ART REVIEW : Sharpening the Focus in ‘Long Beach’

“Focus: Long Beach” aims to draw attention to one relatively small area of Southern California’s vast art scene, but the multipart show has a sprawl of its own across a town that has long since become a big city. Ten galleries, museums and “alternative” art spaces have cooperated in showcasing the work of 50 local artists.

The exhibitions began about a week ago at the Long Beach Museum of Art, followed by an opening or two every day and a tour on Sunday. If “Focus” fails to provide visiting skeptics with a neat characterization or stereotype of art in Long Beach, the celebration has probably achieved its mission. The point is that talented artists of many persuasions live here and that a support structure is slowly building up around them.

The Long Beach Museum of Art offers a convincing sampling in a show continuing to July 24. It began as a drawing show, complemented by a couple of sculptural installations, but grew to include paintings and collages. Meanwhile, the museum’s noted video program offers works from its collection including a tape called “Anthem” by Bill Viola, Long Beach’s most distinguished video artist.

If there is a perceptible theme to the museum’s exhibition, it has something to do with introspective art as a hermetic activity--a slant that seems compatible with working in relative isolation. Joanne Berke, for example, talks about vulnerability in “Ice Cube,” a white-on-white construction containing text in painted wood letters.

Sue Ann Robinson’s “Park Art” book (made of twigs, leaf prints and words on paper) gently communicates with nature, while Deidre Brooks’ brightly patterned gold leaf and enamel paintings suggest silken quilts, Indian miniatures and other precious art forms that require intense concentration.

Ray Bravo looks to the heavens for atmospheric effects but he also consults weather maps, medical illustrations and the intricate details of his own hand. He combines these disparate images plus handwritten texts in drawings so delicate that they seem to float across the paper.

Introspection takes a strange turn in the work of Jen Grey and Robert Anderson. Grey’s mixed-media drawings of apocalyptic landscapes may depict a skyscraper going up in smoke amid craggy pinnacles or bonfires spiraling from the floor of a desert that appears to be the site of a deserted office. Anderson’s compulsively complex drawings of cities and grotto-like scenes are so impacted with minutely detailed decay and detritus that he might be peering down the throat of an urban corpse.

Figurative works are equally unsettling. Jeanine Breaker’s big “Ad Utrumque Partus” triptych is a tour de force of draftsmanship depicting a nude figure in three stages of a psychological struggle, haunted by a crowd of specters.

William Fogg’s photograph-like portraits slide from normal to bizarre right before our eyes as he moves from painting unflattering likenesses of real people to weird composites.

Jake Gilson’s sculpture breaks the mood of contemplative or disturbed silence with the sheer physical presence of three big architectonic structures, but two of them refer to human dilemmas. “Angst” abstracts feeling into a gritty slab knocked off kilter, while “Self-Portrait as Target” presents the artist as an X-marked sheet of glass between two brick pillars.

Upstairs, Beverly Naidus blows the lid off the otherwise restrained exhibition with “This Is Not a Test,” an anti-nuclear installation featuring a walk-in bedroom in a tumble-down house. A sound track composed of snatches of despairing dialogue--”They have the power,” “There’s no hope”--spills into the depressing little room. Projected images of landscapes appear on a tiny “screen” set up on a larger, nuclear-winter landscape in the form of a rumpled bed.

Naidus is an activist who invites visitors to respond to her nightmare with messages of their own on pieces of paper tacked to walls. In an adjacent area, she shows smaller wall pieces that take on less terrifying social ills: mercantile mania, gridlock, shoddy public service. Here again, she doesn’t take problems sitting down but suggests various ways to fight back or take control of discouraging situations. As political art, this work is an unusually effective blend of humor, rage and logic.

Other “Focus” exhibitions are at the Long Beach Art Assn., Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum and Fine Arts Department Galleries, Long Beach City College, FHP Hippodrome Gallery, System M, OverReact Gallery and The Works Gallery. Information: (213) 439-2119.