ART REVIEW : Totemic Nostalgia From Objects Once Trashed

Vintage plastic cameras sit for their outsize portraits in a 1983 Cibachrome series by Bay Area photographer Victor Landweber. With their square, lovable titles (“Brownie Starlet,” “ANSCO Panda”) and bastardized Moderne bodies, these fixed-focus toys of the ‘40s and ‘50s were designed to sell mostly on the basis of style, not versatility or technical refinement.

Landweber shot them separately against black backgrounds in crisp, head-on views, bordered by a squirt of soft, white light, an effect reminiscent of old-fashioned “silhouetting” in commercial art (the isolation of an object from its background).

The images offer wry commentary on the peculiar ingenuity of U.S. manufacturing, as well as the totemic nostalgia that such throwaway products assume for succeeding generations.

Choosing a plastic “Diana” camera was Colorado photographer Vidie Lange’s way of emphasizing the artifice in her “Diana and Las Vegas” series of 30-by-40-inch Cibachromes, produced several years ago.

Diana’s fixed eye stared at pockets of Vegas night life: mirrors reflecting an X-rated film churning on a wall-mounted TV above miles of red, cut-velvet bedspread; a blond stripper with perfect lips and milk-white breasts flinging out her arms below a swag of red drapery; a statuesque palm tree irradiated with golden light, like a stage act, near a neon Space Age restaurant.

In contrast, images of Roman-style statues in sunny outdoor settings exude the tranquillity of frozen history, with just a hint of kitsch. A shot of a mild-faced marble woman reaching back to touch her quiver of immovable arrows introduces another Diana, the chaste huntress of Roman myth, who saved nymph Daphne from rape by turning her into a laurel tree.

A statue of Apollo and Daphne--photographed against blue sky near a flashy emporium with a fake Greek pediment--presents a sexual struggle remote in time and stylistic convention, yet filled with a passion unknown to the stylized routines of the Strip.

‘Diana in Las Vegas’ and ‘American Cameras.’

Through May 14. Gallery open 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach.

Admission is free.

Information: (714) 497-1880.