Art Review: L. Ross Gallery pits contrasting visions of reality, dreams

This untitled photograph by Ian Lemmonds uses tiny thrift-store action figures to depict a Wild West shootout.

The pairing of work by Carl Moore and Ian Lemmonds at L. Ross Gallery may seem capricious because of vast differences in medium and style.

Moore paints with acrylic on canvas. His colors are flat, pastel or neon-like, poster hues. He encloses human figures, animals and objects in broad borders of contrasting color. The compositions of the paintings are straightforward. His subjects hint at social issues or occasionally display a marked and questioning social consciousness.

On the other hand, Lemmonds' photographs, deeply saturated in color (even in whiteness), speak of dream worlds, unconscious motifs, a playful (or savage) wit and a sly, oblique relationship to popular culture.

Carl Moore's "The Boxers" features a hint of Pop Art along with bold lines that lend "action" to the mural-like image.

This untitled photograph by Ian Lemmonds uses tiny thrift-store action figures to depict a Wild West shootout.

Sounds like the eternal artistic dichotomy between form and content or between art-with-a-purpose and art-for-art's-sake, but there is a connecting thread. Moore and Lemmonds each deal in iconic and powerfully graphic expressions of power and implied (or explicit) violence.

With his forceful sense of structure, Moore comes close to abstracting his images. Look at the companion paintings called "The Boxers" and "The Boxers II." Each captures a moment when a dynamic punch knocks the protector from an opponent's mouth, but in "Boxers II" the point-of-view is so foreshortened and the image so pared to essentials that it's difficult to tell what's going on. Looking at the smaller "The Boxers" rights the perspective — we are now seeing over the shoulder of the stricken opponent as his face gets whomped around — and provides an explanatory footnote to the larger piece. The artist conveys motion to a basically static, mural-like depiction through the subtle use of "action" marks and the vitality of the borders surrounding the figures.

"It doesn't take a lot to express an image," said Moore. He called his manner "really a flashback style. When I left Memphis College of Art in the 1980s, I was an illustrator and designer. Everything had to be perfect. I used a combination of acrylic and air-brush, and that's good to know how to do but not fulfilling."

Moore's attempt to forge "a style with latitude and freedom" included that sense of perfectionism — his surfaces and lines are impeccable — along with a sort of Pop Art surrealism and what he called "humanism. I don't like the term 'social commentary,' so just say that I wanted to express something, something scaled-down and aware of what's happening in the world."

Lemmonds disagrees about his counterpart's referential stance toward popular culture.

The little toy figures he uses in his photographs, which are taken with an old camera he bought for $50 — "there's a foolish pride in making art with terrible equipment" — he buys at thrift stores, usually by the bagful. The dinosaurs, skeletons and cowboys depicted in this exhibition are completely anonymous, and that's the way he wants it.

"The toys are generic," Lemmonds said. "There's nothing recognizable as a brand, and that's important to me. I actually try to avoid popular culture."

But pop culture exists in ideas, not just brands, and what more iconic figures or action exists in American consciousness than the gun-slinging shootout of the Wild West? So, in his show's largest image, one cowboy shoots down another — both are painted white — their drama staged on a white window sill that is part of a white window frame around which white lace curtains blow against a backdrop of white light. The mise en scène is the drained panorama of the parched nightmare in which inexplicable actions seem endlessly and silently repeated, a sinister variation on Keats' Grecian Urn.

"All I'm concerned with is that the viewer has an idea that something is happening but not necessarily what it is," said Lemmonds. "I don't want to give so much information that it hits people over the head. That's why I leave the photographs untitled, so viewers experience them on their own. There's a narrative there, even if it's not clear."

Carl Moore, "People, Places, Perspectives"; Ian Lemmonds: "New Work"

Through May 31 at L Ross Gallery, 5040 Sanderlin, Suite 104. Call 767-2200

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