SECURITY PACIFIC SHOW : ‘GONE FISHING’ USES LIGHT BAIT AND MAKES IT CATCH

Tack a “Gone Fishing” sign on your door and no one will interpret it literally. Friends and strangers alike will assume that you’re simply on vacation--or out of commission, professionally speaking.

In Security Pacific’s “Gone Fishing” show, however, the subject really is fish: big ones, scary ones, pretty ones, weird ones, even a few that look as if they might devour an unsuspecting fisherperson.

Four artists were invited to participate in this show (through Sunday) that serves up light summer fare with a dollop of serious purpose. The ever-imaginative William Crutchfield has it both ways in a decorative, 8-foot-tall, painted wood construction called “The Importance of Being a Bubble.” The bubble takes on cosmic significance as it rises from a fish’s mouth to the surface of water, bursting into a sun, then becoming a moon and finally the ringed planet Saturn.

Gaylen Hansen, whose work was seen in depth last February at the Municipal Art Gallery and Koplin Gallery, shows five paintings that reaffirm his image as a mystic woodsman. In an amusing lineup, we find Hansen’s alter ego juggling fish and being outwitted by an eagle who grabs his catch. Hansen’s is a woolly world of macho dreams and lovable beasts, but he keeps it from becoming one big cartoon by ruffling the edges of the peaceable kingdom with a case of nerves.

Cranston Montgomery offers a dozen sleek, sculptural creatures. Fashioned of various materials--painted wood or fiberglass, bronze, foam that’s plastered or covered with cloth and varnished--they swim (or fly?) above our heads in the cavernous lobby, an especially odd twist for those patterned after bottom fish. Despite their refined similarity to the real thing, the issue here is not realism but transformation of nature into solid form.

Finally, we come to Tim Nordin, who steals the show with a 12-foot-square floor installation called “Greed.” Seven brightly painted fiberglass fish seem to emerge from the glistening, dark floor to snap at hooks suspended from the ceiling. Struggling to meet their death, they call up society’s most venal forces, not to mention our self-destructive bent. The piece is great fun nonetheless--a witty spectacle improbably plunked down in a structure that symbolizes monetary power and, of course, greed.

This installation and Nordin’s wall pieces combining acrylic-on-canvas panels with painted fiberglass fish may shock viewers who remember him as a highly disciplined non-objective painter. Known for such exacting feats as laying down multicolored single touches of the brush on porcelain-like surfaces, he moved into more expressionistic work but retained the sensibility of a classical abstractionist.

Less has changed than meets the eye in his new work. The impact of his life-size, three-dimensional images (cast from actual sailfish, tuna and marlin) only temporarily obscures the fact that Nordin (an avid fisherman) still works as a pure painter. His sculptural fish are essentially elegant forms to be painted, not realistically but in solid colors intuitively selected.

With the creatures placed alongside or in front of rectangular “seas” of canvases, these works will probably be read as trophies or dramatizations of kitsch objects, but they are most convincing as paintings whose abrupt juxtaposition of abstraction and realism presents these opposites as equivalents.

Also closing Sunday at Security Pacific’s Gallery at the Plaza downtown is an indoor-outdoor show called “Personal Evolution: 3 Sculptors,” featuring the work of Rod Baer, John Luebtow and Jay Willis.