Daughter's Portrait Abellana acknowledges the modern transformations that have come and did not resist these changes by depicting his daughter Ellen in full Flower Power getup in a 1970 portrait. Instead, he attempted to comprehend and contextualize them, as he did in the early 1960s with his experiments in abstraction and expressionism to see if he was adept in this newfangled movement.

Result #1

Today, when the heir of a 19th-century father/son duo is also the father of a 17-year-old daughter, it seems more appropriate to remember that both of these artists used painting as a way to express the complex conflicts and anxieties of their times—as they did in Abellana's case, through the eloquent and sensual phrases of his combination of painter and word. However, if this current exhibition suggests anything, it's that Abellanas line-painting—his darkroom methods, his hauntingly emotional palette—are not nearly enough.

Result #2

Daughter's Portrait Abellana acknowledges the modern transformations that have come and did not resist these changes by depicting his daughter Ellen in full Flower Power getup in a 1970 portrait. Instead, he attempted to comprehend and contextualize them, as he did in the early 1960s with his experiments in abstraction and expressionism to see if he was adept in this newfangled movement. With this year's work, it appears that Abellana is quite capable of revisiting his predecessors.However, if his efforts at commercial reappropriation are any indication, we may be looking at an artist for the many who are already seen as one of the art worlds sacred. Abellanas continued affinity with Figuration is paralleled by an apparent desire to recreate for the viewer the ancient mythic simplicity of his own childhood, where, as the artist describes, he was living in the jungles of the Amazon. By playing with the feminine without transgressing its boundaries, Abellana uses his artistic medium to make us conscious of our own positions within the forest of images of power. A series of colored triangles and lines hangs in the gallery windows, spreading the word beyond the walls in a gesture that brings us back to the works on paper. This piece also serves as a signifier for our individual relationships with the world, and our relationship to others. Abellana suggests that the journey of an artist from the grave to the stage of invention is not to be undertaken by anyone but himself. In other words, it is the journey of a spirit from the grave to the stage of invention. In the final analysis, Abellanas work is an interpretation of reality as a performance of these movements. But is that reality, or is it a postmodern myth?As the artist has said, It is not possible to complete the journey. Abellana is interested in what happens when a artist begins to regress from the grave. As a result, his work demonstrates how art is a performance in itself, rather than a mark of achievement. He is a very intellectual artist. In an exhibition at the Perpetual Museum of Contemporary Art, the artist installed six works, all from this year. In each piece, the word is imprinted on the paper like an inscription; the gesture is inseparable from the painting.

Result #3

Ellen used to speak to me from a distance, her voice still in her long, deep voice, as if she were speaking through me. For a time, it appeared to be me speaking, but it was really something else: Ellen's voice transformed into that of my first wife, and my first daughter's voice filled with the recorded voices of others' voices. Ellen seems to have recognized that her true role as a woman was to act. Yet Ellen's capacity as an adult was not to act but to hear, and she acted to a gender that was not her own. At the same time, though, Ellen's own voice became a record of an act, and it may be that the erotic gesture of an adult woman became the gesture of an adolescent girl who is a profoundly vulnerable and reluctant victim.In the same way that Ellen's dreams and desires are to be understood and transcribed, I suggest that we try to see their reconciliation. The artist's image, which Ellen chose as her medium, is just as unblematic, and the significance of the subject's pose is just as overwhelming. We may ask ourselves whether Ellen's self-portrait, in its reassimilation of what has been shown to be a feminine pose, is what it means to honor this feminine identity. She can be seen as a response to the closed society of her family and to the imperative of the family unit, and to a society that denied the body's right to representation. In the end, Ellen's pose is a psychological one, reflecting an awareness of her own identity as a woman and the need for control.

Result #4

Daughter's Portrait Abellana acknowledges the modern transformations that have come and did not resist these changes by depicting his daughter Ellen in full Flower Power getup in a 1970 portrait. Instead, he attempted to comprehend and contextualize them, as he did in the early 1960s with his experiments in abstraction and expressionism to see if he was adept in this newfangled movement. Abellana is interested in the connections between the war on terrorism and the war in Vietnam, but he is more interested in the contemporary struggle between the survivors and the catastrophe of destruction. He juxtaposes his own photographs of the former guerrilla soldiers of the Huey P. Long Distance Rifle Association with images taken from reports in Vietnams press of guerrilla warfare, protests, and riots; he has also used Vietnams military history to create a body of work that appears almost a critique of American imperialism.Abellanas latest work, taken from his series The Big Picture, 2004–2005, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The series was begun in collaboration with the artists wife, Margarita, and depicts the famous split-wall of the Wall in Berlin in the eyes of Berliners in a photograph taken at the Berlin Wall in June 1989. In this photo, Abellana's wife looks out at the upper portion of the wall, while the lower portion of her body, centered in a glass enclosure, shows her with a child. A trompe loeil picture of the Berlin Wall was used as the subject of the series, as is one of the only one to feature the word Berlin and the country itself, in the same frame. In a traditional painting, Berlin has been replaced by Berlin; we get only the image of a monumental architectural structure. This series has always been a variation on the theme of the Berlin Wall as an emblem of isolation and, above all, of the collapse of the Western system of walls, which came crashing down in June 1989, as the breakup of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Eastern alliance under the post-communist era led to the collapse of the Iron Curtain.The Berlin Wall has been the image of rupture and distance; it serves as a symbol of the conflict between the Western landscape and the unknowable destructions of a shattered world.

Result #5

Daughter's Portrait Abellana acknowledges the modern transformations that have come and did not resist these changes by depicting his daughter Ellen in full Flower Power getup in a 1970 portrait. Instead, he attempted to comprehend and contextualize them, as he did in the early 1960s with his experiments in abstraction and expressionism to see if he was adept in this newfangled movement. She appears so pathetically not to move or feel—as if she were hiding behind her lace-bottom pants, worn gold-ringed suspenders, and fringed by the dark folds of an oversize suit. Yet her cheerful and happy pose carries an aura of glamour and elegance. The photograph evokes a stony professionalism: Abellanas image presents her daughter's face in the plastic of the portrait and, as if in a slick commercial, offers the same kind of satisfaction that a picture of a Marilyn Monroe gives. The lack of any definitive thought that might stem from Abellanas image-process of dissolution—of universal symbolism that would be like the dissolution of the portraits and their audience—also functions in the context of his earlier photography, in which the celebration of all things digital took the place of any active engagement with the real world.Abellanas iconic images are in part what gave the show its title, What the Shit-hole Do You Live In? The exhibition was assembled by Laura Hoptman's Office of Art and Media, the Berkeley Gallery of Art's newly created space in San Francisco. The artists, with the help of some 26 artists and collectives, toured the U.S., Europe, and Japan. What emerges is a youthful, optimistic, and social utopia. According to Abellana's prolific diary, which reaches over 500 pages, the juxtaposition of beautiful, beautiful girls who look like a billion dollars, a billion dollars, and a billion, a billion, the shit-hole do you live in? And the fuck-hole do you live in? Is it even possible to be that fascinating? They would certainly find it in those poses, which ironically are intended to pique our fascination and our curiosity.Despite Abellanas writings, there is no doubt that the moment of the photographs' release from their conceptual gestation has created a sense of lost time.