ED TEMPLETON @ Roberts & Tilton

Ed Templeton's newest exhibition of photographs reads like a roadmap for the dispossessed, the disenfranchised and the dissolute. He includes himself in the lineup of wayward souls, yet with each image there is no judgment or sense of skewed subjectivity. Everything appears as it should be, in perfect order, wherein the sometimes disjunctive hiccups and densely laid reverberations of the universe are held momentarily within the camera's eye.

Templeton's greatest strength as an artist is his honesty and the willingness to describe and investigate difficult visual terrain. In this newest series of photographs, aptly titled "The Seconds Pass," Templeton manages to illuminate both the tragedy and comedy inherent in the experience of modern life. Works like Smoking Van, show a vehicle in various stages of demolition, each subsequent image not only revealing a narrative, but more importantly, setting an emotional tone as we see in one image a man walking out from a burgeoning cloud of smoke like an ancient warrior from a distant time. The final image in this particular lineup is of an old woman standing alone, and gazing presumably out into the distance at the burning van, or possibly the woman is contemplating her own mortality. Her face is drawn and conscious of something beyond herself.

Other images like Pink Car and Boobs, are more obvious and comical, yet even within that comedic impulse is a sinister force evidenced by the woman in the photograph at the far left of the frame, whose face betrays some kind of personal distress, loss or pure insanity.

Templeton places no judgment, but offers up the image as a reminder of our collective grief — that we are all connected, as each of these images, blends effortlessly, and sometimes not so effortlessly into one another, creating a tapestry of human longing, loss, and divinity.

Travis Somerville at Charlie James Gallery

"A Portion Of That Field…" could be one of two things: a painful reminder that an Obama presidency represents but a small step in the Sisyphean integration of race or else a glorious prism through which to view art's cannibalistic and self-reflexive tendency to devour and reconfigure popular culture. Though the show's walkaway impression is one of postponed "I have a dream" hope, it's obvious that the humorous sophistication of Somerville's compositions and the historical breadth and depth of his scope that the latter's the case.

The exhibition's tone is faux-strident and mock-scathing. One piece resembles a vintage ad for a vaudeville show. "Sing Out America," features the head of an Al Jolson "Mammy"-singing figure replaced by a Klansman. Another satirizes the dream of a promised land. The New Colossus shows a large truncated acrylic painting of the Statue of Liberty (Beckoning? No, scared shitless) behind which stands a turnstile, as if African slaves were brought to America in an orderly manner. Other pieces suggest the business as usual activity once the show has closed. In Double Not, for instance, an impossibly long coil of rope with nooses at the end suggests that, if you give someone enough rope, they'll eventually hang themselves.

Somerville's wry humor collates the components of racism and bigotry into an extravagant installation that suggests that it's not the audience who laughs at the performances, it's the performers (and us) who laugh at the audience (ourselves).

NATHAN REDWOOD @ Michael Kohn Gallery
"Altered Atmospheres," Nathan Redwood's debut show at the Michael Kohn Gallery explores an "altered" terrain that feels vaguely reminiscent of the fantastical worlds of Jules Verne. These color-saturated paintings propose a world of concupiscent shapes undulating amidst the clamor and clutter of modern life  — a shovel, a microphone, a chair, a flower pot. Yet while that moment may be intoxicating and compelling, it's hard to shake the wow-that's-so-cool-dude-aesthetic (replete with electric guitars, wooden milk crates and microphone stands) like so many young LA-based artists such as Kiel Johnson and Edgar Arceneaux.

His painting, The Yard reads like The Wizard of Oz on Meth where a skewered cartoon deck with lawn furniture rise toward a psychedelic sky that resembles an amalgam of hanging tangled viscera. Redwood is at his most compelling when he commits wholeheartedly to his own alternate universe (dispensing with garage band paraphernalia) and focuses instead on landscape which is alternately fractious and distorted. Works like the wonderfully enigmatic Feelers propose a world at odds with itself where the landscape is constantly in motion, reaching, springing and growing out of itself with the simplest of forms. Yet it is the tension between these elements that creates the power inherent in the image. Other paintings like Into White further reinforce Redwood's facility with sparser imagery; the straightforward nature coupled with strong saturated colors gives these paintings their power.

Ultimately, the cultural iconography of modern day life found in paintings like The Yard and So Much Sound, Redwood swerves off course. The artist seems to fully realize his own artistic powers, the possibility of his materials and the essence of his artistic vision with powerful works like Into White. After all, the paraphernalia of human life is ultimately a form of distraction and with these few lovely paintings, Redwood gets to the true heart of the matter.

"NIGHT LIGHTS" @ DNJ Gallery
The works of three photographers, Bill Sosin, Ginny Mangrum and Helen K. Garber comprise the show of "Night Lights" at DNJ Gallery.

Bill Sosin's "urban impressions" were taken mainly in Chicago, shot from the inside of his car in the rain, while his windshield wipers were turned off. We see droplets either resting or dripping down his window in different directions. The backgrounds of Sosin's images are out of focus and the raindrops on the windows are in focus.

Ginny Mangrum shot her pictures looking from the outside in, as opposed to Sosin. The interiors of the public places in Mangrum's photographs are empty and inert. Whereas Sosin played with the rain, Mangrum played with the darkness and the psychological elements of empty spaces, showing how powerful the presence of living beings can be by depicting their very absence.

Helen K. Garber puts two cities together, Venice, CA next to Venice, Italy. Garber's work — inspired by an old photograph from 1922 showing her great aunt and uncle sitting in a gondola in the canal in the Italian Venice — are not just beautiful presentations of two cities. They deal with issues of globalization and Garber's shattered image of Venice, Italy.

These three photographers explore beyond the shutters of the cameras, but care about aesthetics within the frame. Each photograph stands on its own as rich compositions and beautiful scenarios.

SAN FRANCISCO

MILDRED HOWARD @ Gallery Paule Anglim
The Berkeley sculptor Mildred Howard is best known for her multimedia assemblages — Rauschenbergian combines of photographs, architecture, found objects, and household items—that explore history, identity, and memory. Their formal disruptions and dislocations both symbolize the distortion of the past by cultural arbiters (intently controlling the present and future) and, paradoxically, commemorate the unnamed people whose likenesses survive through Howard's art. In this show, Howard takes a literally global perspective as "a citizen of the world," recontextualizing the terrestrial sphere into trophy or figurehead (reminiscent of similar figures in Wiley and Ocampo), and producing sculptures that are both formally intriguing and critical of the current failed world order (and who is not, these days?).

Coating bitter sociopolitical medicine with esthetic sugar works, of course. On the Rebound is a globe trapped in a basketball hoop/net; it's amusing as surrealist paradox, but also loaded with cultural meanings: sports as the ticket for top black athletes to a larger world; human survival as a game; blockage, frustration and deadlock. Dishin' It Out is unambiguously anti-militarist and anti-imperialist with its camouflage-covered globe set atop a silver tray, a toothsome delicacy; remember the absurdly graceful balloon dance by Chaplin's Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator? The globe in Forever Green, covered in segmented wedges of AstroTurf, mocks our shortsighted preference for pretty illusions about perpetual pie in the sky over more inconvenient realities.

Perched invokes the cutely patronizing imagery of only a few decades ago with its tuxedoed, spats-adorned, top-hatted black crow; its lamppost/chess pawn/banister balanced on three feet, in spats; its steamer trunk, a reminder of Pullman railway porters; and, at the top, a black-oceaned globe, suggestive, these days, of petroleum, the abundant, cheap energy of the 1860s and beyond.

NEW YORK

PATRICK LEE @ Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

Patrick Lee's latest show opened on April 22. As at all of Lee's select exhibits, all works were sold prior to the opening. That says volumes in today's market for the desirability of Lee's drawings by collectors. From what I understand, one must get on a long waiting list in order to acquire a Lee drawing as his output is limited. This is completely understandable when one considers Lee's enormous gifts and his commitment to his aesthetic. Yet while considering his great technical skills, one is made aware that his skill is subordinate to the mood of the picture.

A religious sensibility can be found in the celebration of Lee's subjects. His men stare out at the viewer with defiance, yet their tattooed, pierced faces evoke the transient, superficial nature of their desperate lives. Lee recognizes that their now muscular bodies will one day betray them and shrink under the inevitable weight of age. For some, these drawings may make the viewer uneasy with their implied anger and violence, yet these compositions, despite their size, attain a monumentality that harks back to the portrait work of Rogier van der Weyden and Albrecht Durer. Essentially, when one looks at Lee's work, so meticulously drawn that they look like photographs to the modern eye, we recognize that Lee's tenacity and dedication to detail is similar to that of a medieval goldsmith.

There is no one today who works in this lapidary tradition. One wonders whether Lee will always remain dedicated to his monumental minimalism in choice of subject or will he expand his view beyond his hermetic area of concentration? The world of art deserves and awaits more of Lee.