GUILD PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON LOCAL ARTISTS’ PROGRESS

The annual Artists Guild open juried exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art has served, fairly or not, as a prestigious barometer of local progress in the visual arts for 70 years. The latest edition--on display through April 7--is of particular note, if only because it foreshadows San Diego’s first major curated exhibit of local art, opening March 23 at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, with a sampling of artists included in and excluded from the La Jolla show.

Mainly, it reflects the taste and judgment of this year’s guild juror, Robert McDonald, chief curator of the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. McDonald, a former La Jolla museum curator and still a close local art-watcher, chose the 63 works on display from more than 750 entries. In his juror’s statement, he calls the show “A portrait of the community . . . its strength is that of its participating artists,” and adds that “the visual arts life of the San Diego area is flourishing as it never has before.”

That may sound like--indeed, be--the usual boosterism, but the evidence to support it is pretty strong. As usual, there are ordinary, derivative, weakly expressive works here, but they seem to be well offset by works of genuine elegance, wit and inventiveness, some by artists who already enjoy fairly widespread reputations; for example, Michael Pfulb and his framed neon constructions, paper artists Ed Pieters, Martha Chatelaine and Bob Simpson, or Robert Miles Parker and his pen-and-ink Los Angeles panorama.

Given the variety of styles and media here, it’s hard to imagine any two viewers agreeing on which artworks are best. McDonald has selected two $1,000 prize-winners: Cibachrome photographs by Suda House (she’ll be represented in the La Jolla show) and performance installations--which include photographs, fabrics, slide projections and sound--by Christine Oatman.

The House photos, from her “Aqueous Myth Series,” are “Lilith” and “Kali Ma”--lyrical, sensual, erotic idealizations of witchy womanhood. In “Lilith,” for example, House’s nubile subject is seen lolling in water that half-floods, half-caresses her torso, as the Cibachrome colors add a vivid wash of their own. The timeless, mythic quality of the shot is made pointedly modern by the presence of some toy rubber sharks that appear to be circling Lilith’s body. If this is feminist art, at least it’s not one-dimensional.

Oatman’s installations, “In a Redwood Forest” and “The Earth Laughs With Flowers,” which take up a cloistered nook of the display area, seem heavily influenced by ‘60s flower-power notions of earthy liberation and oneness with nature. It’s hardly helped by the tape-looped soundtrack that includes Cat Stevens’ saccharine “Morning Has Broken,” but there’s a bright, imaginative, tactile appeal to Oatman’s matching of color photos--they depict a frolic in the fields--with like-colored bolts of cloth.

One can’t help but wish that McDonald had broadened his prize-giving impulses to include a non-photographic winner, and John Edward’s aluminum mobile, “Sunset,” is clearly a winning work. The Modernist simplicity and harmony of its conception is richly pleasurable, as Edwards arranges rectangles of colored aluminum to form an abstract globe that neatly betokens a Southern California sunset.

Appropriately, the guild exhibit’s entranceway is dominated by a new piece by last year’s winner, Ellen Phillips, whose metal meshworks are Minimal invocations of mental and physical barriers. They evoke everything from concentration camps to close-minded thinking--and imply the connection between the two. Her “Wall Segment 8” is a small, powerful wedge of barbed wire, iron and tiny transparencies and seems to mark Phillips among the area’s most original, identifiable and meaningful artists.

Other works in the show command attention and spark simple delight. Yoonchung Park Kim’s “Rolling Down Drawing 5” is elegant, scroll-shaped abstract acrylic painting that suggests undulant motion frozen in space. Glass sculptor Christopher Lee--one of the fastest-rising artists in town--offers a large, vaguely anthropomorphic stacking of cut plate glass, “Dancin’ the Robot,” which strongly asserts his unique approach. And Thomas C. MacMichael’s “Bridget” is a stunningly elegant black wood and glass table that is pure furniture-as-art. If you have doubts about San Diego’s artistic life--or if you’re already sold on it--go see this show.