Soft Spot Magazine
#2 February 2003
Cannibal Flower Gallery

The desperate poison that emanates out of Skid Row tends to mutate the
denizens. Drive through the Fashion district of old LA after the warehouses
have shut down and you see the signs of surrender everywhere, the blank
faces of buildings, the tent cities, the dealers making stops without
concern at intersections. It is a harsh cold place. Pigeons make the jump
from seed to meat just as people make the jump from booze to crack; moving
back and forth to Darwin's law of what's available. The mercury lights
flicker in dead marquees, the defective illusion of safety only highlighting
the danger of finding the wrong people in the wrong place. These ruins that
stand in the shadow of Miracle Mile are the improbable place for things to
grow, yet here and there, there are glimpses of something new rising from
the mulch of civic failure.

Over the last two years, the Cannibal Flower gallery has grown up as a
bright spot amid the relics of prosperity. It's taken root at 453 Spring
street, a 100 year old bank building. It is the type of building you only
find in old cities, and it's a signal of LA's emergence as a remnant of the
industrial age, a relic of the first age of speculation, a time when
buildings were built out of money that didn't exist, a grandiose sort of
consrtuction that was an archtypal poster of excess for what later became
the great depression.

Now the gallery has taken over the space after nearly thirty years of
inactivity and has become one of the more improbable and spectacular places
to hang art and throw a party. Within two years, the gallery has expanded
to show other artists, reaching out to places like San Francisco and Seattle
to bring new art and artistis into the changing LA scene. Already it's a
fine addition to lowbrow legends like La Luz de Jesus gallery; but more than
this, the gallery is a fine network of styles shown in a large enough place
to make it all not seem so crowded. Rooms intentionally built as secrets
now act as offshoots from the main hall. Vault doors ready made for
stereotypical safecrackers are now wide open, the guts of the mechanism now
advertisements for multimedia exhibits and hallucinatory animations. And
it's not like the gallery is expressly interested in beauty, there are often
some works done with risk and as in the case of Wasner's "A baby for Vera",
the trick is making a nightmarish whorehouse/nursery seem almost elegant.
Or Neely's cartoon images that capture the most disgusting and violent of
our human tendencies, a violence in cartooning that goes beyond the glib
humor of a sick and twisted show. These are paintings that have gone beyond
style to capture an elemental emotion, some with a lacerating cynicism and
others like Lauri Robertson's "11", with a wispy dreamlike beauty that
borders on alien weirdness.

The potential of this gallery is endless, with a vast stretch of vacant
floors hurtling up from the lobby, who knows what popularity and a little
expansion might do to the place. Possibly it might extend to the streets,
spreading outward instead of upward, a renewal to make the orphaned dirt of
this city into something beautiful once again.