Submitted by David on Thu, 11/17/2011 - 11:26am
Hung in a Malibu beach house, with wide open Pacific sunsets just outside the window, the brooding color of, say, a Mark Rothko canvas just doesn’t have the same effect as it would in a New York loft. Or so critic Dave Hickey once pointed out. That’s why that first vanguard of California abstractionists painted bright and flat--they were contending with the ultimate natural expressionism and unforgiving natural light. Decades later, Marina Pinsky’s geometric, nearly abstract photographs manage to marry California light and a weighty broodiness that seems more suited to the expressionism and constructivism of the East Coast--or Eastern Europe, which is, after all, where the Russian-born, Boston-educated artist comes from.
When Daniel Ingroff, co-director of Workspace, an artist-run storefront in L.A.’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood, encountered Pinsky’s work at UCLA’s open studios, he was attracted, in part, by the push and pull between weight and light in her images. He set the wheels in motion for a show at Workspace, on view through December 4, and Pinsky came up with images of intentionally placed red bricks with illuminated light bulbs either propped up against them or hung down from them. The soon-to-graduate MFA student calls the series Water and Power, a title that mimics the work’s systematics but also gets at its carefully honed casualness.
By Catherine Wagley
