Thresholds—with their curious balancing act between two places, spaces or states—have always exercised a tremendous pull upon human imagination. It is, without even working at it, a naturally apt analogy for multiple types of transformation. The number of commonly used phrases in our language that we take for granted shows how we all understand the liminal quality that the concept of a brink reveals.

In the truly grand geography of greater Los Angeles, going down to San Pedro always still surprises, as this tip of land, the bottom-most point of LA, opens onto the ocean. Surmounted by a seemingly endless number of dock rigs and ship riggings, boats, and containers, it really feels like you’ve arrived some place other than the City of Angels. Located in what was once a military base, the cultural center of Angels Gate has taken a decommissioned barrack and transformed it into art galleries. On the top floor of the main gallery “PORTALS” inhabits the slightly diminutive spaces, and the art installed there in turn plays around with the sense of portals being something from a port (which is a portal) and each being a portal to elsewhere.

Alicia Piller, Blue Memories, Flooding Back. Navigating Tongva Waters (2021). Courtesy of Angels Gate Cultural Center, photo by Justin Galligher.

What engages so wonderfully about this exhibition is that it avoids a monolithic definition of how all this disparate art fits with the thematic premise. There are works that look like framing devices through which one could gaze from one physical world into another. Erin Harmon’s low-relief cut-paper architectural constructs, Echo and Occulus (both 2015), Yevgeniya Mikhailik’s smoky drawings on translucent paper from the Barrow Series (all 2021), and Howard Schwartzberg’s willfully awkward abstract Open Space Bandage Paintings (2020) all allude to multiple interpretations of these gateways. There are others in which the boundary being crossed is more of a philosophical nature. These loosely corral visual quanta that lead us to consider our presuppositions, as one moves from the certainty in one moment to the instability of another. Svetlana Shigroff’s wild mythologem-laden tapestries, Esther Ruiz’ somber light-and-reflection works, and Elana Mann’s handcrafted sound conveyors all share in this impulse. There are works in which the brink being pursued is much more symbolic in nature. They work on visualizing the movement from one state of being to another, as one goes from life into the afterlife, from the present to the transcendent. Alicia Piller’s dense Blue Memories, Flooding Back. Navigating Tongva Waters (2021) and Erika Lizée’s expansive and astounding The Subtle Body Prepares for Emergence (2021) are both rapturous site-specific works that underscore these complexities.

As with the most entrancing of exhibitions, “PORTALS” springboards a viewer’s imaginative musings into an altogether unexpected set of considerations. It’s like a box within a box within a box, and not only physically fitting together but conceptually and imaginatively. It is a perfectly fitting liminal experience to have at one of the outer limits of this immense city of many portals.