ART/Cathy Curtis : ‘Suburban Visions, Middle-Class Dreams’ Opens Centennial Series

The refrigerator hums, a dog barks somewhere and the TV drones in another room. You are back at your parents’ suburban house, and somehow the scene is both familiar and alien.

They still ask you the annoying old questions (“Don’t you think you should get a haircut?”) and Mom remembers what you like for dinner.

But they have their own mysterious private lives now, and they have changed a lot: They have shrunk and slowed in a scary way. With great pain you suddenly realize: Oh, cliche of cliches, they won’t be around forever.

Larry Sultan’s many-part photographic installation evokes that feeling of loss and change with poignant clarity. Literally and metaphorically, it is the centerpiece of “Suburban Visions, Middle-Class Dreams,” an exhibit of work by six California artists, curated by Charles Desmarais for the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.

The first of a yearlong series of photo shows celebrating the county’s centennial, “Suburban Visions” remains on view through Sept. 25. Desmarais, the newly appointed director of the Laguna Art Museum, was formerly director of the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside.

Although just a few of the images in the exhibit are specifically of Orange County, a statement from Desmarais says all deal with “that comfortable geographical and psychological city and county between the overwhelming press of humanity and the vast isolation of wild nature.”

Sultan’s turf is both geographical and psychological. By juxtaposing cropped blowups of old family snapshots with many Ektacolor prints of his parents going about their daily lives, he contrasts the sunny outlook of an Ozzie-and-Harriet nuclear family with the tensions of two people in late middle-age who seem to be chasing their lost youth under a blanket of misunderstandings and uneasy truces.

The old photos show that Sultan’s father was a trim and handsome man, reclining blissfully in a little inflatable pool, mowing the lawn with a purposeful energy across the street from a modest clapboard house, lifting his young son against the sky in a blurry arc.

Sultan’s mother was a latter-day Queen of Sheba in her modish scarf-hat and fancy blue bathing suit. And young Sultan’s bare shoulder blades have a sweet fragility as he romps on the lawn near the hulking car in the driveway.

Decades later, visiting his parents’ expensive, new “dream house” is a great disappointment to Sultan, as he explains in a statement. It holds “few secrets, associations or dreams. . . . The pillow is too high and spongy, the sheets are polyester, the blanket is full of static charge and too thin.”

The new house is a fussy place, overly ornamented with flower-patterned drapes, elaborate lattice-pattern wallpaper and a headboard made of metal that looks like twisted rope--but oddly lifeless.

His parents exist side by side (at the breakfast table, reading in bed) but rarely seem to relate to each other. In one shot, a bid to communicate through the closed kitchen window becomes a study in frustration.

Sultan’s mother sits alone at a vast table adorned with shiny, green place mats and a suburban still life: looming pepper shaker, jar of aspirin and prescription bottle. Her eyes are closed, and her pink robe slips away from her body to reveal her bra.

In the living room, she poses against the green living wall in heavy eye makeup, a silver satin blouse and white slacks as if vamping for her son, while her husband sits hunched over a TV baseball game.

But although it is his mother whose image Sultan most memorably captures in these photographs, he writes emotionally of his sleeping father that his face “with white traces of moisturizing cream” was “like the face of a lover . . . open, unprotected.”

Sultan’s work is mainly about mortality and the tug of memory. But in this complex homage to his parents, the suburban way of life--even its evolution from “starter home” to cold, middle-class palace--plays a major role.

In Eileen Cowan’s untitled large-format Polaroids, the link to suburbia is not so much geographic as psychological: a Peyton Place of tangled sexual alliances and potential misbehavior. Using featureless black backgrounds, she poses figures in stagy tableaux that look like moments from a TV drama, but with a deliberately ambiguous effect.

In one of several double-photograph pieces, a middle-aged woman talks on the phone (indicated only by a long cord), her stockinged feet comfortably propped up. The cord leads to a phone in the adjoining photograph. In this scene, a man kisses the shoulder of a young woman in a white tulle evening dress who puts her hand over the phone button, as if to cut off her mother’s remonstrations.

Meaningful glances and faces that avoid looking at each other both abound in Cowan’s work, and they feed the persistent air of mystery and tension. In another photographic twin-set, young lovers in bed (he in a T-shirt; she wrapped in a sheet) are juxtaposed with an image of an older man sitting on the edge of a bed, hungrily watching the same woman, now in a blue evening dress, put on a necklace.

Roger Minick’s Ektacolor photographs milk a single theme: the way people are overwhelmed and benumbed by the shiny, light-dazzled, color-saturated unreality of a shopping mall.

Some of Minick’s figures turn transparent, literally evaporating into the glitzy backgrounds; most only look abstracted or tense. The siren-song of “sale” signs becomes meaningless static, and the shapeless plastic bags holding the goods turn booty into anonymous, pathetic bundles.

The other photographers, who all prefer the sensitive black-and-white tonal palette of gelatin silver prints, choose to focus on architectural and natural features of suburbia.

Judy Fiskin’s groupings of tiny square photographs from her “Dingbat” series deal with a type of apartment complex built in the 1960s and ‘70s. Enlivened by geometric patterning and various permutations of roof and balcony styles, these buildings have a newfound retro appeal.

In each of her “Western Journey” pieces arrangements, Laguna Beach photographer Laurie Brown juxtaposes a satellite weather photograph with two images of a natural site--waterfront acreage or scrubby flatland near the mountains.

Sometimes the shadows or cloud masses vary in these paired images, and some of them were evidently taken at different vantage points. There are no signs as yet of human intrusion, however, and the “suburban” angle is mystifying, because Brown seems to be primarily interested in the subtle formal relationships between land masses and the photographer’s point of view.

Joe Deal’s images of developments in suburbias-to-be are not so much commentaries on suburbia as tight-lipped, reportorial observations.

Surrounded by bare hills and piles of dirt in which someone has already dropped fast-food containers, a model home in the Phillips Ranch development--at Riverside County’s border with Los Angeles County, near Diamond Bar--contains a lone striped couch, visible through the window. In the dirt back yard of a Yorba Linda home bordered by a stark chain-link fence, two women perch on a lawn chair while a couple of white poodles squash themselves into the dust.

Granted that some of his choices have to be shoehorned into the “suburban” mold, Desmarais’ inclusion of a broad range of distinctive approaches to such an irresistible topic makes the show one of the Muckenthaler’s most thoughtful offerings--and piques the imagination about his plans for Laguna.

“Suburban Visions, Middle-Class Dreams” continues through Sept. 25 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. Admission is free. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Information: (714) 738-6595.