scapes implore the viewer to look within
themselves, rather than gaze at others.
—LEORA LUTZNEWPORT BEACH, CA
R. Luke DuBois: “Now”
at Orange County Museum of Art
New York-based artist R. Luke DuBois is not
only a master of the IT platforms of a wide
range of media, including the Internet, music,
performance, video and film, he has learned
how to manipulate and combine these vari-
ous media to create dizzying videos that
address the inundation of images and sounds
in contemporary society. Each piece in
Dubois’ first solo museum survey show on
the West Coast is an amalgam of several
media, and reminds us of just how discon-
certing our world has become. “The final
result,” former OCMA curator Dan Cameron
theorizes in the catalogue, “is not exactly
pleasant, bordering on the painful.”The 76-minute video Academy(2006) shows
the Best Pictures from 75 successive years
of Academy Awards, with each full-length film
compressed into a single minute; this art piece
progresses from early black-and-white movies,
through Technicolor, into recent fast-paced
ones. The underlying purpose of the video is
to demonstrate how filmmaking has changed
over the decades, while presenting this pro-
gression in a way that watching all of these
movies (in real time over 10 days) would not.
“Just as visualization helps us to make sense
of the ‘facts’ of our world,” the artist explains in
the catalogue, “art made with data lets us look
critically at those ‘facts.’” Yet the intense com-
pression of the individual films often renders
them as incomprehensible, and indistinguish-
able from each other. The 60-minute (Pop) Icon:
Britney(2010), a similarly formatted film of
split-second images of Spears, clearly ad-
dresses the star’s public persona. As the wall
label explains, the pop star has existed entirely
within Auto-Tune and Photoshop, with all of her
pictures and videos airbrushed to present a
perfect icon, and with her “live” performances
pre-recorded and lip-synced. This mesmerizing
video trivializes the singer, presenting her to the
world as the fake star that she really is.Acceptance (2012), a high-definition video,
is comprised of two screens, one of Obama,
the other of Romney, with each giving his
2012 Presidential Candidate acceptance
speech. Yet the words of their speeches are
manipulated to periodically sound as though
each candidate is mimicking the other. Themost illustrative piece in this show, reflecting
our media-rich world, is Sergey Brin and
Larry Page(2013). Here, two screens display
the respective Google co-founders being in-
terviewed, while moving Google text and
image searches, collected in “real time,”
are superimposed over their faces.
—LIZ GOLDNERSEATTLE
Daphne Minkoff: “Highly Colored Space”
at Linda Hodges Gallery
For her eighth solo show at Linda Hodges
since 2003, Seattle artist and North Seattle
College art professor Daphne Minkoff took
an archaeological approach to depicting
various locales in Seattle’s Central District,
a historically Jewish and African-American
neighborhood that is rapidly undergoing
transformation and gentrification. In fact,
some of the structures she portrays in her
small (18 by 24 inches) canvases of oil,altered photographs, and mixed media have
already been demolished. Seen on one level
as an aesthetic rescue mission, “Highly Col-
ored Space” is a documentation of vanishing
urban spaces in the form of 32 paintings that
memorialize doomed storefronts, houses,
restaurants, roads and back yards. On an-
other level, when de-contextualized, they
operate as abstracted cityscapes in the
tradition of Richard Diebenkorn, photogra-
pher Aaron Siskind and local painter Paul
Havas. Minkoff begins each painting with
her photographs, then paints over them,
and scrapes (or “excavates”) back into them
to create the illusion of peeling paint, graffiti,
and fading labels or signs.Blue Light(all works 2015) reveals National
Rifle Association graffiti on a wall while
Hardwarehighlights the store’s sign with
its missing letters. Abandoned supermarket
shopping carts (in Nomads View 1and
Nomads View 2) and crumbling houses
(An Inner Strength Still Remains) provide
the outer limits of any explicit social commen-
tary. Elsewhere, deteriorating sites become
gentrified by Minkoff: appealingly colored,
divided into color blocks, and far from any
hint of detritus or decay. Of these, Remnant,
Think Blink View 2,and T-Docks View 1are
the most abstract and least troubled by the
artist’s concerned interventions. They put the
more random scenes into a decorative space,
perhaps undercutting the artist’s program of
identification, rescue, memory and protest.
The brutal cropping of the original photos
extends to the composition of the resulting
mixed-media pictures. Older houses, as in
Broken Heart: I Want it Backand Deeply
Rooted Foundation,become picturesque
rather than cautionary. The T-Dock Views
(a popular Lake Washington inner-city
swimming beach), along with Offrampand
Simplicity Brings Forgetfulness,are the
airiest, and most promising. They show
open white and blue skies that are filled with
rain about to fall on solitary constructions.March / Apri 2016 - art ltd 29“Academy,” 2006, R. Luke DuBois
DVD video, stereo sound
76 minutes; Edition 5 of 10, 1 AP
Photo: Courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery“Sublime LA 10,” 2015, Elena Dorfman, Pigment print on metallic paper, 33^1 ⁄ 2 " x 69^1 ⁄ 2 "
Photo: courtesy of Modernism Inc.
“Remnant,” 2015,
Daphne Minkoff
Collage, oil on board, 24" x 18"
Photo: courtesy Linda Hodges Gallery