ART REVIEW : GRIMMER AND JULIAN AT SOUTH COAST PLAZA

Like an escalating number of other Southland art institutions currently building, moving, rearranging or planning expansion, the Laguna Beach Museum of Art is sustaining growing pains.

But unlike larger facilities that send their visitors around cavernous holes and scaffoldings, the museum has found a creative solution to its temporary problem: It has moved its exhibition program to a shopping center.

With its seaside location under construction for nearly a year now, the museum has been holding forth quite elegantly in a donated space at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. Lunchers at Piret’s and shoppers headed for Bullock’s may still be surprised to see the museum’s temporary outpost at the Bristol Street entrance, but the art looks right at home in two pristine galleries.

The current attraction (through Aug. 31) is a show of sculpture by Mineko Grimmer and drawings, paintings and monoprints by Joanne Julian, organized by the museum’s former curator, Robert McDonald. The exhibition is a congenial pairing of gracefully quiet sensibilities, strengthened by an Oriental connection.

As always, Grimmer captivates her audience through a combination of calming sights and sporadic sound. Drawing on her Japanese heritage, she builds lattice-like wooden structures, sets them over pools and suspends frozen pyramids of pebbles above them. As ice around the pebbles melts, the little stones drop, ricochet over the wood and finally drop into the water. The pebbles descend faster as time passes and the sound changes from an occasional plinkety-plantkety-plunk or ka-thunk to an engaging clatter.

The principle is the same in six maquettes and one full-scale piece currently exhibited, but the Minimalist wooden structures vary from vertical towers to horizontal receptacles in grid or herringbone patterns. “Four Verses Set to Music,” the centerpiece of the show, has layers of bamboo stretched across a square wooden framework. A pointed post in the center, directly below the pebble pyramid, has a metal rod running through it--and therein lies the sculpture’s center of interest. When a pebble happens to hit the metal, a sharp ping rings out, contrasting with the relatively muted sounds of stone against bamboo and water.

The piece is easy to grasp conceptually and visually, but it’s not unusual to see visitors stay with it for extended periods. The art has a hypnotic effect countered by the gentle Zen drama of sudden movement and percussion.

As an artist, Grimmer has conceived an elaborate structure to create an unfettered experience. She gets your attention then sets you free to ponder such peaceful subjects as the necessity of contrast and the way a simple sound can have the quality of a revelation.

Julian’s Oriental grounding is a matter of medium (ink), subject matter (flowers and disheveled hair, both erotic symbols) and consummate brushwork. She doesn’t imitate Japanese art, but she seems to have absorbed it and integrated its perfection into Western modes of painting. There’s an edge of fatal beauty in her work that stops just short of decorative fastidiousness.

While Grimmer’s work seems to gather force and spend it in falling stones, Julian’s spews forth energy in highly controlled brush strokes. They swirl across a massive open space in large, scroll-like abstractions or cut sure lines and clusters in smaller flower paintings. What Julian owes to Oriental aesthetics is a mastery of material that allows her to wed spontaneity and control. Hers is the sort of art that brings years of art-making to bear on a single brush stroke.

Such meticulousness can squeeze the humanity out of art, but the slickness of Julian’s heroic work is tempered by a certain tremulousness in smaller pieces. Her white-on-black flowers, for example, are so direct and so obviously the product of a human hand that they put you in mind of finger paintings. Foreground and background are so perfectly fused that you can’t be certain whether the lilies and irises rose up from the deep or were imposed on it.

The exhibition is open Monday-Friday, noon-8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5 p.m.