The balcony overlooking the soaring Dart Gallery of the Monterey Museum of Art La Mirada provides a long leaning-on-the-railing view into the deep space. The facing wall—about 25 feet high and 50 wide with a giant, full-length window—creates a cavernous room that evidently provides an exhausting challenge to curators, as does the low-ceilinged warren under the balcony opening into the expanse.
The current exhibition, “In Process: Ingrid Calame” (through Feb. 27), addresses these challenges with a drawing created directly on the entirety of the massive wall accompanied by a series of large framed drawings on the adjacent walls and smaller, intensely colorful oils in the low-ceilinged spaces. Each format represents a stage in the almost fanatical process of Calame, a rising star in the contemporary art world. From New York originally, the artist moved to Los Angeles to study at CalArts and stayed. Los Angeles and, later, other cities became the subject of her work, which might be considered a forensic investigation of the residue of human interaction upon the landscape: the oil spots on the sidewalk, the cracks and holes on the street, bumps of paint, layers of gum and old graffiti. It’s a process of seeing the sum as evidence of urban decay and disintegration.
The artist painstakingly traces the outlines of these layers upon transparent sheets of Mylar, kneeling on the sidewalks, asphalt roadways and industrial lots. In the studio, she integrates these tracings into a single Mylar layer using different colored pencils to achieve potentially vast drawings that could well be topographical maps. But the crisp cleanness of the Mylar, the even, elegant pencil lines in two or three radiant colors, is obviously a repository for more than geographical information. Each color appears to have a direction, and within the empty mazes of lines there appears an occasional recognizable outline. In fact the artist often integrates tracings from different locations to achieve a beautifully crafted composite that represents an impossible geographic confluence. In the paintings—here oil on aluminum—the artist begins with tracings, then fills in the outlines with intense color in a limited but vibrant palette.
The paintings are too flatly radiant to refer overtly to Jasper Johns, though giant stencil-style numbers are the most recognizable shapes within them. In fact, like Johns, Calame represents both modernist and postmodernist preoccupations, moving from representation to exalt the final object as an abstraction. The wall drawing lacks enough intensity to wrest that surface from its architecture. But from that far balcony, though we know it is derived from only a tiny fragment, it does convey the urban essence: its fissures, byways, areas of concentration and dispersion, and so very much between. Read more of The Exhibitionist at KUSP.org/exhibitionist.
Pictured above: Ingrid Calame, ‘ArcelorMittal Steel Shipping Building One, Right No. 238 & Shipping Building Two, Left No. 50,’ 2010, oil on aluminum
