ART REVIEW : Some Very Abstract Art Rises From Some Very Down-to-Earth Things

“Take a ball of string, three pieces of stiff board and a pot of India ink . . . “

Despite the hours of painstaking labor involved, the instructions for such old-fashioned projects inevitably promised “hours of quiet amusement.”

And so do Darrell Montague’s tongue-in-cheek “Devices, Demonstrations and Coping Mechanisms,” a series of texts and images reproduced on painted canvases that are part of a three-person show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (through May 20).

Montague’s professional-looking little diagrams actually are useless; the neatly printed instructions zoom off into fantasy land. To make a “Seebackascope,” it is necessary to “wedge a small piece of memory” inside a small cardboard box, “running it diagonally from corner to corner as shown.” Completed, the object will reflect “the people and places that you forgot.”

A “Sophistical Apparatus” involves the use of Occam’s Razor (the philosophical argument that the simplest solution is generally the best solution) as a cutting tool. Other components include “metaphors . . . held in place by means of strips,” openings cut as tall as “the depth of your convictions,” and cardboard candy boxes with “arrangements of conceits.”

Zigzagging back and forth between discussions of hobbyist technique and allusions to mental activity is a tricky business, however. When the text gets too smart-alecky, the delicate balance between the models (the straightforward assembly instructions) and the artist’s fanciful tone is destroyed. But Montague’s witty concept is worth honing.

Edward Quoss, the guest artist in this exhibition, whips up quizzical variations on familiar objects in a medley of sculpture from the past few years. Plastic grass grows on the seat of a green metal chair, its frame punctuated by sprinkler valves attached to a green hose coiled underneath. The object of this aqueous attention is a sprig stuck in a clay pot sunk into the seat. On the chair-back, a little holder contains a picture of a stuffed armchair.

This piece is called “Chair Nurse,” evoking notions of tender loving care, from the infantile pleasures of wet-nursing to the armchair-nurturing of humans.

“None” suggests a weird, natural-world equivalent of the TV test patterns that used to come on when a station wasn’t broadcasting. On the “screen” of a white TV-like console, a field of sand marked with neat horizontal ridges holds two stones, each surrounded by traced, concentric circles.

“Carpenter’s Ruler” is a fold-out yardstick hung high on the wall in a rick-rack pattern. The penultimate “bends” are covered by tree branches, and the final few inches are created by an added-on piece of branch.

The merging of one of a carpenter’s basic tools with the medium in which he works is a sweet conceit in itself. But the piece also works on a wonderfully pure visual level, inclusive of its unexpected placement on the wall.

Quoss’ work, which doesn’t seem to have changed much over the four-year period represented in the show, generally subscribes neither to old-fashioned surrealism nor to the more self-conscious sensibility of some hip young artists.

Quoss’ nearest artistic “relative” might be H.C. Westermann, an artist who combined an impeccable sense of craftsmanship with an air of mystery and humor. If Quoss lacks the late artist’s salt-of-the-earth, seat-of-the-pants conviction (maintaining instead a cool, ‘80s distance from such underlying romanticism), he is nevertheless another one-of-a-kind inventor.

Grace Songolo, the third artist in the show, makes small earthenware pieces weakened by her unfortunate attachment to metallic glazes and prettied-up nature imagery. Instead of either emphasizing a truly outdoorsy feeling, or doing an eccentric stylized number on her ubiquitous hills and rocks, Songolo settles for a glitzy, gift-shop look.

Her best piece, “Support System,” consists of two tall matte white mountains cradling between them a stack of naturally vari-colored stones. But even here, Songolo couldn’t resist painting fake cracks on the mountains that read neither as events in nature nor as worthwhile design elements.

Art by Darrell Montague, Edward Quoss and Grace Songolo is being shown through May 20 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Space 111 at the Harbor Business Park, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 549-4989.