Highly prescient, somehow whimsical, Sandow Birk’s exhibition “Los Angeles and Her Surroundings” explores what can only be described as late-stage capitalism in Southern California. In 40 drawings that have whiffs of nostalgia, environmental and architectural pleasure, and a clear-eyed view of declining social and political aesthetics, Birk tackles everything from a major museum on fire—and isn’t its present reconfiguration at LACMA, at least a little as if it were going up in flames?—to the hectic urban sprawl of the signs at mini-malls to a tree hung with discarded shoes.

There are timely depictions of a traffic jam of COVID-19 vaccine seekers at Dodger’s Stadium to the glossy, Frank Gehry silver of Disney Hall.

Sandow Birk, Disney Concert Hall Downtown, 2021, Ink on mylar, 13 × 15 in

In the latter work, Disney Concert Hall Downtown (2021) created in ink on mylar, architectural form, and both its beauty and transitory nature are expressed in a lovely, peaceful work, in which the concert hall’s gleam in the background is less prominent than a collection of differently shaped balloons and cotton candy that shimmer around a street vendors cart. Both balloons and concert hall have their own fascinating architecture, as well as the implied conjecture that one may not be any more permanent in the great scheme of time than the other. The serene pink and blues of the balloons, flowering trees, and the blue cast to the sweeping concert hall shape also echo that aura of transience.

Then there are darker images: whether it is the Orwellian cast to the gowned and masked workers approaching vehicles in Mass Vaccinations at Dodger Stadium (2021) or the all-too-human horror of tent villages on the streets of Skid Row – Downtown (2020). Although very different, the visual scope and fable-like narrative of these works to some extent recalls the work of Thomas Hart Benton.

Sandow Birk, Mass Vaccinations at Dodger Stadium, 2021, Ink on mylar, 13 × 15 in

There are neighborhood shops, such as an auto parts store and barber shop, an artificial limb store and bait shop, a water store, and poultry shop – all conjoined in a cluttered urban sprawl that both celebrates small businesses and decries the careless lack of urban planning and community needs. Other images celebrate more iconic landmarks, the Whiskey on Sunset, Angel’s Gate lighthouse in San Pedro. The wide reach of Birk’s cultural depiction of LA is impressive in and of itself, meticulously drawn, yet fraught with a tangible anxiety.

Sandow Birk, The Triumph of Death (Las Vegas), 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 44 × 59 in

That anxiety seemingly explodes in Birk’s larger scale paintings, such as Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (after Ed Ruscha) (2022), an acrylic on canvas work as fierce and pointedly critical in its own way as his The Triumph of Death (Las Vegas) (2018), depicting the carnage of sniper serial killing, and our American death-cult with guns; the police brutality and protests in Ferguson in A Few Bad Apples (Killed by Cops) (2019); and the ugly racism endemic in our society’s traditions shown in The Triumph of Hate (Charlottesville) (2018).

Make no mistake, these works are all as sweepingly epic as they are thoughtfully, illustratively rendered. Birk tells the American story without placing or sugar coating it, and specifically in his drawings, the story of Los Angeles.