ART REVIEW : Bunn Illuminates New Museum

The Frank O. Gehry space is beautifully crafted. The location--a few blocks from the balmy Pacific--is ideal. David Bunn’s inaugural installation, first in a series called “Previews: Art in the Raw at SMMOA” at the unfinished Santa Monica Museum of Art, is just provocative enough to bode well for the fledgling institution. Director Tom Rhoades could have chosen some predictable blue-chip Westside artist whose credentials alone would have assured smooth sailing, but he made a riskier--and commendable selection.

Bunn is established enough to be an assistant professor at USC, yet still unjaded enough to lace conceptual work with poetry (some of it quick and clean, some of it gooey), personal revelation and clever references to the tenets of art history. His keenly appropriate kickoff, called “Sphere of Influence,” forces you to get familiar with all the space’s nooks and crannies as it plays like a walk through art’s “greatest hits.”

Bunn concocts wonderful “instruments” from combinations of reflective tubing, high-powered binoculars and telescopes, vintage cameras, simple wood frames mounted on old microphone stands. These gadgets are arranged in the museum space in a careful circle, inscribing the perfect center of the room.

From each of these viewing sites Bunn isolates some innocuous and unnoticed structural detail. A crevice on the floor looks like South America, enlarged whitewashed brick looks like a flickery color-field arrangement. A floor drain excised from its context becomes an “earthwork” from a distance.

The reflective convex surface of a small outlet cover is magnified to become one of those tricky mirrors in a Van Eyck painting that reflects the scene back onto itself; as we look, we see ourselves and the miniaturized show space peering back. When we peek through a mounted kaleidoscope, exposed wall supports are repeated over and over like bands of a grid. Viewers, passers-by and Bunn himself become participants in a clever process piece that would do Frank Kaprow proud.

On index cards mounted at each gadget, Bunn types the date of his structural siting plus some freely associative title or descriptive couplet, such as “Spot on which eyes, wind and hearts are fixed.” Through another site he spots a Pollock splatter, the handiwork of a painter probably cleaning his brush, and types the entry “The East/New York.”

It is not dredged-up art-magazine fodder that makes this exhibition fun. It is rather that Bunn makes site-sensitive art of the common but universal act of sorting. He takes us through an archival look at the evolution of a building (formerly an egg processing plant for Edgemar Farms) and reminds us that more often than not we’re looking but not seeing.

Bunn’s installation (at 2437 Main St., Santa Monica) ends Sunday. Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 1-6 p.m.