LAGUNA MUSEUM SHOW IS NO BIG DEAL

Bucking the trend in contemporary art that advocates bigger is better, the Laguna Art Museum is showcasing more than 120 works--none exceeding 18 inches in size--at its South Coast Plaza satellite facility.

“On a Small Scale: All California ‘86,” a juried exhibit running through June 8, has been assembled by Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Discussing the tendency to “work big,” Fox said in an interview: “The history of recent art, particularly in the United States, has been toward (making art) on a large, even monumental or titanic, scale. This tendency has been happening from the ‘60s on, when artists started working in big spaces, such as vacant factory buildings.

“Small scale has rarely been addressed as an issue,” he said. “It was eclipsed by bigness, by earth works done by people like Michael Heizer and Robert Morris, or by artists who use the entire gallery or exhibit space like the (Jonathan) Borofsky exhibit” recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary/Contemporary facility in Los Angeles. “Now, suddenly, you see an exhibition coming along (featuring works) on a small scale,” he said. “It intrigued me.”

The exhibit includes photography, painting, sculpture and ceramics. Among the works are Anna Homler’s “Salvation,” a shoe jammed with tiny purple pencils; Katherine Wells’ “Night Gathers Carved Smiles,” a skull that sits in a helmet decorated with feathers; Kathleen Flood’s watercolor painting “Abstract Sun” and Steven A. Smith’s intricate assemblage “Deirdre.”

Fox viewed more than 1,500 slides submitted by nearly 600 artists before selecting the pieces for the exhibit.

“I realized as I studied the slides that there were certain interests that came up over and over again that were specifically a function of a small scale,” Fox said. “There were a lot of people who happened to do some small paintings, but I didn’t look at that with any particular interest. I was more concerned with the people who were specifically addressing the aspects of a small scale, not that the work just happened to be less than 18 inches.

“A great number of these people are interested in compression, intricacy and miniaturization, or using tiny objects to make very intricate and multifaceted constructions, such as Karyl Sisson’s ‘Vessel IV,’ (a piece made of clothespins),” he said. “A lot of this work stresses the kind of sense of miniaturization and real complexity of form that doesn’t bowl you over with bigness but captures you with its almost microscopic detail.

“Conversely, there are a number of people who are working on a very small scale but showing big landscapes. Finally, there are a lot of people using found objects or found materials, like clothespins, a skull and linoleum. These people are working with materials that are small of scale and allowing the small scale to kind of dictate how they work.”

Fox said that undersized art has not always received favorable attention from critics and art dealers. “The seduction of working on a small scale is that it can tempt you to work in a very precious way,” he said, and added that some carefully crafted small works are considered “precious” because they are overly embellished with details.

“That (preciousness) has often been frowned upon in the history of modern art, particularly in the early ‘60s and ‘70s. Some would find that it impeaches the integrity of the object. But I think we find a lot more exploration of ‘preciousness’ in recent years. For a while there were a lot of galleries that didn’t care to show works that were small, and now it’s not at all unusual to find.”

The gallery is open weekdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., and Thursdays until 8 p.m.