SAN DIEGO, CA.- This fall, Four Walls, a Ray Street gallery destination for investigative contemporary art, will present two new exhibitions of drawings and video by artists who explore the conceptual and expressive possibilities of negative space. Out of Sight, Out of Mind features time-based work in video format by Les Leveque and Wendy Richmond, while Out of Line, a group show of drawings in various media, includes examples by internationally renowned artists Nicole Eisenman, Jim Shaw, and Masami Teraoka. Both exhibitions run concurrently from September 8 through November 7, 2007.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Time-Based Work displays videos that dislocate and recombine physical and psychological spaces to reveal new ways of experiencing our place in the visual and social plane. Les Leveque’s 2 Spellbound of 1999 is a frame-by-frame re-edit of Alfred Hitchcock’s 111 minute psychoanalytic thriller into a 7½ minute music video. Exploiting the symmetry of Hitchcock’s camera, the stability of narrative logic is replaced with a Rorshachian dance where ecstatic bodies and identities intermingle and shift.

Also on view, Wendy Richmond’s parallel works, Airport (1 minute), and Airport (1½ minutes) of 2007, demonstrate how contemporary Americans occupy personal space in the public sphere as a culturally constructed form of composure. Her work consists of tiny movies that she has shot of people in simple daily activities, such as the ground crew servicing airplanes, which she has woven into choreographed patterns of startling depth and calibration. Richmond’s work will be featured in the concurrent solo exhibition, “Public Privacy: Wendy Richmond’s Surreptitious Cellphone,” at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego from September 8, 2007, through January 6, 2008.

Out of Line: An Exhibition of Drawings presents seven works by established and emerging artists who each explore the expressive possibilities of line, and the negative space it renders, to posit witty observations on the world and the nature of form. For example, in a pencil and ink study from his famous LA Sushi Series (1981), Masami Teraoka samples the techniques of Japanese woodblock prints to fill the negative spaces of his two-dimensional sheet with expressive calligraphic line, cartoon-like cells of sushi menu images, and faux provenance seals.

Negative space in Nicole Eisenman’s Complaints of 1994 at once isolates and throws into relief the visual pun of the children’s odd encounter with a face-painting clown. Eisenman has created works filled with provocative humor in a variety of media throughout her career and has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gill, Mexico City, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Kunsthalle in Zurich, Switzerland.

Other works in Out of Line include Edith Massey’s dedication and signature on a flyer for her band, To Lupita Low Life; Happiness is Eating Eggs; Love You; Edie Massey of 1980; Laughlin, Nevada (2007) by San Diego-based artist K. V. Tomney; Blasted Allegories (1996) by Jim Shaw, who has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Santa Monica, New York, Paris, and Geneva; and Spenser Little’s Untitled (2007), which uses wire filaments to play with the viewer’s perception of form in space.

Reinventing Ray Street show by show, Four Walls has made a name for itself over the past year by presenting thoughtfully conceived exhibitions of local and international artists. This emerging contemporary art space has collaborated with other major art institutions in the region, including the Museum of Photographic Arts , and its shows have increasingly garnered the attention of the San Diego Union -Tribune, Art Week magazine, and other publications and media.