Karthik Pandian.

Richard Telles Fine Art | Los Angeles, California

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Presenting three large, multifaceted film installations, "Darkroom" is primarily Karthik Pandian's graduate show at Art Center College of Design last year. Handsomely re-installed in Richard Telles' Beverly Boulevard gallery (through April 11), the works are all dated 2008 except for the pages recently torn from the Financial Times plastered across the front window and doorway. Like an inverse camera obscura, the show documents the artist's fascination with the concept of light, which runs the gamut from photography and popular memory to the recession and proverbial good and evil.

Given this metaphor, one easily gets the opening reference to tough economic times--even if it doesn't shed much light on the main installations. Possibly sensing this too, Pandian has dressed the window with a small silkscreened symbol mimicking, according to the artist, the footprint of the show's title work. Indeed, coming after such a transparent one-liner, Darkroom almost imparts too much information, both elucidating but also eclipsing its meaning. Furthermore, the six-channel 16mm film installation is housed in a serpentine entanglement of scaffolding and electronic equipment that the viewer is obliged to navigate in order to observe the projections, involving a lot of squinting and crawling around.

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The film components of Darkroom, a dense mix of superimposed and interspliced imagery, were shot in a range of locales, including Berlin and Los Angeles. Projectors are paired off, set on top of each other, adding innuendo to the films' overall doublings. Glimpses of the foreign and the familiar flicker in and out of frame, among them a bridge in Frankfurt designed by Albert Speer Jr. (the son of the notorious Nazi-era architect) and sunset at Zuma Beach in Malibu. Pandian's subtle voiceovers include hard-to-hear statements like "Ich rufe die Jugend der Welt," Speer Sr. being flipped off, and, more seductively, "I want you inside me." A muffled minimal techno mix (produced in collaboration with DJ-musician Eric D. Clark) plays in the background. The "coupled" projectors and dank, constricting crawlspaces are tangibly ominous, evoking a sexy intimacy tinged with real dread.

On view in the entrance space before one reaches the elaborate Darkroom is New Moon (After Anger, Hope), a looped video of the William Mulholland Memorial Fountain shot at night. Employing light equipment conveniently poached from a nearby film unit, it is projected onto a sheet of sandblasted glass partly buried in a bag of construction sand. Located at Los Feliz near Griffith Park, this monument commemorates the man whose stranglehold on L.A.'s water supply ended up costing lives and destroying whole industries as well. The illusion of endless growth and prosperity seems to be embodied in the structure of New Moon, offering episodic transmutations of water, wind, sand and glass.

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The exhibition's meteoric traversal of light concludes in Developer, a 16mm film screened once daily in Richard Telles' Martel Avenue space. Shot with a malfunctioning camera, the film strobes and jumps through the Beverly Hills home of a Palestinian real estate developer, which the unprepared artist happened to visit one day. We are treated to a long, jerky tracking shot through displays of conspicuous consumption, including Middle Eastern-looking bathrooms and hallways. There's no accounting for where we are or what any of it means, which seems to be the point if ultimate conundrum of Pandian's show. Memories are always screened, whether in the dark or up there in lights.