ART REVIEW : THE SENSUALITY OF JUDY DATER AMID CHARMS OF SANTA BARBARA

The charms of this town, compelling in any season, are irresistible in August. Or so it appears as traffic slows to a fitful crawl and one parking lot after another displays a full sign.

Once those obstacles are surmounted, Santa Barbara opens its arms as seductively as ever. The aroma of hot cinnamon rolls wafts out of doorways while T-shirt shops flag tourists with the promise of comfort dressed up in a logo and a splash of color.

The few substantial art spots have difficulty competing with Santa Barbara’s alluring landscape and commerce along State Street, but currently they keep pace with two absorbing exhibitions.

One is “Judy Dater: Twenty Years,” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (through Aug. 30). The show of 88 works by a 46-year-old photographer known for her nudes and psychological portraits covers her career from 1964 to 1985, in black-and-white and color.

An accompanying monograph by James Enyeart (who curated the exhibition for the De Saisset Museum in Santa Clara) divides Dater’s oeuvre into “Early Work,” “Men and Women” (generally separated), “Egypt,” “Self Portraits” and “New Portraits.” The traveling show confuses these categories, but the artist’s sensibility is consistent.

Dater captivates us right off the bat with a portrait of a startled wood nymph in a see-through dress and another of a black male nude who oozes sexuality as he lounges in a flowery, fringed setting. No doubt about it, Dater deserves her reputation as a photographer who has taken the wraps off sensuality. She is one of the few women to photograph both men and women as objects of desire.

She has also been called a chameleon by those who have accurately noted the range of her interpretive revelations of human character. But there’s another leitmotif in this show: Dater’s taste for the exotic. The people she pictures--whether fellow photographers, models, writers, Egyptians or inmates of institutions--are not ordinary. They are enchanted, inspired, crazed, possessed by their beauty or infused with foreign culture.

Dater has said she chooses subjects “because they have something fascinating about them, a certain flair.” She accentuates that flair, giving us Ansel Adams in a state of divine reverie, John Szarkowski as an insufferably imperious curator of photography (at New York’s Museum of Modern Art) and a woman identified only as “Gwen” as a hypersensitive soul whose anxiety causes her head to flop to one side.

Yet these people aren’t freaks; they come off as expressive types who know that a camera can’t suck the magic out of them. One of Dater’s most enduring--and endearing--images is that of photographer Imogen Cunningham as an elderly pixie (or dirty old lady?) who encounters a gorgeous young nude woman in a forest. Though obviously staged, this witty image of two women sizing up each other is a classic encounter between youth and age that gives a refreshing spin to the concept of voyeurism.

As we follow Dater’s career in the photos exhibited, she seems to remove veils and move toward clarity, but she is always more a romantic than a realist. Whether cropping a juicy fragment of entwined bodies or back-lighting Beaumont Newhall’s halo of white hair, she betrays no interest in the camera’s ability to reveal mundane truths. Instead, she is guided by her own instincts about the edge of magic, divinity or sensuality that makes each person special.

When she went off to Egypt, in 1979 and 1980, Dater might have documented the decay of an ancient civilization. Instead, she switched from black-and-white to color and made the odd juxtapositions that have occurred over time seem strangely beautiful. A yellow-covered car parked by an Egyptian statue and a pale blue Pepsi stand smack in front of a pyramid seem to make the landscape all the more exotic. Dater doesn’t take her usual liberties with Egyptian people, and results are comparatively boring, but when she views a native wedding from a heavenly vantage point she sees a sparkling fairy tale.

Her penchant for the strange seems to shift in 1982 self-portraits that recall early Cindy Sherman. In this series Dater casts herself in various roles and engages in feminist commentary. As “Ms. Clingfree,” she’s a cute little maid with her hands full of household tools and cleaning potions. Posing as a “Leopard Woman,” she wears a svelte jump suit unzipped to the waist. Wearing a curly blond wig, she’s a compulsive eater and a hysterical screamer with her head in a bird cage.

In all these color photographs, women are ludicrously portrayed as objects on a black-curtained stage. Whether eager to please or self-indulgent, they seem to be playing out someone else’s ideas of their persona. The sense of freedom that typically soars through Dater’s work is stifled--and relieved only by the rattle of ironic laughter.

Hospitalized people pictured in Dater’s most recent portraits aren’t free either, but they seem deadly earnest as they push pencils and marking pens across big sheets of paper. While distrustful gazes set up barriers that can’t be crossed by outsiders staring into their faces, their artwork provides an escape for both subject and audience.

Concurrently, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is filled with trash collected by artists Cheryl Bowers and Nancy Merrill. Most of it was gathered from Santa Barbara beaches in less than five weeks, a fact that’s surprising only if we imagine that this beautiful community is immune from the throw-away consumerism that threatens other parts of the country.

The piece, called “Sea Full of Clouds: What Can I Do?,” is obviously a plea for conservation and recycling, but the artists seem to be of two minds about the problem. On the one hand, they put enormous effort into addressing a pressing social issue. On the other, they treat the scavenged materials so lovingly and poetically that they instill Styrofoam cups and plastic lids with redeeming value. Along with the plastic bags of garbage that billow across the ceiling is a corner of treasures--less common gleanings that await transformation in one of Merrill’s assemblages.

Giving an impromptu tour of the environment, Merrill confessed “a secret desire to be the Simon Rodia of plastic,” though that notion is largely an idealistic solution to an overwhelming concern. Her compulsion--and Bowers’--to turn the rising tide of throw-away packaging into art is just their way of trying to raise the collective consciousness and persuade people to alter their habits.

To that end, the two Santa Barbara artists have created an environment that changes daily. Bowers has painted a wall with windows of sunset and sea that read as vestiges of a lost civilization. The artists have also covered the floor with flour, installed an altar and a fire pit, provided prayer sticks for visitors’ wishes and festooned the gallery with artful clumps of castoffs.

Two walls of the gallery were originally clean but chalk was provided for visitors to write their hopes on one, their fears on the other. Both are now layered with comments and ongoing dialogues.

It’s easy to be cynical about such a touchy-feely manifestation of social conscience, but the issue addressed here is so real that only the most relentless consumers and petrochemical producers are likely to dismiss it as trivial.

The show ends next Saturday, from 5 to 7 p.m., when Juan Ayala will present a “ritual ceremony” and Bowers will chair a forum.

The Contemporary Arts Forum is open Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. Hours at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art are Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thur, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun., noon-5 p.m.