Ruscha Blends Technical Zip With Otherwise Bland Topics

Edward Ruscha’s word paintings at the Henry Vincent Gallery (428 Brookes Ave.) state the obvious with uncanny conviction. Since the 1960s, the Los Angeles artist has been depositing words and phrases onto simple but seamlessly executed surfaces of graphite, gunpowder or pigment.

Plucked as if at random from common usage, Ruscha’s words-- well, film, good reading, very true-- have no particular merit. Like the apartment buildings and gasoline stations that also appear in Ruscha’s drawings and photographic books, these subjects have been singled out as particularly indistinct.

They are merely excerpts from the white noise of contemporary urban (and especially Los Angeles) culture that have been isolated, divested of their natural context and given disproportionate attention. Ruscha renders his inherently bland subjects with extreme technical acumen, adopting either a slick, commercial lettering style or a mesmerizing trompe l’oeil manner, with letters depicted as rippling ribbons, sliding into oblivion.

The artist finds his materials in the same place where he shops for subjects, in the everyday world. Thus, besides the more traditional tools of paint and pencil, Ruscha uses egg yolk and blueberry juice (in two examples here), as well as spinach and Pepto Bismol as pigment.

Ruscha’s elevation of the common, his monumentalization of the mundane, defines his pop art sensibility. His focusing on what is normally invisible--because of its ubiquity rather than its rarity--gives Ruscha’s work its fundamental irony. His icons are purposely empty of meaning. Their instant familiarity and legibility are backed by nothing but wry humor and a chasm of questions.

Like much pop art, Ruscha’s paintings deflate art’s typically puffy aspirations and diminish its traditional distinctness from life. This small survey of six works spanning the years 1968 through 1984 pays tribute to Ruscha’s role in this revolutionary act and reminds us of the legacy upon which so many conceptual artists today are capitalizing.

The show continues through March 19.

The current two-person show at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery (1140 W. Mission Road) urges the visitor to suspend disbelief and embrace unpredictability. Local artists Amanda Farber and Christine Oatman use known reality as a vehicle for imaginative transformation, creating entire environments that defy scale, gravity and logic.

In Farber’s roomful of painted aluminum, wood and cloth mache sculptures, a human-sized spoon hangs at eye level on one wall, next to an even larger pair of chopsticks. Two black smears hover like giant eyebrows nearby, across the room from a massively enlarged purple plum.

Farber’s installation of objects on the floor, near the ceiling and hanging on the walls creates an atmosphere of oddness and exaggeration that yields an enchanting sense of disorientation. Titles of the works masquerade as honest guides, while often leading to coy, punning meanings. The chopsticks, for instance, are titled “Walk,” a double entendre alluding to the anthropomorphic quality of the standing, crossed sticks, as well as to their common use in wok cooking. “Fly Eyes” describes two red discs hovering high in one corner, and “Babies,” a pair of bowling balls on the floor.

This playful, whimsical tone carries through the entire installation, though the evocativeness of the individual works ranges greatly. Some forms are little more than mute presences, clumsy and flat. Others are eloquent abstractions, redefinitions of familiar forms. The railing in “Bannister,” for instance, begins suspended in mid-air, only to droop downward and curl into a spiral on the floor. “Listen” consists of two slender, black shapes resembling rabbit ears, one convex and the other concave, revealing a delicate pink center.

In the adjoining room, Oatman presents photographic records of her staged “Fantasies in the Landscape” of the past 10 years. More than just documentations of the artist’s “ephemeral site works,” the photo-sequences read as independent narratives, each image functioning as a film still, a glimpse of a larger, magical fiction. In format and frequently in content, the work derives much from the dream-like serial photography of Duane Michals.

In each of Oatman’s Fantasies, she introduces an element of unreality into a beautiful natural landscape. A school of fish weaves through a forest of redwoods in one sequence, a flock of white butterflies emerges from a frozen stream in another. Reduced to sets of six images, these constructed events can be beautifully poetic and mysterious. In “Tying Oats (As If It Were Children’s Hair),” Oatman pictures a woman whose own kinky golden tresses echo the tall grasses, binding clumps of oats with ribbons, then exiting the scene, as she entered, through a door leading nowhere in the middle of a field.

The more complex “White House on the Hill” involves an intriguing displacement of perspective and scale from image to image within the sequence, finishing with a view from within a constructed dollhouse. It is only when Oatman’s actors are no longer participants in the Fantasies but merely chance witnesses to them that the images fall flat. The presence of observers, staring at--or worse, pointing to the anomalous events--forces the fantasy upon the viewer. This displaces the viewer’s own discovery of them and reduces the series to the level of storybook illustration.

The show remains on view through March 10.