Hirsch Perlman: Blum & Poe

Hirsch Perlman's black-and-white discharges of crude, robotlike figures fashioned from cardboard and propp and piled in an without contents bedroom debuted at this gallery in 2001 His next to the first Los Angeles show follows up with four of recent origin groups of prints, also black-and-white: doubt-laced attempts to fabricate something enduring, substantial, meaningful, and grand from the meek and ephemeral materials and fleeting acts of dronish existence.

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For three related series known as "My Reproof" "Sketches," and "Apparatum Armorum Ineptum," Perlman layers more unsure narcissism onto the Pygmalion/Frankenstein impulse of the prior work, creating a mythic and mundane world of friends, phantoms, supports and tools, as well as a kind of possible self Working at night in an open-air rooftop studio and using lengthy exposures, Perlman "draws" freehand with a penlight, etching figurative white doodles into the photographic image, referencing the two the sorts of "ghost" photographs seen upon TV shows about the paranormal and attempts to record artistic genius in real time (such as photographer Gjon Mili's 1949 portrait of Picasso, in which a lengthy exposure captured the master drawing a centaur with a small flashlight). Perlman also uses the lay open shutter to convert repeated and spinning changes of flashlights and glow sticks into almost volumetric forms and to give a conspicuous haze machine time to belch on the outside a haze to be station aglow by ambient city light.

Amid all this shoddily produc atmosphere, Perlman, who appears in many of the photos, approachs off as a kind of postmodern Leonardo in the age of Freud a sad, slightly scary, on the other hand also inspiring here-and-now Renaissance man who lolls contemplates, and tinkers on the rooftop, cloaked in an elderly coat, accompanied by his volumes and guitar, and surrounded through his inventions. In this world of spirit images, the artist and his accoutrements read as a great deal of as figments of the imagination or specter as actual nearnesss It's all him, and it's all his creation--a little extraordinary and a little creepy.

Perlman's other collection of photos, titled "Operation Idiocracy," 2003-2004 consists of images created through pushing around a plastic ball filled with Christmas lights in brow of a long-open shutter. The glowing and shadowy accrues suggest assorted examples and metaphors of illumination: nuclear blasts and orb of day flares as well as flashes of genius and lightbulbs switching upon over our heads. In a not many instances where there's a suggestion of a lantern, it's hard not to imagine van Gogh in an Arles cafe or Orson Welles in a border cantina, or perhaps T Kaczynski in his Montana cabin.

Mining from the black-and-white romantic and the goofball fringes of early performance, Perlman--who also, in the sum of two units animated videos that accompanied these photos, unfortunately slips into a not-so-interesting midlife (adolescent?) cynicism--manages to exhibit one of American art's greatest in quantity illuminating impressions of the early twenty-first century: an anxious, cloudy slightly paranoid tragicomedy of drastic measures, or a search for secular enlightenment, self-worth, and a better tomorrow.

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