Gregoire’s Minimalist Sculptures Present Some Subtle but Demanding Riddles to Viewers

As one passes through the rooms of the Dietrich Jenny Gallery (664 9th Ave.), the sculptural forms of Mathieu Gregoire announce themselves quietly, their subtle, perceptual riddles settling indelibly in the mind. These are demanding works, though physically unassuming.

“Small Divider,” a slick black rectangle extending just a foot from one wall, arbitrarily divides a space in two, a metaphor for larger architectural and sociological schemes.

Gregoire examines spatial conditions in terms of relationships and opposites--between inside and outside, under and over, rough and slick surfaces, human and sculptural scales. Looming over his plushly upholstered “Small Chaise,” one is made to feel oversized and monstrous, while his “Clear Glass Booth” promises only anxious claustrophobia.

Other works offer more tantalizing experiences, such as the glorious illusory phenomenon captured in “Switch Box,” a large plywood form suspended from the ceiling. The object’s two apertures, one vertical and one horizontal, give visual entry to a smooth white Formica interior, a stage for beautifully shifting shadows and reflections from the outside.

Extremely minimal in form and constructed with confidence and precision, Gregoire’s work feels several steps removed from the real world. In the white-walled vacuum of the gallery interior, these objects transcend function or even decoration to become pure cerebral and sensory experiences.

In contrast to Gregoire’s reductive refinement, Anna O’Cain’s installation, “Match, Place and Hold,” also on view at the gallery, betrays an additive sensibility. The environment, like a collage, is filled with diverse objects and images, many of which are themselves conglomerations of various other images.

In the center of the room, O’Cain has reconstructed a room from the landmark Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, also known as 291, the exhibition space operated by Alfred Stieglitz in the early years of this century. On the walls of his gallery, Stieglitz introduced the work of important American and European modernists--painters, photographers and sculptors--effecting, in the words of artist Emile Nolde, “a revolution in the mind and the arts.”

Nolde’s words hang amid an eclectic assortment of framed sketches, watercolors and enhanced children’s drawings in O’Cain’s reconstructed gallery space. References to the space itself, as well as to photography, ancient alphabets, astronomy, wildlife and more appear within these frames. On the periphery of the reconstructed gallery is a trio of drawings and a group of assemblages reminiscent of primitive science experiments.

Within O’Cain’s perplexing display, certain images and references recur but never congeal into a meaningful whole. Issues of redefinition, experimentation and challenge within art and other arenas of knowledge and expression emerge tentatively, never long enough or clearly enough to give the installation any coherence. O’Cain’s work has its momentary delights, but it is painfully lacking in focus.

Both San Diego artists’ works remain on view through April 2.

The objects a person is attracted to and chooses to save for prolonged meditation can often reveal much about their collector. When the collector is an artist, these scavenged goods often have an implicit relationship to the artist’s work--through a similarity of form, structure or meaning--and seen together with the work can often better reveal the artist’s sensibilities than either could alone.

Exhibitions joining the works an artist makes with those he collects can be filled with subtle insights or bold revelations, but “Artists and their Collections,” at the Mesa College Art Gallery (7250 Mesa College Drive) provides neither, since it delivers only half of what it promises. By not including the 13 San Diego artists’ own works alongside those they collect, the show never rises above a scattered monologue, even as it promises an engaging conversation.

This motley assortment of crayons, matchbooks, motorcycles, quilts and pipes sorely lacks a context. With or without the gallery handout explaining the appeal of these objects to their artist-collectors, the show ends up looking too much like that section of the county fair where hobbyists display their mountains of miniature mice or souvenir spoons. The underlying message of this show is that accumulation, for these artists, is not an end in itself but a manifestation of the same individual vision that shapes their work.

This meaning is lost, however, unless the visitor is already familiar with the artists’ works. For example, Gillian Theobald’s selection of old post cards would have rhymed marvelously with her paintings, with their shared intensity of hue and simplified imagery of such natural phenomena as waterfalls and geysers. Instead, they float here without context, and though inherently interesting, like the Indian molas and Central American huipils also on view, their full significance to their collectors is barely suggested.

The show continues through April 7.