If you stroll into Godt-Cleary Gallery in Mandalay Place, you might find yourself drawn to an amiable abstraction prominently displayed on the gallery's central display wall. Watch out.
"Persimmon," a large, abstract diptych, appears to be nothing more formidable than drops of turquoise spattered across a red surface. To learn it was painted by lifelong Angeleno Peter Alexander is to imagine the sort of starkly modern but airy and palm-appointed home-in-the-hills in which you might find such an agreeable composition above a Barcelona chair. It is, in its way, West Coast art typified: resolutely visual, even a little playful, without a whiff of intellectual rigor or social analysis. Sea spray isolated in a brilliant sunset, if you like.
But get closer and it's dangerous. The persimmon red is shot through with barely perceptible veils of hot pink and the turquoise drops are glowing coals of matter from a planet where cool is hot. Even a second's glance at one patch sears its opposing-tone afterimage on the retina as the image ripples over it.
"Persimmon" is a fitting introduction to Alexander, whose work is about color and light even when it appears to be about places and objects. Born in 1939 in Los Angeles, Alexander has lived and worked there throughout his life, excepting studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and various residencies in the U.S. and abroad.
Much of this show is drawn from his LAX series, from the 1990s and into this decade, and consists of off-kilter, nighttime aerial views of LA—rectilinear light patterns stretching to the horizon, save for the toes of hills. But the pilot's a little audacious, pitching and yawing just enough to make you uneasy. In the digitally enhanced print "Lawndale" (1998), the city seems like it might drop off the edge into the ocean.
Alexander's Las Vegas prints occupy solid and familiar ground, maybe a little too familiar to locals used to quirky takes on the Strip. But Alexander takes the unusual step of printing his distorted images on gampi, a kind of vellum paper, giving the scenes a tenuous air. The black-and-white "Stardust" (1994) reads like an early 19th-century photograph, or maybe a pinhole exposure.
A series of digital prints on velvet presents old porn images of women and seems out-of-context here, except that these, too, seem more about registering light's reflections than about prurience. But the paintings are the show's highlights, especially the deftly executed "Miramar Plumeria" (2002), from a series observing water effects, and "Study for Blue Six" (2003), from a commission for the new Disney Hall in LA. Each, like "Persimmon," offers more than its initial appeal.
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Alexander's art emblemizes a West Coast aesthetic, but the Contemporary Arts Collective has the Western ethic covered. The juried members show, which continues through this weekend, tackles The Wild, Wild West. The works and winners were selected by Jerry Schefcik, director of UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery. First place was taken by Jan Tower for "Terrestrials 4," a most peculiar painting of cattle, bovine shapes, blue-silvery moonlit and seen from roughly the eye-level of a child.
From there, the takes get even quirkier. Anne Davis Mulford offers a cowgirl's revision of Western mythology in the complex ceramic sculpture "Prickley Heat"—which nonetheless sits next to Chet Eskey's more traditional but stylized bronze "Cougar."
It's a varied assortment, at times lighthearted and at times fractious. Reinterpreting the West is nothing new, but it's usually a promising prospect, and this show amounts to more than your usual roundup, pardner.