Photographer Tatiana Botton brings her abstract eye to the strange and mutable iceberg at her first solo exhibition ‘Ice’ from February 13 through March at g169 on West Channel Road in Santa Monica Canyon. The opening reception will be on Saturday, February 13 from 5 to 8 p.m.   Floating, sailing, twisting and melting in the vast world of Antarctica, icebergs are the fascination for Botton, surprisingly, because she had originally thought that she would prefer the land-based phenomena, such as the penguins, on her trip to Antarctica.   During her 14-day excursion aboard the National Geographic Explorer ship in October, Botton and her partner, Lauren McCollum, managed to survive the notoriously choppy, turbulent waters of Drake’s Passage’a two-day endurance test from the tip of Argentina to the Antarctic peninsula.   ’It was 48 hours of straight crossing’or for some, two days of lying in bed,’ Botton says. The benefit, though, was that the passengers were well informed by the time they emerged from the trial. The Explorer is equipped with a team of scientists, who offer videos and presentations on the strange, empty continent.   Although Botton was able to get close to the many varieties of penguin (minus the majestic emperors), she was transfixed by the icebergs.   ’I think the best pictures I took were of the tabular icebergs,’ she says. These particular icebergs have a flat, table-like top and steep sides. She credits a middle-of-the night view from the deck for her splendid shots. ‘The captain had promised the passengers that if the light was good at 3:30 a.m.’by the time we had cleared Drake’s Passage’he would wake us up via intercom. At 3:30, I woke spontaneously, put on all my gear and went out in the 10-below night air. There was a white cloud cover, no sunlight (at this time of year, spring in South America is daylight most of the time). The flat light made it easier to photograph the icebergs.’ Botton remained on deck shooting the gigantic shapes until about 8 in the morning, at which time a few more brave souls joined her.   Botton, 38, specializes in advertising and editorial portraits but fits her Antarctic expedition into the category of personal work. ‘Right now it’s all about panoramic landscapes,’ she says. Future projects may include a trip to Hawaii to study and photograph the lava flows, and perhaps a study of the desert.   Botton, whose father is French, grew up in Cannes and Barcelona, where she studied American literature and filmmaking. She moved to Los Angeles in 1994 to study journalism at UCLA, and has remained ever since. She and Lauren and their cat make their home in Santa Monica.   ’While writing for publications in the U.S. and Spain, I discovered photography,’ she says. ‘Making people look beautiful was initially easy for me and drew me in, but capturing the ‘essence,’ as one art director said to me, was the real challenge. I found that I had to approach each subject intuitively.’   Botton was attracted to icebergs for their abstract shapes, and was further intrigued by the names of their locations that speak to the fabled lore and silent starkness of the continent. Names like Deception Island and Paradise Bay encourage the visitor to create their own narrative, she says.   Botton’s association with Frank Langen’s g169 came about through Langen’s girlfriend Diana Brown, a good friend. His gallery in Santa Monica offered an agreeable fit with her interest in marrying art with philanthropy. Twenty percent of the proceeds of this exhibition will be given to Heal The Bay, whose mission is to protect and preserve the health of Santa Monica Bay.   She and Lauren have just closed on a commercial building in Santa Monica’an old printing press at Tenth and Broadway’that they intend to open as an art studio/gallery. ‘I would like to combine art with charity, particularly with local organizations,’ Botton says. ‘We’ve already talked with L.A.’s Best, an after-school education and enrichment program for elementary school kids.’ Botton will be on hand at Saturday’s reception to talk further about her Antarctica adventure. ‘It’s an amazing location; from one season to the next, it will always be different. No matter how many photographers come, they will never be able to find the same picture again.’

The Armand Hammer Museum has been on a roll in recent months, with shows by Charles Burchfield and Robert Crumb. Add to this eclectic, electric list the young abstract artist Jonas Wood, whose whimsical series of paintings based on plants are a must-see. ‘I’m only relying on structure: plant and base,’ Wood tells the Palisadian-Post on a recent visit to his Culver City home base. And that’s about it. The minimalist painter jettisons three-dimensional planes and perspective from his latest group of canvases. Alive with simple shapes and basic colors which all at once evoke Joan Mir’, Alexander Calder and perhaps some wonderfully dated-looking art from a Little Golden children’s book or the cover of a funky 1960s jazz album, Wood’s paintings are now on display through May 9 at the Hammer, located at Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards. In addition to various group shows, Wood’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago and Tokyo. Wood’s Culver City studio is located at the end of a busy alley in an industrial area lined with hangars of auto parts and furniture imports. A small black dog named Robot greets the Post reporter on a recent visit. In one corner of the room, Wood’s assistant will spend the entire time focused on his laptop, as if posing for a still life. As solid as the work is, Wood’s Hammer exhibit may be a disservice to him as an artist, as it represents only one facet of what he does. Here at his studio, there’s a much wider breadth on display, and the artist, casual in a royal blue track suit jacket, is surrounded by oversized works in various stages of completion: abstracted portraits based on family photos and baseball cards, interiors, a Spalding basketball. But at the Hammer, viewers will see his series of potted plants, distilled to their very essence: leaves, stem, base. All of these oil-on-linen works are untitled. Wood is not particularly excited about titling his individual paintings. But he does have a label for the group of nine abstracts already there hanging at the Hammer. ‘The name of the show is ‘New Plants,” Woods says. ‘I want you to know that these are plants.’ Or ‘very simplified plant forms,’ as he dubs them. Wood did not consciously set out to emulate or evoke Calder, an artist he enjoys, but he relates to and connects with Calder’s ‘primal struggle’ between dimensions. On one table sits a miniature model of the gallery space at the Hammer which Wood created to see how the paintings would be organized. Next to this cardboard construction, which features thumbnail versions of the paintings on display, are under-drawings for paintings of the model itself. Instead of painting existing interiors, as he has often done, ‘I’m doing the reverse,’ he says, ‘creating hypothetical interiors.’ Wood, who turns 33 this year, was born in Boston and raised in the suburb Weston. He received a B.A. in psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York, and his M.F.A. from the University of Washington in 2002. Upon graduation, he knew he didn’t want to return to the East Coast, so he moved to Los Angeles in 2003 at the urging of a buddy, sculptor Matt Johnson. Unlike, say, San Francisco, L.A. has an important art scene, Wood says. Unlike New York, L.A. has good weather going for it. The artist does see some California influence in some work, ‘particularly the cactus and succulents out here.’ To him, the palm trees are exotic, ‘prehistoric.’ One painting features a bird of paradise atop a Sony stereo speaker, which is broken down into geometric shapes and cool, muted colors. Interiors of his parents’ and grandparents’ homes are a kind of ground zero from which many of his abstract images emerged, to be re-contextualized. One of the paintings in the Hammer show, a predominantly yellow canvas with wan doodles earmarked by a red triangle wedge, is based on his painting of a children’s drawing made by his older sister, pinned to the wall of his childhood home and appeared in the background of another painting. From a portrait of his mother with a cat seated in front of a group of plants, Wood created a series reinterpreting those plants as seen in the painting, not the source photos. ‘I’ve been painting the art in the back of my paintings,’ Wood says. ‘There are all sorts of abstractions, all these little moments’ which he likes to re-contextualize as new works of art. ‘But it’s still from me. I don’t feel as detached.’ He points to the vague reds and yellows behind Oil Can Boyd on a baseball card pinned to the wall. ‘I could say everything about those things,’ he says, regarding those blurry shapes. On one wall, his portrait of Pablo Picasso hangs among his interpretations of baseball heroes. ‘All of the Boston sports teams are my teams,’ he says, showing his rendition of former Celtic Larry Bird. Wood walks the Post through some of his process. Take a particularly lively portrait of Wood’s wife, ceramist Shio Kusaka (who is now about seven months pregnant with their first child), and Robot, amid striped furniture and a gaudy chandelier. In the painting”in which Wood exploits patterns in Kusaka’s dress, the furniture, and in the repetition created by the chandelier’s candleholders”art imitates life as Robot is depicted doing exactly what he does during the Post’s visit: slumbering in a black, long-haired lump.   Wood suggests that a common technique cuts across all of his paintings, regardless of subject matter. ‘There’s a flatness in my work,’ he says. That is Wood’s legerdemain, making such minimalism look effortless and fresh. Wood believes that ‘only in the last three or four years have I been making work that’s important [in terms of his artistic evolution].’ So does Wood worry that ‘New Plants’ might erroneously suggest an artist with a narrow type of output? ‘I have a fear of being pigeonholed,’ he says, quickly adding that he does not fret about these images representing his first major West Coast show. ‘History compresses an artist’s work to make people think they’re doing only a certain kind of work,’ Wood says. ‘I’m not going to be concerned if people are [upset] if I never do anything like this again.’

The Grape Vine

In 1946, when my Uncle Louis’s wife died, he moved from the Midwest to the nation’s new frontier: Las Vegas, Nevada. A year or two later, our family drove out to visit him. It was a desolate place, mostly desert, with one hotel called the El Rancho. In 1953, we saw my sister Corky and Liberace appear in the opening show for the new Riviera Hotel. This year, when my wife and I returned, out of nostalgia, we decided to visit the new 67-acre City Center, one of the largest commercial developments in the world, anchored by four hotels: the Mandarin Oriental, the Aria and Casino, the Vdara Hotel, and the as-yet-unopened Harmon. For a long time, Las Vegas appealed to big gamblers. For a short time, the appeal shifted to families. The latest approach focuses on eating, drinking and, as always, fabulous entertainment. In the City Center alone, there are 17 restaurants. We stayed at the Vdara, in a beautiful, quiet room with a view of the mountains and a full kitchen, all for $129 per night. With several friends to visit, we only had time to see one show. At a cousin’s recommendation, we selected magician Lance Burton. To this day, I cannot figure out how Burton made people disappear, or how he levitated them. And I can’t imagine how he created a flock of ducks out of a handkerchief, and how he got said ducks to follow his verbal instructions. Spectacular! The Silk Road restaurant in the Vdara is not worth the trip to Las Vegas. My bacon was cold, and there are no fish dishes such as lox or herring available for breakfast. But it was no problem to walk to the Bellagio, where, for $15, I had a buffet that included a huge table laden with various types of fish, Chinese food and pastries. Elsewhere, we had tapas and gazpacho at Julian Serrano (good but not spectacular) and we snacked at the Petrossian caviar house in the Bellagio, where the caviar is too expensive to enjoy. However, the terrine of fois gras and selection of Polish vodkas are superb. And then we splurged. Pierre Gagniare, one of the most prominent Michelin three-star chefs in the world, currently owns eight restaurants worldwide, including locations in Paris, London and Hong Kong. Twist, located inside the exquisite Mandarin, with terrific 23rd-floor views of the Strip, is Gagniare’s first in the States. So we rolled the dice. For once, our bet paid off. The staff was amazingly friendly. Julie Lee, the wine steward, was very helpful in suggesting some excellent wines in our price range. The chef de cuisine, recently from the London restaurant, came over to the table to chat. The service was impeccable. I started with the ‘Lobster Five Ways.’ Surprisingly, I found the lobster sashimi most flavorful. There were a number of spectacular dishes, but the one that stands out centered around small, thick noisettes of veal sitting in a rich morel mushroom sauce and served with a small cup of veal stock on the side. Absolute perfection. With a delicious bottle of Spanish Priorat at $55 and a more full-bodied Cabernet from Honig winery at $95, the bill totaled $150 per person. (A much better deal than the $300 per person”food only”quoted to us at the famous Joel Rubishon restaurant.) With a comfortable, reasonably priced room, a spectacular show, and a dinner as good as one would expect in a three-star restaurant in Paris, a good time was had by all.

  Ten Women Gallery, located at 2651 Main St. in Santa Monica, is run by 10 local artists, one of whom is Margot Strong, a longtime resident of Pacific Palisades and manager of the gallery.   All of the art is diverse and handmade, from one-of-a-kind jewelry, hand-sewn purses, fingerless gloves and hand-knitted delights to glass works, pottery and handmade cards.   The ten women share gallery expenses, responsibilities and workload, maintaining one of the longest-standing retail outlets in Santa Monica. The gallery celebrates its ‘sweet 16’ this year.   On the last Friday night of each month, Main Street galleries will stay open late, and Ten Women will remain open until 9:30 p.m.   Contact: 310-314-9152. Rich Schmitt/Staff Photographer