LA Times: August 10, 2007

AROUND THE GALLERIES: Endangered, threatened . . . safeBy Leah Ollman, Special to The TimesThe "newfoundland" of Carrie Marill's lovely show at Sixspace is not the known locale but an imagined place. It exists on paper as a visual sanctuary for threatened and endangered species of plants and animals, mostly birds.In many of Marill's paintings, delicately rendered in gouache on paper, several types of birds perch on a single plant. Their natural habitats may be far-flung, but the Arizona-based Marill brings the living things together based on what they have in common: the fragility of their survival.In one painting, birds from North, Central and South America -- a great egret, a least tern, a mountain pimpernel and a wader with the charming name of double-striped thick-knee -- make their home in an ethereally beautiful sprig of endangered Tennessee yellow-eyed grass. In another work, Marill eliminates not only geographical differences but also the natural distinction between dwellers of land and sea when she perches several birds on a branch of globally threatened red coral.Marill is deliberate about detail, but her style feels refreshingly unburdened by scientific precision. She leaves much of every sheet white, reinforcing the notion that these scenes are hybrids of the actual and abstract. In several pieces, she applies cutout figures to the surface, but the effect feels gratuitous and is less interesting than the more straightforward work, which is quiet in approach but well-informed and impassioned.Sixspace, 5803 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 932-6200, through Aug. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sixspace.com.