It’s a commonplace of urban life that certain social or cultural venues exert disproportionate influence simply because of their size and leverage in the community.  It’s no different in the L.A. art world, where certain galleries and museums compel our attention simply by the scope of their commitment to a given show or artist.  We’re inevitably drawn back even when we may be otherwise inclined to resist.  Then there are others we pass by almost routinely (if regretfully), only to be reminded of their singular importance to the community, when contact is finally restored.  There are quite a few important art galleries in Los Angeles  (something—point of perspective—we perhaps would not have said not so many years ago); but we all have personal musts—and Young Projects is one of mine.  It is unique in Los Angeles and maybe this part of the world; and, as a gallery devoted to the moving image (film, video, digital—with an international scope; from the most experimental avant-garde to under-exposed or re-discovered vintage and contemporary work), it has no equal. 

Of all the galleries at Pacific Design Center, Young Projects probably makes the best use of its glazed jewel-box/black-box spaces.  Pacific Design Center remains otherwise in a somewhat transitional state.  There have been a number of notable departures and arrivals.  (I was sad to see another year in L.A. leave—until its departure, another must destination in the PDC.)  Jae Yang is closing her ArtMerge space for a new gallery location yet to be announced.  I was there last Friday evening for its farewell show and the designLAb-sponsored installations by Kenny Scharf (Scharf-in-excelsis—a customized Pontiac Grand Ville that may be one of his true masterpieces) and a sublime pairing of Won Ju Lim crystalline plexiglas stacks. 

Inevitably I was drawn into the Young Project galleries; all the more easily enticed by a bar installed up front in one of the spaces, where Bryan Carter poured me one of the best martinis I’ve had in my entire life.  The gin was Bombay Sapphire, of course; but this genius mixologist used the slightly lower-proof, subtly black-peppercorn/lemongrass-infused Bombay Sapphire East.  En route to libational nirvana, I was soothed for what promised to be a very dark passage in the project space across the corridor. 

The press release/handout for Andrew Voogel’s Black Water was no better than most art gallery communications (which are generally insufferably pretentious, abysmal and sometimes completely unintelligible) and possibly worse.  But its headnote quote was apt:  from Baudelaire (though from what? and certainly not written in 1909—he died in 1867) in English translation:  “The dispersion and the focusing of the self:  those two movements are of the essence.”  I was already halfway there.  The exhibition was arranged as a sequence of videos and projections, arranged along a winding corridor that became progressively darker as the viewer advanced, to the point where even the faint glimmer of the preceding space dissolved into shadows and eventually went pitch dark.  At that point, the viewer was guided through the last spaces by a rope stretched around the screens or dividers that partitioned the space. 

The ‘passage’ begins innocuously enough:  a figure that appears to be on a sunlit cruise, moving towards or away from a city harbor or bay.  Moving into the gallery proper, we’re confronted with a mash-up of Las Vegas style neon signage, the vari-colored and styled letters reading, “CASTEAWAY.”  (And already we’re feeling a bit shanghai’ed.)  From here, we move down a corridor, past an HD video in blazing color, taken from a Flaming Lips concert.  The details are hazy, but what was being simulated (or actually enacted?) on-stage was apparently some blood sacrifice.  From this dazzling toxic disturbance, we progressed through a serious of visual ‘nocturnes’ (both projections and videos, until arriving finally at the title video, Black Water.  Here we were essentially submerged into an anthracite blackness.  Only very gradually, did the positive/negative light contrast of undulating waves (under night skies barely lit by stars) register.  The impression was of something (a body? the viewer’s surrogate?) rolling under the water, intermittently breaking the surface—a liquid sarcophagus.  It was an image of death’s watery tomb.  Having just died, it was hard to imagine the reprise of consciousness, of light; but the last ‘secret gallery’s’ Second Sea gave some suggestion of this, with its horizon line of breaking waves. 

There is a lot of very ‘dark’ (in every sense) work being produced today in almost every medium—and it’s not surprising.  We’re all very much in a ‘middle passage’ (Voogel references the historical ‘Middle Passage’ in the work) and headed for death zones  (some of which may conceivably entrap the still living). 

In another YoungProjects space, Jim Ellis showed the appropriately titled, Reexamining Static.  With or without a martini—I wouldn’t if I were you.