The works included in Milano Chow’s new show at Bel Ami, “Park La Brea,” conceal themselves from strangers, murmuring discomfort and paranoia under their breath, only audible when confronted with the intention of listening. Sterility, dizziness, remembrance, forgetfulness, exposure, delinquency, shame, desire, and fear loiter each of the four pairs on display. Two works, Facade and Facade with Staircase, command the show, presenting multi-story beaux-arts frontages — which, at first glance, suggest nothing more than facades, as flat as the paper on which they are illustrated — but reveal, on closer inspection, disjointed proportions and skewed expectations. While most windows are empty of subject matter, a few frame women, larger than the entry door, their silhouettes occasionally tucked behind curtains or blinds. Just as some windows emit light and others darkness, as would an occupied tenant building, some figures are fully obscured, some only partially, while others stare openly outward, their features visible in full. (Park La Brea, for those not acquainted with Los Angeles, is a massive postwar public housing complex just south of Hollywood, which is today apartments and condos.) Fixtures repeat in each column, with one or two misplaced, just slightly off center, disturbing the symmetry and organization of the whole. There is a sense of invitation coupled with a sense of intrusion, of invasion. There is a collapse between public and private life, a theme that recurs in so much great art since the 19th century. Chow’s works intensify this tension and call attention to it, without bashing the viewer over the head about it. Beneath the air of rigidity and unity, these works are teeming with life, movement, and dissonance.

Two dioramas are set on a table, displayed against a curtain that might otherwise find good use in a hospital between two patients’ beds. The dioramas are like forgotten models for a noir film never made. They recall the bleak hallways and empty rooms of the castle in Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka, or the sanitarium inhabited by Marcelle, in Bataille’s Story of the Eye. There is a stifling bureaucracy about them, and even the most elegant decorative flourishes seem to serve some functional utility. It is through these that we are admitted behind the facades of the first set of works. In Corner, a woman peeks out from behind a Japanese screen decorated by silhouettes of a setting sun, grasses, and a stoic crane. The floor is checkered, and its perimeter is drawn by a Greek meander, a labyrinth motif in linear form, like the salt surrounding a seance. There are two walls missing, but if they were present, they’d likely be identical to the two represented, outfitted with a door. I imagine that behind the doors there must be identical rooms, arranged molecularly and extending infinitely, like Borges’ Library of Babel, or the Cube of Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 film. 

A third pair, the most Lynchian of the ark, are most similar to the first pair of facades, however, with Eastern flares (referencing Bel Ami’s location, in a mock arcade stripmall in Los Angeles’ Chinatown), and, behind them, demarcated by checkered floors, and a horizon, cut short by the silhouette of a wall which mirrors the profile of that in the foreground; while it completes an image of an outdoor courtyard, it may also be merely a shadow of the illuminated facade. Presumably outdoor forums, or markets, they are totally empty except, again, for a single woman in each. The discomforting sense of voyeurism emitted in the first two facades falls away, and the women in the Checkered Floor pieces are left with the evasive appeal of fashion models. These panoramic works most typify the fragmented memories of dream-images; disparate forms, memories and places are combined and condensed, space is left undefined and constantly amorphous, and the object of desire is always receding from grasp.

Finally, the most distant perhaps from the others, on account of their representation not of objects associated with space, but objects associated with time, two clocks, with women pinned-up on their mantles. These two drawings, or collages (all of the works, by the way, are partly drawn, partly photograph transfers, assembled into collages, with the dioramas being the same, but in explicitly three dimensions) give something of essence to the rest. In keeping with the behavior of the show around them, they are understated, but are nonetheless the pulse of the exhibition. These Victorian-esque clocks dominate the women at their bases. In Clock (2:50), the woman is swinging, as though she were a component in its system. She is frozen in sway away from the clock’s faux-pendulum, but appears to be nonetheless animated by its arbitrary time keeping. In the other, Clock (7:27), the woman is in repose, killing time, at the base of the clock.

The drawings are rendered coldy and rigidly, schematically and without room for error, furnishing the contrasting disruptions in rhythm, symmetry, and proportions with all the more energy. And yet the works are delicate, as fragile as eggshells. “Park La Brea” cannot help but hark back to the 19th century over and over. It is haunted by its clocks and facades, but also by its Geist, by its elusive task, and by the fact that it seems to be so easily forgotten. It is striving to put images to the dream in which reality has been submerged. It is trying to tear art away from its rotten situation, shattering forgettable kitsch images and carefully reassembling them into new, dissonant compositions.  //

Milano Chow's "Park La Brea" is on view at Bel Ami in Los Angeles through December 5.