The rough-hewn almost ungainly presence of the ceramic vessels that sit directly on the floor in the small space echoes the distinctly DIY atmosphere surrounding them. Festooned with motifs that draw on images ranging from decorative to topical and from historical to contemporary, the work on display is a kind of diary or handheld sketchbook where the formal qualities of the rendering are subordinated to the graphic immediacy of the research that the artist is conducting. Jennifer Rochlin’s accompanying untitled 2D works of oil and collage on paper underscore the poetic reach of “Wild is the Wind”: it is an effort to fit incongruent categories within the register of art and create hybrids that locate the mundane within the reach of the universal. As with the glazed ceramic urn Wonder Woman, Rocks, Sea, Shields/Rope Pattern (2018), categories are collapsed and hierarchies are leveled.

Charting in another way the convergence of the everyday onto a broader historical plane, Nick Kramer’s mixed-media works in “No Neighbors, Street Lights Are Out” follows an equally winding path through the impressions that the world immediately around him places in the artist’s eyes. A series of works all titled Weather Balloons (2018) appear at first glance to be the somewhat dulled bodies of shrunken satellites or enlarged spinning tops, but on closer inspection are seen to be the shapes of aluminum pots and pans collected, shorn of handles or signs of aging, and aggregated in vertical columns. Proposed as stand-ins for failed near-space exploration devices, they hang at various heights throughout the gallery. The nearby presence of photographs, all titled A Hand of Pots and Pans (2018), in which these aluminum rounded casings are portrayed with handles and stains intact, underscores the somewhat dystopian neighborhood that the artist is exploring internally and externally. Even in the lightness of the polychrome aluminum work, such as Green Moon (2018), with its light green and pink hues coursing below an orange route indicator, an ineluctable melancholy pervades the work.

All in all, the experience of the art at The Pit fluctuates between the forlorn qualities of a metaphorical pit from below and the necessity of pits, like those at the center of fruits. The view from there is not particularly optimistic but it is not entirely about giving up hope altogether. It is more about looking around the corners of the obvious and accommodating the scruffiness of the world in order to see what actually might be in there, even if it isn’t by any means perfection.

The objects in the image seem preternaturally still, pushed off to the left side of the frame: a liquefied elastic globule seems to pull down or just barely rest at the very corner of a marble slab, above it there is a chunk of what looks like concrete with rebar sticking erratically out of it that in turn appears to be floating upwards. In Ball and chain (2016, archival pigment print), it is hard to understand how this is happening at first, and then you discover that the artist has been photographing things in water.

While all these things may look to be materials that are lighter or heavier than each other in the regular world, in fact the photo is not relaying the truth. And where is the ball and what is the chain? Photographing through the water also smoothes the surfaces so they all seem to glisten. Linking these unreliable relationships perceived by the viewer to the ways in which societies regulate relationships that are established between people and power, the artist takes us “Outside the Garden,” (the show’s title), that idyllic Eden where all things were purportedly in the proper order.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda’s practice is primarily an exploration and play with gravity, everyday materials, physical tension and humor. The core of his practice concerns the use of everyday objects and the manipulation of their physical, metaphorical and functional paradigms in sequence. Detailed and very meticulous photographs of improbable events occupy the space along with ungainly but intriguing object agglomerations. Pereda’s work calls into question the stability and predictability of our expectations about common physical phenomena and the way things work. He uses an array of art tropes such as still life to undermine the authority of our expectations and create a realm in which norms are subtly and subversively upended.

In the main gallery there are more dimensional works. One is a cast concrete version of a jacket and pants, both mounted on rebar hangers, titled The Suit Makes the Man (RUA) (2017). The density and clunkiness of the concrete is the antithesis of the floating quality of the photographs, and the way that both the pants and the jacket are cut reveals an almost constructivist quality. It is accompanied by Sticks and Stones (California Decline) (2017) a large tri-part sculpture that occupies most of the gallery. It’s towering presence and oddly stable, though makeshift, quality is perplexing. The vertical elements made of a cast concrete slab, a metal pole and plaster column fragments are connected by telescoping rods and stabilized with a wedge. With a palm tree held aloft by one, a bowling ball by another, and an upturned head resting on a stump, it parodies a monumental colonnade.

Whether it is elliptically evoked in two dimensions or more stridently delineated in three, Pereda takes the viewer outside of the garden where values are inverted and overturned in a much less foreseeable or reliable universe.

Much like the Jorge Luis Borges book after which it is named, the 18th Street Arts Center’s PST: LA/LA exhibition addresses history and its delineations, whether entirely or partially fictitious, in order to question the role of master narratives in general, and particularly in the case of the LA / LA (Los Angeles and Latin America) diaspora.

In his collection of stories, Borges gives the “histories” of such infamous people as Billy the Kid and John Andrews Murrell—fictionalized by Borges as Lazarus Morell; while much of what he writes is relatively factual, an ongoing intrusion of invented and modified details causes a reader to question the overall veracity of his accounts.

This ambiguity ties into the small-scale works organized for the gallery at 18th Street Arts Center in that through  various modes and utilizing diverse genres, they deal with investigating the shortcomings and inexactitudes of different systems of transcribing and historicizing an authentic telling of the tales about what constitutes Latin America(ness) and its dislodging into the United States.

As with Borges’ writing, these works provide an indexical entrance into the processes and histories being studied, allowing the viewer to follow the deviations and divergences of this art from a ”neutral” historical retelling. In fact, these works together reject any pretense of making history neutral.

Carolina Caycedo’s Dependencia / Dependency (currency insertions) (2012), uses ink stamps on banknotes that carry the respective values of the minimum monthly wage, a gram of cocaine, and a liter of gasoline in six different cities (three Western and three Latin American) to show both the varied costs and question the means of establishing material values across a globalized culture.

The set of projected color slides that comprise Runo Lagomarsino’s ContraTiempos (2010), faithfully track the artist’s search in the Ibirapuera Park of São Paulo for cracks and stains in the concrete pavement that resemble forms looking like the South American continent.

Josefina Guilisasti creates Objetos Light (2014) by juxtaposing a shelf of white cast silicon rubber objects such as vases or pitchers with a video loop in which these solid-looking objects are dropped and become surprisingly fluid things that bounce and shimmer as they hit the ground. Here, the genre of the still life gives way to alternate understandings of objectness and the tracking of unforeseeable histories.

In the end, much like Borges said of his text, it is in the value of contrasting the different versions presented that the meaning of this work is revealed. Its aesthetic bearing reveals the relations that underlie the various and differing interpretive axes, as it disassembles and scrabbles the underlying historical markers. These visual works offer a glimpse into larger research processes, and the viewer is invited to observe and appreciate or to go on musing and extrapolating meaning. If the audience follows through, they will discover a mutable set of historical accounts, which is exactly the point and the virtue of noting the disparities.

In the darkened gallery, a single row of seats faces a large screen on which a series of images loop. These images run by in rapid succession with all of the characteristic flashes of light, scratches and stuttering of an acetate film. Transitions from one scene to another are made by jump cuts. There are no fades; just one scene after another, sometimes separated by large areas of dead space in which black predominates. Repeatedly, backwards countdowns of numbers and letters, all parts of the film leaders that are attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector, as well as text announcing this is The End and large block letters spelling out A MOVIE BY BRUCE CONNER, appear. But it’s light years from the movies. Created in 1958, this 16mm, black-and-white (with sound) 12-minute film is made entirely of found footage. Scavenged from various sources and montaged together into filmic segues, A Movie is, in retrospect, a tour de force exploration of how media will interact with our consciousness of the world at large.

Parachutes drop, skydivers descend, ships sink, and firing squads take aim, while the mushroom clouds of atomic bomb blasts billow out in slow motion. Elephants are hacked to pieces, people are shivering and crying, automobiles run off cliffs and flashes of white dots fill the screen. Countdowns continue; women undress. Wagons circle, cowboys and Indians race by on horseback, cavalry arrive, elephants stampede, cars race, spin out, crash, flip and burn. Locomotives surge, tanks arc over hills, blimps fly and crash in fiery conflagrations, a woman carefully unrolls her stockings. The End scrolls by again and again, dead space gives way to women carrying fruit piled high on their heads, surfers take to waves, waves overtake boats, motorcycles race in mud, a plane crash lands on water. There are aerial gunfights, bombs dropping and explosions. Amidst the onslaught of catastrophes, disasters and war, there are moments of grace. A man and woman spin carefully on a high wire over a city, schools of fish and scuba divers swim by and shafts of light reflect down through the water from above. Bruce Conner’s overall sequence however is dominated by violence.  It savagely follows the news dictum of “If it bleeds, it leads,” even when the bleeding was only captured in black and white.

Conner’s groundbreaking film crystallized a new technique and mirrored the historical moment of its time. Even his use of sound—Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome”—marked another innovation. Conner would continue to use this union of sound and image in his films and lay the groundwork for future developments. Importantly, this composer’s tribute to scenes around Rome recalling the glory of the Roman Empire hailed from 1924, when the Mussolini government was evolving into a totalitarian regime and memories of Ancient Rome were exploited to support aggressive and nationalist policies. Bruce Conner shifts the terms of a viewer’s understanding of newsreel footage by using the loaded albeit wordless soundtrack to move against existing conventions.

With work that has a firm footing in the traditions of the fiber arts, Jane Hugentober builds the case for a powerful conceptual dimension within a more traditional art-making framework. Far from ironic, the artist looks to precedents such as Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79), Hannah Wilke’s photographic dialogue with her mother or even the research of Eva Hesse as a way to create artwork that is about its formal and material structuring as much as it is about the narratives related to how human beings, specifically women, balance the myriad of things that go into their existence.

Mixing the roughhewn, particularly her hanging hooks, with the delicate and repetitive quality of sewn and embroidered lines, Hugentober builds a compelling case for why “conceptual” might be rolled back to the more simply named “thoughtful” and thus bridge works without the categorical imperative to renounce anything vaguely looking like it was handmade. Part of a more generalized trend to reevaluate, without a dogmatic edge, the way in which various supposedly obsolete forms of art and artmaking can conspire to create multi-tiered art experiences for a viewer, Hugentober operates as a medium between the material, the temporal and what we might think about searches, roles and assigned places, giving viewers reason to pause and reconsider their own categories and presuppositions.

The artworks are arranged in the multi-leveled and delightfully disheveled gallery space in clusters or irregular groups, taking advantage of the various nooks and crannies and a labyrinth of overhead tubes and pipes. On the upper level, a wall that has been painted in a soft pink hue houses a disparate array of works ranging from the artist’s own output to things that have been collaged together in a clear homage to her mother. It directly addresses the legacy of being both an artist and a mother. The digital video I do remember (2014) records recollections of her grandmother talking about her mother’s difficulty in maintaining a maternal and a creative side to her life.

With this autobiographical turn, the artist opens the exhibition to considering the different conditions imposed on each generation and works to shift the obligation of artmaking from those materials and techniques once defined as high art to include those relegated to craft. Coincidentally, she ponders in exquisitely visual terms, how this hierarchy is also doggedly determined by a gender bias. In And That Was That (2016), the hulking jute and silk skein, treated gesturally with additions of oil, intrusions of wool and slatherings of latex, hangs majestically from oversized metal hooks, bowed but unbeaten. Its references draw on work ranging from Alberto Burri’s arte povera burnt and crackling monochromatic surfaces to Anna Mendieta’s camouflaged earth bodies, without relinquishing its individuality.

Whether she is more actively stressing the physical aspects of her work or mining it for its broader implications as a practice, Hugentober unfolds her ruminations, opening them to sophisticated, revelatory contradictions.

In this two-person exhibition of paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and writing, Rebecca Campbell and Samantha Fields mine their own personal histories, passing them through the filters of their respective multifaceted art practices, and elevate them to models for critical appraisal, both art historical and social.

Starting with the curatorial premise that each artist pick an image from around the time that she was born, and, branching out from there by delving into their recent and past output, forging a collaborative improvisational “call-and response,” they provide us with a compelling view into the ad hoc community we call the “art world.” Fields’ Transplant (2015), a work referencing the 1972 landfall of Hurricane Agnes, and Campbell’s Miss April 1971 (2015), a painting derived from that month’s Playboy magazine centerfold, are the loci of this 18 month collaboration in which each work prompted the other artist to create or select additional artworks in an interweaving of thematic leads.

Transplant, from Fields’ most recent photo-based body of work in which she paints landscapes that she traverses, reflects the deformations and modifications brought about by her use of film. Whether representing lens flares or digital blurs brought about by the camera itself or the streaking and flattening of light as recorded through windows and windshields, Fields points the viewer at both the representational and pictorial aspects of her images. Campbell’s painting diverges slightly from her previous interest in autobiography and documenting women she knows: with Miss April 1971, she toys with paint to obscure and draw attention to the nude while engaging formal aspects of painting through a calibrated and systematic use of palette knife swatches and large blocked-out fields of white and gray. Both artists seem to encourage the viewer to oscillate back and forth between seeing their painting as something representative in the world or as paint, which acts in and of its own material accord.

The differences between the way these two artists are normally categorized (simplistically reduced to atmospheric landscape painting for Fields and figurative feminist painting for Campbell) are quietly and effectively dismantled in the overlapping works taken from different times of their overall production and in the multiple vitrines containing drawings, thumbnail sketches, photo-collages, and test paintings from the artists’ studios. In these and in each artists’ writing, themes and ideas are played out in a far less easy to categorize way. The complexity of an artist’s practice is much more effectively delineated in the disorderliness of the studio—recreated in facsimile in this context—than in the reductive format commercial galleries necessitate. With generosity and abandon, Rebecca Campbell and Samantha Fields have produced new artworks inspired by dialogue with one another about the nature of creativity, and in the process, they have given us a view into a time when linguistic categories and stylistic uniformity aren’t the only means we have to understand and appreciate the creation and evolution of artists and their work.

“These Carnations Defy Language” started with Alexandra Grant and Steve Roden’s mutual enchantment with the writings of the French poet and essayist, Francis Ponge. Ponge created a form of prose poetry, in which he worked with highly ambiguous and elliptical language to wrestle with the opacity, even the pre-eminent suchness, of objects. Grant and Roden share with Ponge this distrust, or maybe even rejection, of endowing art with the power to overwhelm the source of its inspiration, and they have each evolved ways of introducing viewers to the precariousness and uncertainty of their poetic assignments of meaning without renouncing their authorship. So like a pongé (a light material mix of silk and wool) both Grant and Roden individually and collaboratively remove a veil and erect a semi-transparent barrier between their art and its sources to keep the viewer circling and seeking an entry without being able to find a single unequivocal route that accesses their core meanings.

The densely worked images that Steve Roden has elaborated here were drawn from and even taken out of an issue of Domus magazine, dating from April 1964 (the month and year of the artist’s birth) that was a gift from his father. The collaging, drawing and painting follows Roden’s practice of making numerous forays into mark making, painting, cutting and overlaying fragments until the separate elements almost coalesce into a whole. This instability of resolution is the result he creates that allows a viewer to see where he ended up and get a glimpse into his process, at the same time. By placing his poetic ‘solution’ into a set of brackets Roden keeps his art from becoming formulaic, from closing itself off in absolute certainty. His project is to wrest meaning from the world through the visual without losing the sense of the entire framework from which it is winnowed down.

The larger banner-like vociferous painted images from the “Antigone 3000” series that Alexandra Grant has fashioned here draw their impetus from her research into the Greek myth of Antigone. The painting, use of repeating motifs and shifts between layers of foreground and background operate with Grant‘s painterly style and continue her visual research into the use of literary texts as tangential source material for her imagery. The technique with which Grant creates useful quandaries for a viewer include shifting visibly between works in which patterns drop in and out of focus thus forcing a re-viewing of nearby similar, yet simultaneously and subtly different work. By using psychological motifs such as Rorschach-like blots and modern heraldic devices like bold chevrons, the artist pushes viewing between the spaces of intimate self-analysis and external pageantry. Her project checkmates any attempt to ascribe one reading to the images.

“These Carnations Defy Language” is a very satisfying interstitial voyage, and as suggested by the exhibition’s title, excerpted from a quote by Ponge, less about getting all the answers and more about formulating compelling questions.