Caught in sleep, but not in repose

We never see ourselves as others see us. That’s a given. To see ourselves when we’re asleep, even more preposterous. Ten years ago, Laura Cooper set out to create a visual record that would overcome these natural limitations. She wanted to know “where she was� when her conscious self checked out.

She asked her husband, fellow artist Nick Taggart, to photograph her each morning before she awoke. Like all good Conceptualists undertaking a project, they established some rules. Only one photograph a day would be taken, none if Cooper awoke first. They wouldn’t edit the results. The process would continue, daily, until death or divorce.

The ongoing project, on view at Angles Gallery, consists now of more than 2,500 images, presented like serial data, in a grid. However formulaic the result sounds, it turns out to be utterly sensuous and fully absorbing. Titled “Exterior of Unconsciousness,� it’s a private diary that we’re granted the privilege of viewing.

We see Cooper in an unguarded state, clothed and unclothed, both nestled in bedding and bare. She is vulnerable, certainly, but because Taggart approaches his task with such tenderness and respect, Cooper’s integrity is never violated. The project avoids the taint of voyeurism.

Taggart shoots down onto Cooper from a consistent distance, so that she’s always seen from around the waist up -- close enough to read the serenity on her face, far enough to register the balletic twists of her posture. Though sleeping generally means horizontality, Taggart orients the photographs vertically, which puts us in a more direct, face-to-face relationship with Cooper. The perspective feels both more intimate and more formally dynamic.

From afar, the spread of small black and white images resembles a continuous drawing, with shadowy passages and luminous respites. Studied closely, the work has a cinematic sense of progression. It’s not just the patterns on the bedding, shifting from stripes to plaids to florals, but Cooper herself who evolves. The maturation is subtle, but near the final group of prints, it becomes overt. She thickens and swells, until from one frame to the next she is no longer alone in the bed but snuggled next to her newborn. From there, the chronicle feels like a love letter, a daily ritual of appreciation.

Together, Cooper and Taggart have created an extraordinarily beautiful document. Originally intended to expose the machinations of unconsciousness, it testifies instead to the power of its opposite state: acute attention. Cooper sleeps on, her lovely face peaceful and closed. Taggart -- and the rest of us -- are happily wide-eyed, more devoted than ever to the act of looking.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Aug. 2. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Goode sky-scapes verge on the trite

Over the four decades that Joe Goode has been at it, he’s made art that’s clever (the milk bottle paintings), disturbing (the “Environmental Impact� series), daunting (the fire paintings) and deliciously beautiful (the waterfall paintings). Rarely has he shown work as bland as the new pictures on view at Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

All are sky-scapes, but Goode has always favored perceptual phenomena over concrete description, and these new works are no exception. A full or nearly full moon floats in each of the colored fields, the images being essentially studies of light, color, texture and atmosphere. They simply don’t have enough of each to offer.

In “It’s Coming,� the moon is a porous orb hanging in a daytime sky. The blue meanders from periwinkle to royal, but inconsequentially. Goode can conjure ravishing effects through layering and resist techniques, but he holds back here, leaving large expanses (this painting measures 66 by 108 inches) relatively undifferentiated.

His palette too verges on the trite and sugary in this group. The nighttime skies range from a melodramatic violet-lavender blend to a drab, smoggy taupe. A deep indigo awash with distant stars or a pale atmospheric veil redeems one of the paintings, the diptych “Day 4.� Here, at last, the sky feels alive and unpredictable, as in an Albert Pinkham Ryder, rather than standard-issue, as in Hallmark.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Aug. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Oil spill elicits Sekula’s passion

Allan Sekula is part poet, part pragmatist. His lyrical instincts tussle continuously with his social agenda, generating a friction that is never less than interesting but seldom much more than that. In his new work, “Black Tide/Marea Negra,� at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Sekula strikes an unusually comfortable balance.

The piece is concise, visually engaging and dense with political, ecological and social significance. In December, a newspaper in Barcelona, Spain, asked Sekula, a longtime Southern Californian, to respond to a tanker disaster in northwest Spain that spilled 20 million gallons of oil into the sea. Sekula made a group of color photographs and joined them with a fragmentary, libretto-like text.

The published version of the work (in Spanish) can be seen under glass on a table in the center of the gallery, while larger versions of the photographs, without commentary, line the walls. Sekula’s text (which is available in translation) alludes to the kind of official dissembling that can make such an ecological tragedy vanish from the news. The pictures, meanwhile, describe the real physical effort necessary to ameliorate such a tragedy’s effects.

“Disposal Pit,� a diptych of a glossy black cesspool clotted with debris, hints sharply at the ugliness of the problem. “Volunteer on the Edge� illustrates poignantly the heroic efforts of those attempting a solution. A young man in the picture stands where water meets rocky shore. His disposable jumpsuit remains white only on the shoulders and hood. Everywhere else it’s been stained inky black, matching the shoreline around him. He is bent with Sisyphean focus on his task, scraping a layer of oil from a large rock.

This kind of potent, classically beautiful image feels more at home in the work of Sebastiao Salgado than in Sekula’s, but it’s a welcome addition to the latter’s otherwise plain-spoken documentary efforts. Several other pictures in this ensemble also have an emotional intensity uncommon for Sekula but essential to reinforce the intellectual arguments his work presents. In “Black Tide,� the humanitarian underpinnings basic to Sekula’s work rise to the surface in more visible, accessible form than ever.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Saturday.

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An unconvincing reprise by Noland

Kenneth Noland has come back around to the circle paintings he first started making in the late 1950s. In his dispiriting show at Chac Mool Gallery, Noland revives his familiar format of painting concentric bands of color without providing a very convincing case for its return.

At their onset, these circle (or target) paintings engaged the art world’s hot issues of the day. They emerged after the radical breakthroughs of Abstract Expressionism, answering its allover surfaces with an in-your-face focal point, stripping its sentiment bare and confounding the topic of flatness by painting unmodulated areas of color that appeared to recede and advance, and even seemed to spin.

Noland worked on the floor, letting his thinned paints soak into unprimed canvas. His circle paintings, and the stripes and chevrons that followed, had a spare beauty, an economy that helped usher in minimalism.

Noland learned from Josef Albers and worshiped Matisse, but in these recent paintings (dated 1999-2001), he’s only quoting himself -- and not favorably. These are “signature Nolands� for the nuance-impaired. One or two of the five canvases muster some spunk, through an assertive pairing of the complementary colors blue and orange and by contrasting uniform, flat areas of color with aerated penumbras that flare, like in an eclipse, around the central circles.

What weakens these paintings are the shortcuts that Noland takes to recapture the momentum of the earlier series. He no longer stains his canvases, and in place of those brushy, gestural penumbras, Noland appears (in at least one of the paintings) to be airbrushing the transitional space between figure and ground. His colors lack the purity that spoke so forcefully in the earlier work. Here, the pigments are boosted by metallic, pearlescent and holographic additives.

The worst offender, “Mysteries: Platinum,� has thickly frosted bands of white, black, pink and blood red set against an iridescent field. It’s flashy, in the manner of desperate efforts at attention. In adopting the target as a motif, Noland made clear from the start that he knew how to snare the eye, but he’s apparently lost sight of how to keep that attention happily entrapped.

Chac Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 550-6792, through Saturday.