‘The way we live in this society with high technology, we cause our own problems.’ : Century Gallery Showcases Art, the Environment

Artist Nancy Baytos-Fenton still wonders what authorities must have thought when they found the 23 dead birds with their feet missing.

It hit her later, after the madness of that November day in 1984 when hundreds of birds dropped dead from the sky onto the streets of Westminster, felled by a toxic cloud of pesticides from a nearby cauliflower field.

Tipped off by a friend, she had rushed to the Orange County community intending to add to the extensive wing collection she used in her artworks. For the sake of expediency, however, Baytos-Fenton decided that feet would have to do.

She swallowed her horror and scurried about, clipping the claws and surreptitiously slipping them into her purse before health officials could chase her away.

“It was a very frightening thing to me. Just to see it, I couldn’t believe it,” Baytos-Fenton said. “They were collecting the birds to do tests on them. When they saw the ones without the feet they must have thought those were very strong chemicals.”

Twenty of the 23 pairs of claws she harvested that day now serve as the core of the former Burbank artist’s “Downwind Series,” featured with the work of six other San Fernando Valley area artists in an exhibit called “North Region Sampler III.” The show is at the nonprofit, county-run Century Gallery in Sylmar through June 24.

This is the third installment of the gallery’s occasional series of shows focusing on the diversity of artistic talent in the Valley area . Three of the artists are Cal State University, Northridge, graduates, one recently immigrated to Studio City from South Africa and another studied in Tokyo. All are what curator Catherine Zubia calls emerging, or struggling, artists.

“This makes people aware of the Valley as a rich resource for artists. It also gives the artists a chance to exhibit, a stepping stone,” Zubia said.

Zubia found the pieces had a common, if subtle, link: Whether paintings or wall sculptures, they all seemed to be concerned with the environment.

Baytos-Fenton’s assemblages, for example, point to the delicate relationship between nature and technology and suggest that birds are barometers of the safety of the atmosphere.

The temple-like creations, with their religious overtones and sacrificial imagery, are homages to the fallen birds of Westminster. Their claws are juxtaposed against such government surplus items as insulators and resistors, reminders of the industrial advances that jeopardize wildlife.

Though the genesis of Baytos-Fenton’s controversial artworks makes for fascinating story-telling, the public has been somewhat hesitant to embrace them, Zubia said.

“Most people are intrigued, but they don’t want to live with them. The grisliness of the feet offends most people. But I see it as very graceful, poetic almost.”

The favorites among many of the show’s viewers, Zubia said, include the “River Rocks” series of five landscapes made mostly of homespun paper that depict rocks in river beds. The works were created by Sandy Bleifer of Encino.

Karen Keehne’s seven wall-mounted, acrylic-covered slabs of lightweight polyurethane foam, each interrupted by a fissure, also appeal to an audience well-versed in the imagery of an earthquake-plagued region.

Keehne, a resident of La Crescenta and graduate of CSUN’s art program, has given the paintings such provoking titles as “To Hide in Full View/An Enigma” and “The Course of Least Resistance/Retreat.”

The figure drawings of Tokyo-trained Junko Chodos of Topanga are popular as well, Zubia said. The colorful renderings on coated black paper show humans in various positions: twisted, tilted, kneeling. Some are so contorted they appear tortured, and their faces suggest the intensity of Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch’s famous 19th-Century canvas “The Cry.”

The graceful, simplistic wood, paint and mixed-media creations of Victor Moreno of Canoga Park, also a graduate of CSUN, are more calming by comparison. Tall slivers of painted wood take on the forms of tools or unrecognizable objects--one appears to be a spear, one a pickax, another bears resemblance to nothing familiar, but is painted a muted neon green and has a black metal tongue curling out of it.

Gregory Martin’s massive wall reliefs, on the other hand, are described by the artist as complex and excessive. Portions of his three-dimensional works jut outward, seemingly crowded out in a competition for space with other large objects. Martin, of Woodland Hills and another alumnus of CSUN, uses wood, paper, metal, fiberglass, oils, acrylics and found-objects to make his wall pieces.

The abstract acrylic canvases of Peter Myerson, a South African artist who moved to Studio City about a year ago, round out the show. Swirls of color--red, yellow, blue, purple, white--stand out against black backgrounds, creating the impression of aerial landscapes or views of Earth from outer space.

Myerson, 56, said he toyed for years with the fine lines separating abstract and representational art, and has struck a balance by hinting at realism but never quite crossing the edge.

“I feel that I’m staying with the abstract because it has more strength and power. It has a quality that invites the imagination,” Myerson said.

Though he never considered himself a political artist, Myerson said, his paintings are influenced by the oppressiveness of South Africa’s apartheid policies. The metaphor has been unintentional.

“I feel in some way the content of my work derives from the horrific state that exists there. I’m taking something that has inherent beauty--the landscape--and it’s coming out in a way that has conflict, that’s not pretty.”

Likewise, Baytos-Fenton, 40, does not see herself strictly as an artist with a social conscience, although the “Downwind Series” might suggest differently.

In fact, the collection was supposed to be “a personal series,” and was never intended for public viewing. Colleagues finally persuaded her to exhibit the assemblages.

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a political artist, but my work does seem to have a message,” she said.

“To me it was just part of the circle of how things go: The way we live in this society with high technology, we cause our own problems.”

The Century Gallery is at 13000 Sayre St. in Sylmar. Exhibition hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Call (818) 362-3220 or (805) 259-1750 for more information.