cannibal flower gallery
by Mike Coppolino
December 2002

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 construction that was an archetypal 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 artists 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 Wassner'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 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 Laurie 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.