Nery Gabriel Lemus at Steve Turner Contemporary

Nery Lemus' work at Steve Turner is evocative in many personal ways. At inSITE2000, artist Mark Dion created Blind/Hide. a camouflaged hut where one could bird watch along the Tijuana River estuary. As part of the scavenger hunt that is inSITE, Diane Calder and I had a picnic lunch inside the artwork, donning the coats and pith helmets, and bird watching with the provided binoculars.

A few years before that I was on the roof of the parking structure for the Tijuana airport, coordinating a plan to bring a friend across the border. The fence that separated the United States and Mexico was an imperfect thing at the time, and in places the barrier had to allow for the arroyos and rivers that crisscross the political boundary. At the appointed time, my friend would sneak along the dry wash that passed under the fence as I drove over the dirt road that ran parallel to the border. If la migra were not in sight, I would slow, he would hop in, and we would then head north. From my high vantage point, I couldn't help but notice the birds that crossed the barrier with impunity. In a way, it seemed sort of arbitrary that the political powers would control the movement of one particular species, but not another.

The quality of execution of Lemus' drawings leans more towards the OCD pencil work of his CalArts faculty than the Iza Genzkin vomit that's often popular among the Younger Than Jesus crowd. Some of the images are familiar to regular readers of Los Angeles' dead tree publication. In fact, I may have clipped the image of undocumented immigrants using trash bags as flotation devices as they swam in the sewage and insecticide runoff that is the Colorado River as it crosses the border. The toxic river provided safe passage past the septic-phobic border patrol agents, unwilling to muddy their boots. Taken in toto, Lemus' images provide a complex story of migration, surveillance, and death along the political divide.

Still, I'm left with one of those basic but uncomfortable questions that plagued older generations of CalArtians. I have to blame John Mandel for this, from my year as an impressionable first year student. I remember someone showing a painting in class, and John asking the student what he'd like (ideally) to become of the object that he made. Shown in a gallery? In a museum? Have it bought by a collector? The student was seemed to be happy with any of these prospects. So would it matter who bought it? The student didn't really care. In typical Mandel hyperbole he (rhetorically) asked, "So if Adolf Hitler wanted to buy your painting and hang it over his sofa, you'd be fine with that?"

Unlike, say, Sam Durant's banners outside the OCMA California Biennial spray painted (in Spanish) "We are workers, not criminals," (which wave like red capes to the torros in condos across the street) Lemus' aesthetic commodities fit over a sofa, and are for sale. The problem with such poetic diptychs is that the meaning is flexible to the politics of the owner, which is probably not the artist's intent.

Nery Gabriel Lemus' Friction of Distance was at Steve Turner Contemporary Art from July 18 to August 15, 2009.

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