SHARP-LOOKING SHOW AT LACE : ‘VARIATIONS III’ CHARTS A GALLERY’S GROWTH

“Variations III,” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, is such a sharp-looking group show that it might have been selected by an art-smart decorator. Predominantly red, black and bold, it would add a spirited touch of humanity to a loft furnished at a high-tech emporium.

While the assembly looks a bit slick for a gallery that prides itself on presenting the cutting edge of experimentation and introducing unwashed talent, “Variations III” only emphasizes LACE’s increasingly professional image. With its well-turned-out art, attractive installation and expensive-looking catalogue, “Variations III” points out just how far LACE has come since its early days above a bridal shop on Broadway.

But that’s not the point of the exhibition, and LACE aficionados needn’t worry that the downtown institution has sold out to the uptown Establishment. “Variations III” is an import, only in residence through May 31. It came to LACE through the Fellows of Contemporary Art, a homeless group of angels that does a first-rate job of initiating and sponsoring exhibitions in Southland museums and galleries.

For this third segment of a series featuring “newer art,” the Fellows enlisted as curator and essayist Melinda Wortz, director of UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Gallery. If her selections are notably short of raw edges and scruffy products, they nonetheless follow LACE’s usual pattern of showing relatively unfamiliar talent.

Take Ed Nunnery, previously known to us as a director of the defunct Aarnun Gallery in Pasadena. Now emerging publicly as a visual artist, he shows apocalyptic drawings that collapse in the center and a wonderful wood-and-cardboard sculpture of a “Stickman” being hustled along by his super-charged dog. The rickety, 10-foot-tall fellow, wearing a top hat and scraps of flowing black paper, lurches behind a razor-backed canine who must be in pursuit of live dinner.

Nunnery’s expressionistic art is all sharp teeth and good-humored warnings. The “Stickman’s” legs echo the jagged black frames on the drawings. A shark shoots out of a dark “Interior” scene, gaping maw at the ready; other nightmares feature a dead newscaster and the last gasp of the Pasadena Freeway. Scary stuff, but it has a humorous air about it. You can almost hear the silent laughter of an Ichabod Crane-like figure who careens through Nunnery’s urban conflagrations.

Julie Medwedeff joins Nunnery in the Neo-Expressionist camp, but her largest paintings are so typical of the genre that they seem anonymous. A couple of small pieces pack much more power--particularly one depicting a sweet housewife so rooted to her bungalow that, like a tree, she grows through it.

Social commentary also fuels “Red Scare,” Deborah Small’s crisp wall installation that steps lightly through a mine field of politics. Well-crafted, charming and toylike, with its shelves of alphabet blocks overlaying a silhouette of Cuba, the piece spells out a disinformation message radioed to the island prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Rena Small’s grid of color photographs depicting a woman garbed in flags of many countries can be interpreted variously: as a political statement or a spoof of Minimal art, high fashion or nationalistic pomp and heraldry. Any way you view the lineup, it’s a shining example of conceptual wit, graphically realized.

The Fellows’ first two “Variations” shows were devoted to painting. This one not only includes sculpture, drawing, photography, video and performance, it presents quite a variety of sensibilities. While the work seems disconcertingly color coordinated, it touches on nearly everything but formal abstraction.

Ihnsoon Nam’s big black slabs--in an installation called “Transient Beings, Temporary Remedies”--are the closest thing to it, but they allude to figures and ancient monoliths while resonating spirituality.

Linda Ann Stark’s vivid oils come on rather like an intensified version of Georgia O’Keeffe’s enormous flowers. Though they appear in a theatrical light, these organic shapes float in an ethereal space charged with mystery. The catalogue portrays Stark as the Shirley MacLaine of the art world, explaining that she channels insights received while meditating and “believes that the images she finally realizes have a physical existence somewhere else as well.”

Exquisitely delicate watercolors by Tom Knechtel are not entirely of this world either, though we recognize the dogs, horses and people who become entwined in his dream world. The implications of his allegories involving puppets and werewolves would be frightening if they weren’t so beautiful. It’s as if he paints with chiffon and colored vapors.

Performances by composer Joyce Lightbody (whose scores and tapes are in the gallery) and collaborators Alvaro Asturias and John Castagna coincided with the exhibition opening. Continuing in the video screening room are two works by Patti Podesta, another pair by Hildegarde Duane and David Lamelas, and a documentation of Rena Small’s “Flag Series.”

Among these selections is a hilarious send-up of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the “designer dictators,” by Duane and Lamelas. “A Glory,” an interminable piece by Podesta, requires viewers to read a stream of poetry (relentlessly marching across the bottom of the screen) while perusing a lovely landscape and a woman walking through it--who turns out to be en pointe in pink ballet shoes. The assiduous reading and reflective perusing conflict so annoyingly that it’s impossible to make much sense of the content.

LACE (1804 Industrial Ave.) is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. If you live in Orange County or the San Fernando Valley, you can catch “Variations III” in your neighborhood. The show will travel to UC Irvine, Oct. 4 to Nov. 7, and to Cal State Northridge, Dec. 14 to Jan. 29, 1988.