ART REVIEW : Sculptures Extol Meditative Appeal of Sparseness

“You don’t happen to have a hair dryer, do you? To speed this process up a little?”

A visitor to Saddleback College Art Gallery was looking impatiently at an inverted pyramid made of pebbles embedded in ice. It hangs above a wooden pool filled with water and crisscrossed with taut wires.

Mineko Grimmer’s piece is called “Variation.” As the ice melts and the pebbles plonk into the water, some of them glance off one of the wires to make a little “ping” or (on a wire with a different frequency) a deep, reverberating sound. Other stones skitter over a large rock in the center of the pool.

Because everything depends on the rate at which the ice melts, you have to hang around awhile to catch the action.

But speeding up the process would destroy the whole idea. The sculpture offers viewers a meditative experience involving notions of random patterns and the gradual transformation of one thing into another. It’s about as far as you can get from a pragmatic, Western approach.

Grimmer is one of four artists of Japanese heritage whose spare, quiet work is on view in “Meditations,” Patricia Boutelle’s debut exhibit as Saddleback’s gallery director.

The least obviously “artistic” element in the show is Kazuo Kadonaga’s 6-by-8-foot block of cedar, “Wood No. 9.” Look a bit closer and you will see skinny horizontal cuts in the wood.

So? Well, these are traces of a process. Kadonaga slices new lumber into thin pieces and then glues it back together again. After the wood dries, it pulls apart in willful ways of its own. At the heart of this work is one of the amazing aspects of natural things: Their ability to absorb and adapt to atmospheric changes or other trauma. In fact, this aspect of the piece almost overshadows its considerable appeal as pure form.

Seiji Kunishima’s “Moon Mirror” is a low-lying mound made of granite grooved in small arcs like waves, crisscrossed by stripes of pale, powdered earth, and inset with a dark, dull piece of round glass. Round black pebbles cluster around the base of the eight-sided platform that supports the piece.

There is something innately calming about the curving mound shape, the careful bands of earth and the repeated grooves “softening” the granite. The opaque “mirror” suggests some primitive reflecting device beamed at the heavens and the humble shape of the piece carries a visual echo of an ancient burial mound.

Kenzi Shiokava finds old wood that once served a useful purpose and works on it with hand tools to produce two variants of “Totem Series.”

A trio of shaggy old telephone poles get a partial face lift, with smooth-surfaced areas that disappear into private hollows. A triumvirate of homely railroad ties pockmarked with holes and spikes are discretely carved and stood upright, to suggest a human presence.

The tricky thing about gussying up such “found” objects, however, is to keep them from turning into pretty set pieces. Shiokava seems too concerned with making his pieces conventionally gallery-worthy and not sufficiently trusting of their brute natural power.

A suitably inscrutable poem by Zen master Shinkichi Takahashi, painted--stanza by stanza--around the gallery walls is the exhibit’s sole ornament. The only discordant notes are on the tape of New Age Musak by Kitaro--a blanket of synthetic tranquillity that interferes with the delicate, natural sounds made by those falling pebbles.

‘Meditations’

Through April 15.

Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000

Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo.

Free.

Information: (714) 582-4924.