Cerebral and the Sensual Share Space in Dietrich Jenny Exhibits

Visitors to the Dietrich Jenny Gallery (664 9th Ave.) this month will find themselves caught in a cross fire between strategies of sensual assault and intellectual retreat.

Jean Lowe, a postgraduate fine arts student at UC San Diego, disrupts our plastic-wrapped comfort with exposes of animal exploitation industries, while David Wilson, a 1984 graduate of the UCSD program, shelves social scrutiny for the more cerebral, self-reflexive side of art-making.

In garishly decorated furniture ensembles and canvases stretched like pelts on the walls, Lowe targets our crude disregard for other forms of life. Montage images of acceptable atrocities--from hunting animals for sport to eating them for pleasure--float on busy wallpaper patterns, framed by pseudo-opulent borders.

Through this exaggerated setting of cozy, tasteless Americana, Lowe reveals the foundations of our life style to be violence, cruelty and pride. Deer hoofs form the base of a table lamp in one painting, painted bones border a domestic floor rug and animal heads hang on walls in other paintings as trophies of our domination and presumed superiority over other species.

Lowe’s work teems with the energy of impassioned propaganda, but ultimately the artist’s power to provoke derives less from indulgent manipulations than simply a barrage of facts, stated directly and repeatedly. In “Sheep Story,” for instance, she makes a case for the animal’s exploitation for profit by presenting, together with an image of a live animal, several synonyms for it in our practical vocabulary--a wool sweater, a rack of lamb and so on.

In “Milk Story,” she exposes the monstrously mechanical means by which we obtain what we consider to be a wholly natural product. By painting her dense pastiches in a diagrammatic, matter-of-fact style, Lowe accentuates the real horror of her subjects, and avoids capitalizing on their value as gruesome spectacle.

In a dining room scene, Lowe has painted a red-and-white-checked cloth on the table and served up raw animal parts. Minus its usual trimming and packaging, the meat looks like fare only for the most barbaric of picnics. Lowe is shrewd in revealing our euphemistic behavior toward the processing of animals to serve our needs. The impact of her work is intense and unavoidable.

On the other side of the gallery and, conceptually, of the world, Wilson concentrates on codes of meaning rather than meaning itself. In both sculpture and painting, he works with only the most fundamental elements of form--line, color, plane--reduced to their pure essences.

His dyed and sewn fabric forms, loosely fitted over wooden frameworks, hang on the wall with a mute presence. Only the two that evoke the aura of ageless headdresses transcend pure geometry to suggest further meanings.

In the paintings, vague planes and random streaks of color cohere just enough to signify human form. Painted on paper and directly on the gallery walls--an indication of temporality and, again, randomness--the portraits titled “Philosopher,” “Troublemaker” and “Past President” exist in visual limbo. Features and shadows that typically define character have decomposed here to float in orbit around silhouetted heads.

The net effect is that of a cerebral exercise in generic painting, comparable to the work of Steve Ilott recently shown here. Despite their vibrant color combinations and animated patterning, Wilson’s paintings emit only the faintest whispers, hardly audible through the bell-ringing and drum-beating of Lowe’s neighboring campaign.

The show continues through April 30.

“Floor Show,” at the Mesa College Art Gallery (7250 Mesa College Drive) through May 12, joins sculptors Jacci Den Hartog of Los Angeles and Verda Friesen of San Diego. Den Hartog’s works bring to mind common, familiar objects but their wood, rubber and pigment construction causes them to pull back into an odd singularity. A metal pipe fitting adhered to one wall issues a solid stream of white rubber that falls to the floor, bending just before contact. The pale rubber steps of a wood-trimmed staircase evoke a curious mix of play and deceit.

More mysterious is a four-legged wooden structure supporting a pendulous black rubber vessel, studded with protruding warts. Den Hartog’s sculptures travel from mind to mind, starting out as “snippets of visual memories,” according to the artist’s statement, and slowly fixing themselves in the viewer’s own memory as a set of mildly unsettling questions.

Friesen draws in space with fluid rods of forged steel, welding them together to shape elegant metaphors. “Beginning” can be read literally as two rows of seeds sprouting upward to finally penetrate the earth’s crust and nod about in the open air, but Friesen’s work can be just as suggestive of musical phenomena as organic growth. Its dialogues of line and plane, solid and void, have the concision and eloquence of poetry.