Playful Idea Goes Unrealized

Janet MacKaig’s work currently on exhibit at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art contains the germ of a playful idea about the essential qualities of animals and people, an idea that might be successful in more rigorously developed form.

MacKaig, one of three artists exhibiting at the Center through Nov. 20, employs a wiry thin-line scribble over areas of color and a small arsenal of other devices, mostly scatterings of curving forms rendered in relief, and objects buried within the structure of the painting.

In “Essence of Leopard,” a flattened animal pieced together out of small black-and-red clumps subsides at the bottom of a yellowish canvas drizzled with scribbles. Small footprint-like forms and black smudges (fingerprints?) wind in and out of the spots. The footprints are too cute, but the image offers a sprightly charm, like a good children’s book illustration.

The human “essences” suffer from an overdose of coy mystery. In “Essence of Dick,” for example, cloudlike forms in relief drift over a field of rose and pale black. That’s fine; maybe Dick is a sweetly vague kind of guy. But the cheesecloth fragment obscuring a photograph of something indecipherable offers only an empty tease.

At least as disturbing is her statement that accompanies the work (whoever is responsible for this tiresome convention of artists’ statements--at best a dubious method of footnoting good intentions--ought to be obliged to read these turgid documents till he cries uncle).

MacKaig’s attempt to explain her work seems earnest but employs such nonsensically vague or misused terms as to make the reader wonder whether any intelligence is informing the art. In an essay titled, for some reason, “Technique,” she tells the reader that “Life is attainable in art. The mind becomes totally envolved (sic); creativity is giving birth, nurchering (sic) and releasing a finished enitity (sic).” Among her other discoveries: “Violent angry reflections can also compensate the soul of this artist.”

Charlotte Myers’ descriptions of the genesis of her recent “Through the Looking Glass Series” of paintings make them sound practically a Disneyland ride, bringing the viewer to “the other side of motion and space.” But in translating the distortions of computer-generated imagery into paint, Myers has moved too far from the innate freshness and internal logic of good abstraction.

Brush strokes curiously look both arbitrary and tentative in this work, as if the painter had to appeal to some larger power for permission to create each squashed and skewed form. And so she did, in a sense, because of her seemingly overcautious fidelity to the original computer images. Even in terms of composition, it looks as though no one was at home to guide or intuit the organic development of forms in space.

The most interesting of the seven paintings is “Through the Looking Glass XIV,” which offers a group of architectural forms churned and pulled into fun house mirror distortions. But here again, Myers didn’t allow herself the clout to muscle around these interesting shapes on her own terms.

Lita Albuquerque’s “Sedona Series” is a seductively pretty group of small paintings on paper of volcanic explosions. Above variously sculpted mountain ranges, iridescent splinters and dots leap into the air. Purple, silver, pale green, silvery-blue, fuchsia--each lovely, fragile disaster has a color scheme of its own. There is probably an undercurrent here about the power of nature to dazzle and destroy--sometimes simultaneously.

Like most of Albuquerque’s work, these pieces exude a nature-based simplicity that some viewers find soothingly meditative. This viewer tends to find most of her stuff overly wispy and self-effacing, too dependent on slender threads of introspection and insufficiently stirred by larger crosscurrents, despite the immensity of her chosen theme.

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is at the Harbor Business Park, Space 111, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana. The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p..m. (new hours). Call (714) 549-4989 for more information.