Street cred

California subculture mixes religion and kitsch at Young Blood

Get a bunch of street culture-inspired artists together in Los Angeles, New York, Miami or Atlanta, and there’s a good chance the work they create is going to look similar. Just as trends circulate in mainstream culture, subcultures often share aesthetic styles and sensibilities.

Much of the artwork by the Los Angeles-based Workhorse artist collective on view at Young Blood Gallery looks like it could have been made by the Atlanta-based artists who regularly show at the Grant Park gallery. The same interests crop up: anime, Tim Burton’s gothic critters, Japanese pop culture and the post-industrial urban cityscape.

Workhorse frontman Logan Hicks is visibly influenced by the stencil and spray-paint materials of street art in his works on wood and paper. But while a stencil artist might use just one image and one color, Hicks uses multiple overlays of stencils to create more complicated photorealist images of fire escapes, 19th-century buildings and train yards. Forget traditional landscapes. Hicks’ haunting black-and-silver images wrest noir beauty from unexpected inner-city locales.

Though less technically proficient, artist Poor Al also takes his inspiration from machine, metal and urban aesthetics. In Poor Al’s smog and concrete-choked reality, “Robo Flowers” feature metal “stalks” sprouting pink and yellow posies.

But despite many similarities between Workhorse and other pop culture-fixated artists, there are some noticeable differences in the artwork by these California artists, too.

For one thing, there’s a predominance of kitsch and tattoo influences and nods to a mid-century modern design sensibility more commonly associated with Los Angeles.

Kitsch looms large in Sergio Hernandez’s work. He often paints on reappropriated thrift store detritus. Old wooden plaques and prissy metal plates become ad hoc canvases for works like “Hippies” and “Dog Boy” of a mutt with a furiously barking man’s face.

Pop culture and kitsch also collide in Mr. Cartoon’s melodramatic “Soul Assassins,” a black-and-white print combining movie poster-style design with the hyperbolic sexiness of tattoo art and the edgy, romantic style of the “Love and Rockets” Hernandez brothers.

While kitsch is to be expected from the land that gave us lowriders sporting fuzzy dice and suntanned matrons in pink frosted lipstick and Lilly Pulitzer shifts, it’s the surprising element of religion in both Mr. Cartoon and Hernandez’s work that sets it apart from that seen in Atlanta’s street and graf culture. These artists show how the California Juxtapoz subculture of hot rods and tattoos is also infused with the influences of Hispanic Catholicism and Far East belief.

A beautiful Hispanic Virgin Mary, weeping one perfect Lichtenstein tear, is at the center of Mr. Cartoon’s “Soul Assassins,” a piece both over the top and strangely transfixing for its comic-simplicity and tantalizing narrative tease.

In two “David and Goliath” pieces — one a print and one a painting — Hernandez puts a funny retro spin on the tale of will triumphing over might. His David is a spunky ’50s-style kid with his slingshot at the ready. And Goliath looks like the Shoney’s Big Boy-gone-bad boy.

Lesley Reppeteaux is the lone girl in a guy’s world. She paints Emily the Strange-style dreamy/spooky girls with pin dot eyes and flowing black hair, drawing equal inspiration from goth culture and fairy tales. Her small black-and-white ink drawings in the “Halloween Series” suggest mutations of monster movie science fiction and subcultural hipsters, or a Nightmare Before Christmas casting call.

Amid all of the gritty youth culture influences, the real aesthetic rule-breaker in the show is Freddi C, who departs from the familiar street culture lexicon. His quartet of paintings demonstrates a graffiti-style emphasis on multilayering, but he employs an image bank that is more Wallpaper than Obey Giant. The artist’s elegant, cool, mid-century modern works combine retro Silly Putty pinks and chalkboard greens with background details inspired by vintage textiles. These design-based works are odes to the vintage furniture created by Charles Eames, Mies van der Rohe and Verner Panton and the slouchy young babes whose angular bodies seem designed to fit those Barcelona and Panton chairs.

For those accustomed to Young Blood’s fairly consistent countercultural look, the Workhorse show may seem downright familiar, even home style. But despite the increasing similarities in street cultures (due in part to the global reach of the Internet and MTV), this show proves subtle regional differences remain.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com