, scissors, and glue to make an honest illusion of an ancient tomb or monument. Gray has lighted her tabletop diorama dramatically, so that it casts strong shadows. She has painted her canvas richly, using the simple composition as the basis for paint's sensual pleasures. Despite the best efforts of contemporary archaeologists, the original purposes of such megaliths are not fully known. That sense of mystery - of intrigue and possibility and imaginative transport - is Gray's goal.

Road trips and the rites of passage that accompany them take playful shape in Justin Goldwater's diptych, "Desert Maneuvers 3 and 4." His cartoon-inspired watercolor begins with the morning after, in the aftermath of a wood-paneled station wagon's crash into a bunch of multi-colored cacti. A couple of dozen sleeping bags cascade from its rear door onto the sandy desert floor. The arms and legs of various sleepers stick out every which way, and a few pairs of eyes, one blood-shot red, peek out from their dark refuges. Overhead, the sun struggles to emerge from behind dark clouds, suggesting nature's inescapable cycles and the redemptive beginning of a new day's adventures, despite what went wrong last night.

Kristen Scheile's "Conference Room" is not so optimistic about starting over. The four-foot-square canvas combines several types of representation to paint a vivid portrait of urban decline. The crisp graphic Realism of architectural draftsmanship forms the underlying structure of Scheile's panoramic painting that is equal parts interior and exterior. Its well-ordered rationality has been graffitied over with spray-painted tags; its once sharp lines and pristine surfaces dirtied by the wear-and-tear of accelerated obsolescence. And the loose gestures of Expressionist painting effectively convey the hazy distances of the surrounding cityscape, its queasy colors and lurid tints embodying the unnaturalism of city centers whose prime has passed but whose utility is still there. Scheile paints the hybrid space of cultural cycles, driven not by the rhythms of nature but by the ups and downs of the market.

Artifice and nature complement one another in Adam Sorenson's oil on panel "From the Ledge." Sumptuous, supersaturated colors and dreamy, atmospheric expansiveness describe a world that's too good to be true yet too palpable to be imaginary. The objects Sorenson depicts are familiar: trees, mountains, cacti, clouds. But the space they occupy is strange: fractured, overlapped, inconsistent - like that of cut-and-paste collages or flat, theatrical backdrops for old-fashioned stage shows. The combination is intoxicating: a condensed, compressed reality at once unnervingly beautiful and beautifully post- apocalyptic.

Ryan Chamberlain's three little paintings are no bigger than sheets of notebook paper. But they pack so many visual shifts and dizzying collisions into their compact dimensions that they give viewers plenty of room to get lost in. "Weightless Machinery in Navigating a Garden," "Anti, Circa, Versus, Vis-a-Vis," and "Law of the Wall, Law of the Wake" show Chamberlain to be a nooks-and- crannies artist: a lover of the odd stuff that falls between the cracks, which he then turns into a world unto itself or, better yet, into worlds within worlds. He does so by transforming the unidentifiable detritus of graphic design into animated abstractions whose vivid Pop palettes recall cartoons and whose turbulent, gyroscoping energy evokes early 20th-century abstraction.

Nine artists make works best described as things. Nouns in their purest or simplest form, these pieces insist on their object-ness. They often embrace the muteness of physical materiality, partaking in the silence of stuff that simply exists - without words, explanations, or justifications. Despite their intractability, these works are neither dumb nor standoffish. On the contrary, their reticence invites viewers to scramble, often frantically, to essay what they might mean. Their power resides in their elusiveness, in the sense that no matter what you come up with or how much you know about them, there is always more, waiting for future discovery.

Corey Lunn's "Three Imps" have the presence of malformed toys. Think of "Transformers" that have malfunctioned, their robotic angles and clean adaptability melting into quasi-figurative blobs of animate protoplasm that cannot be controlled or contained. Each of Lunn's trio of tabletop figurines is adorned with its own primitive patterns, rudimentary ornamentation, and crudely painted finish, suggesting folk talismans from long lost peoples or the playthings of youthful aliens. Both organic and abstract, folk and futuristic, they suggest rituals whose significance is a mystery - and all the more potent for it.

"Little Miss Muffet's Giltscape" by Jenn Figg is a heavy-duty pop-up book of a sculpture. Longer and wider than it is high, the ornate form requires a viewer to crouch - or get down on all fours - if you are to see into the many crevice- shaped sections that make up the ribbed, architecturally reinforced form. Peering into each section recalls the experience of reading a book whose binding you don't want to break, because it's too valuable. And Figg has glued little candies to each oversize "page," calling to mind the Braille alphabet and further frustrating a quick read.

R. Nelson Parrish's 8-foot-tall untitled sculpture leans against the wall like a ladder, its sleek, fiberglass- and resin-coated surface recalling surfboards and John McCracken's planks from the 1960s. Candy-colored bands, both translucent and opaque, cut horizontally across the vertical work, setting up jaunty visual rhythms that cause the eye to rebound, rather swiftly, back and forth, as you scan the stripes from top to bottom and back again. Parrish has left about half of the mass- produced particle-board's surface visible, suggesting that the cheap material - the lumber-yard equivalent of baloney - has its own scrappy beauty, and that recycled stuff can be as elegant as anything else.

Alex Felton's looped video projection, "Almost a lot of Things," makes a virtue of anticipation. Grainy black-and-white shapes flicker by swiftly, some more blurred than others but all suggesting that you're looking at leader and that the real film is about to begin. It doesn't. The flickering, shifting shapes are it. And as soon as you wrap your mind around that fact, you start seeing things in Felton's abstract video: landscapes, city views, silhouettes, brick walls, vehicles speeding by, diagrams - the list is endless. Inhabiting the threshold of recognizability, "Almost a lot of Things" triggers the irrepressible human desire to see things where there aren't any. It invites - and then frustrates - our tendency to gloss over our incomprehension. Its pleasure resides in not letting us getting away with our usual tricks.

Joshua Shaddock's "No Joke" is exactly that: a neatly printed, matted, and framed joke that is not a joke. The sheet of yellow paper on which the joke is written appears to have fallen off its backing and slid behind the matting. The joke - about a duck, a convenience store clerk, and grapes - is cut short, frustrating viewers who like stories to reach conclusions, where resolution and clear meaning await. Shaddock's tongue-in-cheek piece says "not so fast." It is actually a digital print that resembles a page torn from a legal pad. And its unstuck tape is fake, an illusion in the service of some higher truth. A work of art, not a joke, "No Joke" makes ambiguous - and ambivalent - meaning out of narrative breakdown, leading viewers down storylines not yet written.

To see Jessica Halonen's "Still" is to imagine that you have stumbled upon the aftermath of a minor emergency - or at least something out of the ordinary. What appear to be sheets of paper are strewn everywhere, across the floor, on chairs, sofas, and tables. It is as if a tiny tornado blasted through someone's briefcase, left chaos in its wake, and forced her to flee before gathering her papers. But closer scrutiny reveals that Halonen's multi-colored sheets are actually thin slices of laminated wood - birch, cherry, maple, and red oak veneer - on which she has drawn meticulously ruled lines and hand-painted images of single flowers. The folded and curled "pages" are small sculptures and you are standing in a carefully composed work of art. That is unusual, perhaps extraordinary, and it heightens perceptions - just like an emergency, but without its dire consequences.

The paper in Dario Robleto's "Movies of Telegrams" is also peculiar, homemade, and part of an ongoing drama. Robleto collected letters various soldiers from various wars wrote to their loved ones at home. He made pulp from the pages and envelopes, extracted the ink, and used both in his state-fair-style memorial - adding silk, lace, ribbons, sewing needles, and old advertisements, as well as hair braided into the shape of a flower by a Civil War widow. His black and orange emblem is neither maudlin nor morbid, but curiously upbeat and touching in its evocation of lost lives and faded memories. The individuals whose pasts are subsumed in "Movies of Telegrams" may be anonymous, but the spirit in which Robleto invokes them is down-home, sincere, and corny - and all the more poignant for it.

Taxidermied trophies are another sort of memento. They pay indirect homage to the animals they are made of, and more emphatically celebrate the machismo of the hunters who killed them. Elaine Bradford's "Elongated" puts a wickedly funny spin on this genre of folk sculpture, adding a 17-foot-long section to the spot where the deer's severed head meets the polished wood plaque. Bradford's crocheted collar, in bold stripes and camouflage pattern, comes with buttons and face-mask, leaving only the deer's eyes and antlers exposed to the elements. Spilling off the wall and onto the floor, where it spirals around like a snake, the yarn addition turns one man's monument to his hunting prowess into something else altogether: a re-animated animal that lives on in a haunting and humorous mockery of man's grandiosity.

Teja Ream's "In Medias Res" departs from reality to register even stranger circumstances. Aside from children, no one believes in unicorns. But Ream's trio of snowy white creatures gives pause, causing even the most skeptical of viewers to wonder, "What if?" Wall-mounted animal heads immediately evoke hunting trophies. But these three fantastic animals are different: They seem to be emerging from the walls, their sleek, porcelain bodies continuous with its lily-white expanse. Plus, one is half-way out, its front legs touching down on the cloud silhouette that covers the floor in the room's corner. The fantasy is infectious: You don't even need to believe it to be struck by the magic of artifice and the wonder of art.