Happily Enduring Vertigo Amid Min’s Mix of Colors

As eye candy, Yunhee Min’s new paintings at Acme have a decidedly piquant appeal.They cater to the appetite for intense color but tweak conditions just enough to make for a deliciously destabilizing experience.

Each of the five works in the show follows the same format, bearing four broad, vertical stripes on a canvas that is just slightly off square, its edges raked to form a rhombus. The young L.A. painter relishes deviations from the norm and has, throughout her other installation work and paintings, gravitated toward colors that have been custom-mixed at a store but rejected.

Painted with a matte finish, the colors seem drab in general, a bit chalky, but gradually they reveal idiosyncratic personalities and, together, quirky group dynamics.

One painting sets taupe next to tangerine, which borders a band of lilac next to a final stripe the color of brick. In another, olive neighbors beige, persimmon and sunflower. The juxtapositions can get tart, and sometimes the eye can hardly settle on the juncture between two hues because of the friction emanating there.

One painting, “Just Like Honey,” buzzes in its entirety, with stripes of white, celery, pale and lemon yellow seeming to jockey for planar positions, advancing and receding in a spunky rhythm.

Scaled roughly to human height, the paintings induce a low-level vertigo with their leaning, angled sides. Min (whose work is also on view in the show “Shimmer” at the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park through March 26) teases the point home with titles like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Terra Firma.” Her work’s most refreshing quality is its sense of humor, the willful crookedness with which she reinterprets the otherwise sober conventions of Minimalism.

* Acme, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Wish You Were Here: The postcard announcement for Renee Petropoulos’ show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery contains all the standard information about dates and location on one side, but where the message on a personal card would appear, it too has a handwritten note: “Having a wonderful time.” Petropoulos has put herself in the role of tourist, her destination being the west pavilion of the J. Paul Getty Museum. This show is the response to her experience there.

Petropoulos, whose work graces the walls of public spaces throughout the city and who has exhibited widely, is no average tourist. She comes to the Getty as a maker of art and a seasoned viewer with an education in art history and a keen interest in the shape, function and experience of architectural space.

For this show, she has selected eight different galleries at the Getty (those containing art after 1800 and photography) and re-created them in a concentrated, abbreviated form. Conceptually, Petropoulos is mining territory that is rich and deep, but the installation that results is only mildly provocative.

To evoke the Getty galleries, she uses chalk lines to articulate architectural structure and colored vinyl panels to stand in for the works on view. Because each wall of the Felsen Gallery represents all four walls of one of the museum’s rooms, the colored panels overlap and the chalk lines multiply, turning the space into a floor-to-ceiling Constructivist composition, oriented on a grid.

There is a quiet harmony to this exercise in visual equivalency, even with all the condensation it entails, but by itself it doesn’t engage the eye for long. Petropoulos supplies a soundtrack, which plays periodically in the gallery and can also be heard on individual headsets, with overlapping voices discussing the paintings and photographs on view at the Getty. The audio montage uses existing taped guides to the Getty collection, reworked into a multitrack clutter.

Sometimes multiple voices describe one specific work, and other times they discuss different pieces simultaneously, all with an authoritative, institutional assuredness. They feed information to the viewer (biographical data about the artist, description of method and content of the work at hand, and so on) that supplements direct experience of the art, but for many viewers probably supplants it. Petropoulos takes the given narrative form of the Acoustiguide and fractures it, jangling its educational function.

It’s turned into something between a parody and a critique of our mediated encounter with art, using the Getty as the quintessential tourist destination to be checked off the cultural must-see list. The surrogates on the walls and the clutter of voices telling us what’s important about what we’re looking at function like a fun-house mirror reflection of the museum-going experience--only it’s not that much fun.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through March 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Ambiguous Artifacts: Sharon Lockhart and James Welling inject doubt into the verity-laced practice of documentary photography. How much of a dent they make in the tradition is hard to assess using only their show at Blum & Poe to go by. Just one of Welling’s images is on view, a detail of a dormer window from a series of architectural photographs.

In itself, the picture of a late-19th-century building framed by telephone wires holds little interest.

What it does, inadvertently, is reiterate the importance of context to determine meaning. Without the company of text or other photographs by Welling (from his varied, 25-year career), the image seems nearly mute, and what little it whispers is ambiguous.

Lockhart’s sequence of nine color photographs was made in the Oaxacan exhibit hall of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. They too come from a larger series, other parts of which (not on view) shed more light on the artist’s intent and potential than the work that appears here.

The photographs take straightforward aim at the museum displays, showing fragments of stone carvings, vessels, figures and tools in their institutionalized settings behind glass, on pedestals or framed on the wall.

Encased and ordered in this way, the objects feel lifeless, and Lockhart reinforces that perception by photographing the displays absent an audience, except for a few museum guards seen at a distance in one of the shots. The highly polished stone tile floor stands pristine, unused.

In a triptych from the same series (not on view), Lockhart shows a man repairing that very floor in one of the display areas. The link between the living artisan and the deadened artifacts of what are presumed to be his ancestors is suggested, implicitly, without polemical urgency.

The problem with the photographs in the Blum & Poe show is that they lack even the pretense of meaning. Lockhart’s deadpan approach makes such a point of her own invisibility that we can’t help but question just why she’s chosen to be there.

She is an artist who’s been praised for her ironic stance, but in her work only a fine line separates such cool distance from a more cloying disingenuousness.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Saturday.

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Ill-Fitting ‘Corset’: Whipped soap? The mere mention of it as a medium causes more of a stir than its actual use in Yolande Macias McKay’s new work at Richard Heller Gallery. The title of the show--”Of Corset Hurts”--also promises more cleverness and content than the show delivers.

Much of McKay’s work here plays off gender stereotypes, but glibly, without much wisdom or insight. “Golden Boy” is a life-size male nude cast in brass and dangling an oversized, shiny silver yo-yo from one upraised thumb. As a parody of classical statuary, it falls rather flat; the man is made to look juvenile, playing with such a toy, but McKay’s rendering is no more sophisticated.

Several works involve a small, androgynous, cast-iron figure standing on a narrow, wall-mounted ledge, or positioned at a precipitous angle against the wall, held there by strings attached to little rods inserted in its chest. In others, she paints foliate patterns with whipped soap and encases them in elaborate gilt frames.

Between the effeminate associations of the florid pink soap and the macho allusions of a pair of figurine pieces called “Stud” lies a wealth of aesthetic and sociological material to draw from. But most of McKay’s efforts here are simply flamboyant folly. Gestures grab attention immediately but squander it on superficial spectacle.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.