ART REVIEW : L.B. Museum Gets ‘Mystery Tour’

Antlers sprout from the head of a miniature bridegroom. Handles of ordinary house and garden tools turn into wriggling snake-like shapes or take off on spiraling courses. Queen Victoria, in the undignified form of a frog, returns to mother England with a boat load of Canadian souvenirs including a Mountie, a beaver and a totem pole.

Sound familiar? Aficionados of curator Josine Ianco-Starrels’ “Magical Mystery Tour” will think so. And quite rightly, except that this year the holiday exhibition--formerly a major attraction at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park--has moved with the curator to the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Lacking the cavernous space of the Muni, the Long Beach reincarnation is relatively diminutive and contains only one room-size installation of the kind that characterized the original exhibition. But the flavor is the same delightful blend of artistic transformation, whimsy and madness.

Devotees of the “Tour” are unlikely to object to a few repeat appearances from former Muni exhibitions; those who live on the south side of Los Angeles will probably be thrilled to see the show for the first time and without having to brave city traffic.

As always, Ianco-Starrels has selected a few artists and let their imaginations run wild in a dozen or so works displayed in a coherent unit. The “Tour,” then, is a journey from “the ordinary to the extraordinary,” as the curator puts it. Taking advantage of the holiday season--apparently the only time of the year when it’s OK for art to be fun--the show focuses on the light side of artists’ power to transform experience.

Neal Taylor, who provides the single installation, turns a living room into a black-lighted fun house where lightning-streaked paintings and wacky furniture stand on their ears and glow in the dark. Taylor paints such heavy-duty symbols as snakes, spirals, pyramids and flaming caldrons as if they were comic-strip images on polka dot backgrounds. High-contrast painted motifs and patterns spill over onto furniture, such as a chair that appears to have been knocked off-kilter by a gale-force wind that has thrown a pair of men’s shoes and a giant necktie against the upholstery.

Colin Gray also affects vigorous physical changes, but he uses shovels, rakes, trowels and ladders as raw materials. One set of tools has handles bent into concentric arcs. In a lineup of “Tools of the Trade,” handles wiggle up toward the ceiling like parallel rivers. Meanwhile, a wall of yellow, squiggly shapes is composed of imaginatively cut and flayed tennis balls.

A fairy-tale sensibility--by turns sweet and diabolical--flavors Nancy Jackson’s whimsical paintings, assemblages and painted furniture. An embracing couple goes up in flames, an ant-like figure clings to an icy precipice and a young man literally follows his heart into the woods. Nancy Monk’s fancies, on the other hand, have an exquisitely weightless quality. Whether etching wishes on blown-glass forms or printing “talk to me” on the tails of yellow bird sculptures, she evokes a milieu of pristine naivete.

Upstairs, Nancy Webber continues her astonishing series of look-alike photographs, pairing contemporary faces with their doubles in artworks. Sharon Wheeler, an art student at Los Angeles Harbor College, for example, is the spit and image of the woman in Frederic Bazille’s painting “Negro Girl With Peonies.” Art historian Elizabeth Mellon is a visual echo of the model for two of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite paintings. If this series doesn’t make you observe the faces in your crowd more closely you are probably immune to the concept of aesthetic transformation.

Animals, particularly anthropomorphized beasts, figure prominently in the exhibition. Sarah Perry’s magnificent life-size gorillas, made of steel and rubber tires, make a repeat appearance. David Gilhooly’s hilarious ceramic frogs (a new addition to the annual show) send up everything from royalty--specifically Queen Victoria--to such suburban-life staples as family circles and bake sales.

Two great big bunnies, facing opposite sides of a double mirror, are the oversize centerpiece of Bruce Houston’s exhibit of 24 miniature assemblages. But the familiar illusion of a green rabbit turning into a blue-violet one (as you walk around the sculpture) is only one idea given full play in Houston’s imagination.

Amid a sparkling array of art-world jokes and bourgeois visions, Houston makes massive truck trailers turn into paintings by Frank Stella and Piet Mondrian. Ma and Pa Chicken stand in front of a Kafka-esque cottage that houses an egg bigger than they are. Little plastic goats with tires around their middles (a la Robert Rauschenberg’s celebrated “Monogram” sculpture) hang from a tree that might be Mother Nature’s art factory.

Houston’s work would probably dry up and blow away if he ever lost his sense of humor. Taking another look at his pieces in the congenial setting of the “Magical Mystery Tour” is rather like being handed a fresh-baked batch of Christmas cookies. You’ve tasted them before, but the flavor renews your faith in comforting traditions and the possibility that there is room for mad epiphanies in the serious history of art making.

The museum is open Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. A video program of tapes by Ilene Segalove and Skip Sweeney, called “Personal Histories,” completes the exhibition, which continues through Jan. 8.

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