ART : Small-Scale Details Wed to Big-Scale Geometry

It comes as an unexpected treat to see the distinctive personal style that characterizes the recent brass, copper and aluminum sculptures by Karin Feuerabendt-Steinberg, who is the standout among the seven little-known artists chosen for the third annual “New Juice in Orange County” exhibit at the Irvine Fine Arts Center.

As a graduate student at UC Irvine, she concentrated on sculpture after studying printmaking with UCI’s John Paul Jones as an undergraduate. “I really liked him a lot; I guess he gave me confidence,” she said.

Her largest sculpture, which works its way down a wall to rest expansively on the floor, looks like a huge necklace--if you can imagine a necklace with the power of a primitive totem.

With delicate little “teeth” punctuating a flat sheet of brass--reminiscent of a kalimba , an African thumb piano--and an inventory of spindly wires, pristine metal wrappings and bits of wire screening, Feuerabendt-Steinberg has wed small-scale refinement to big-scale geometry.

Delicate but not sweet, quietly laying claim to the substantial area of wall and floor it covers, this is minimalist art deepened by cross-cultural sensitivity and a quietly self-possessed feminist spirit.

Another of Feuerabendt-Steinberg’s pieces consists of two strips of double-triangle diamond shapes made of brass that hang from wires at each end of a curving brass bar.

Other small sculptures are spare traceries of metal line bent in willful yet disciplined ways. Although plainly less assertive than the knockout “necklace,” these pieces engage the play of line and shadow with a finely tuned sensibility.

Work by other artists in the exhibition still has a way to go before it hits the jackpot, though in a few instances the potential rewards seem especially worth pursuing.

In Tom La Duke’s “Land of Lincoln,” an X-ray of the spine and chest area in a wood frame sits atop a 19th-Century scene of spreading farmland, in which a pair of back-bent gleaners toil. A pale, blue image of an apple with a bite taken out of it hovering over the landscape, a fragmentary plaster torso perched on top of the piece and a row of tiny Lincoln heads near its lower edge seems to have a point to make.

Perhaps the piece has to do with the way the honesty and uprightness associated with America’s heartland and the legacy of our 16th President have been betrayed by the addition of pollutants to crops. But judging by other, evidently more obscure works by La Duke, a graduate student at Cal State Fullerton, this may be too literal and “fixed” a reading to suit the artist.

Deborah Davidson’s small, eerily vacant paintings of crosses floating (sometimes alight) in swimming pools suggest a judgment rendered on smug suburban enclaves--or smug suburban souls. In “How Fragile We Are,” the viewer looks down on the coldly glossy aquamarine surface of the pool, the oddly macabre black tongue of the diving board and the severe outlines of the cross and its pale reflection.

Clearly, the cross image has personal meaning for Davidson, an instructor at several county colleges who makes her art under the shadow of a brave fight against cancer. The paintings establish a strong and specific aura, and their utter simplicity shows a skilled hand at work. But the nagging suspicion persists that appropriating a religious symbol in this way means taking the easy way out.

Jang Park (or “Jango,” as the wall labels have it), who just received her bachelor’s degree from UCI, seems out to claim some nonexistent Joseph Beuys-clone award. The spirit of the late German avant-garde artist rises again in an untitled piece involving a hunk of carpet bound with rope and hung on the wall like a side of beef. It is fastened to a stack of cement blocks that rests on another sack-like piece of carpet, and is topped with an evil-looking metal hook.

The carpet-as-meat image has a wonderfully provocative resonance, but the piece as a whole strains a bit too hard for a tough contemporary European look without offering evidence it can produce the polemical goods.

In his pastel drawings, Richard Tellinghuisen--who is director of operations at the Newport Harbor Art Museum--seems to be aiming for images that almost resolve themselves into recognizable imagery but duck away at the last minute. A pocket or purse-shaped motif is a recurrent inhabitant of these rather inscrutable pieces.

Laurel Brunner’s brushy painting images, on the other hand, have a brash--even hysterical--predictability.

In “Annunciation,” a gold icon hangs above a New Age infant in swaddling clothes who has spiky white hair and lies on real painted straw. “Behind the Door” features an assortment of fantastic monsters who are all trapped in a room. Another creature, shadowed on the door, lurks outside. Despite their superficial oddity, these pieces fail to engage the viewer’s deeper concerns.

Karen Innis Reid replays the battle of the sexes and celebrates Woman with clay and cast metal figures. In “Yours/Mine” from the “We” series, a pair of male and female figures preside over separate piles of balls at opposite ends of a temple structure. “The Saint” is a bony woman in a strapless turquoise dress and a halo, holding a gold ball.

In a statement, Reid says she sees people “as entities with power or pathos unrestricted to a specific culture or environment” and seeks “to define common purposes through symbolic postures and props.” But in her “staged human imagery,” she seems to be confusing symbolism with dreary banality.

Yet despite some disappointing work in the exhibit, this installment of “New Juice” is surely the best so far, pared down to a manageable group, yet clearly reflective of curator Dorrit Fitzgerald’s generously catholic taste and patient hunt in the unknown corners of the county for the art that matters.