What is burning in Toba Khedoori’s fireplace? In 2005, the L.A.-based artist made a painting of a domestic hearth ablaze, the life-size image rendered at viewer eye-level on an immense field of waxy white paper pieced together from two smaller sheets. (Overall, it’s more than 11 feet tall and 16 feet wide.) A year later, she reproduced the same image for a second giant painting on paper, this time embedded in a surrounding field of dense black pigment mixed with wax. Both works turn up midway through an absorbing 20-year-plus survey of Khedoori’s work newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Former LACMA curator Franklin Sirmans, now director of Pérez Art Museum Miami, organized the show with LACMA’s Christine Y. Kim. Khedoori’s exquisitely drawn works are known for the excruciating care she takes in their rendering, so it’s a puzzlement that the material going up in smoke in the fireplace is hard to identify. Those are not logs. The fuel might be books, given some vaguely boxy shapes, or maybe wadded up documents. Cut-up kindling?
Or — who knows — maybe a sheaf of drawings? Whatever the case, the cozy warmth of hearth and home requires incineration, a transfer of energy in which something is lost and something gained. Much of Khedoori’s work seems a concentrated meditation on similar dichotomies. A fire in the fireplace is something one stares into for the purpose of getting lost — and finding refreshment in the process.