ART : Fragile Ideas Kept All Too Securely Under the Wraps

A few years ago, film star interviews invariably mentioned that the subject was “a very private person.” Being very private, which presumably is a far, far better thing than just being “private,” was an accolade right up there with wealthy, gorgeous and sexy.

But the real private people of this planet are not a glamorous lot. They are the very thin-skinned souls who constantly battle paralyzing insecurities, are deeply wounded by chance remarks and drive would-be friends away with aloof, skittish behavior.

“Under Wraps,” a thoughtful exhibit at the Irvine Fine Arts Center that deals, for the most part, with concealment and repression, recalls the extreme sensitivity that often accompanies “private” behavior. To work successfully in this vein, an artist needs to be able to explore fragile ideas without allowing the art to look downright wimpy. Just a few of the artists in the show seem able to manage this.

Carol Horst creates gentle, non-linear narratives with delicate silver prints bound into books, often combining photographs on paper and on plastic film to create overlapping imagery. Few things are more private than her choice of theme (sleep and dreaming). Even gaining access to Horst’s work becomes a private matter, available to just one person at a time.

In “Untitled (Nightgown Book),” a flowered flannel nightgown, disembodied hands, a man’s image and a twist of bedclothes become players in a subtle drama that mingles allusions to love, sleep and conception. A tiny untitled “flip book” (in which images appear to move when the pages are flipped) offers a disarmingly simple scenario: a woman tosses in her sleep and wakes up, leaving an impression of her body on the sheets.

Nick Vaughn’s work in the show--mannequins displaying shirts with rows of first names sewn in them and photographs of people wearing photographs of other people--have the look of ideas not quite resolved in visual form but tantalizing nonetheless.

The photographs, which seem more effective, are very open-ended. Wearing photos of people of various ages--family members?--may be an acknowledgment of their impact on one’s life. But the awkwardness of photographs-as-apparel (one is a peculiar-looking necklace, the other is a rigid object permitting little head movement on the wearer’s part) suggests that one’s family may be a burden or impediment of some kind.

It seems as though the artist’s intent is the most obviously “hidden” element. Possibly, Vaughn is calling attention to something that the self-made, individualistic culture of America prefers to overlook: the way personality is shaped through reaction to others whom one contacts closely. Or perhaps the focus is meant to be on the definition of the “self” as a being uniquely different from others.

In any case, the quirky individuality of Vaughn’s perceptions gives the works a staying power.

Kathy Gaye Shiroki opens up library books, carves them out and creates imagery involving the books’ titles, using words and pictures from the cut-out pages. In “Story of a Bad Boy,” she juxtaposes two images: a boy balanced on a ledge over a pool and a swath of lawn marked off with string. The text reads: “Do not take on responsibility for a condition which even those equipped to deal with it view with anxiety.”

The portentous sound of the phrase and the suburban banality of the photos work off each other amusingly. Shiroki tartly cuts through the book’s verbiage (none of her choices are seriously literary) to put a spin on its message. Her work reverses the show’s theme, however, by taking something hidden and serving it up in full view.

But other works in the show--culled from proposals submitted by artists throughout the country--lack the edge that makes for memorable art. Some are poor-me pieces, beating their little breasts over some aspect of nature or humanity without sufficient scope or allusiveness to let the idea resonate. Other works are simply too banal or undeveloped.

Sharon Siskin sounds painfully earnest with her title--”The Fruits of Imperialism/Oppression”--for an arrangement of cloth strips and other materials creating the flattened image of what appears to be a stylized dead Bedouin suitable for hanging in bourgeois living rooms.

Michael Arata is involved in a worthy-sounding ecological project, but his “documentation” of curling, annotated black-and-white photographs, assorted plant cuttings and other materials lacks the shape and substance of a finished piece.

Anne E. Mudge’s “Insular Entities” consists of three bristling mounds made of little wood sticks and bundles of steel wires. The first piece is all wood sticks; the second is partly opened up to reveal the wire interior; the third is more fully ajar, with a tangled fuzz of wires. Well-crafted though it is, the piece lacks its own aura of surprise and enchantment to correspond with the well-worn theme of the miracle of growth.

Judith Blankman’s “Peripheral En/vision” is a walk-in environmental piece, a 3-sided enclosure with a dirt floor, a ladder, a descending stairway and a latticed ceiling. The idea is (as Blankman writes in a statement) to let the viewer bring private associations to the piece.

You could say she hasn’t given us much to work with. You could also say she has given us too much, that the “ground rules” are so vague it’s hard to get involved. A piece so baldly lacking in nuance or imagination does not exactly invite us to contribute our 2 cents.

Had the work been intended as an ironic response to viewer expectations of art, it might have come off as fairly clever. But Blankman is playing it straight here, and her wishful thinking just doesn’t do the trick.

Dean Dan paints wispy figures surrounded by delicate wire prisons in a style reminiscent of those School of Paris artists of the 1950s and ‘60s whose names no one can recall. Michael Brangoccio does large, polite abstractions dependent on contrasts in texture.

In Brian Cast’s wall sculptures, bronze or aluminum is cast to look like sheets of cloth under tension, pulled over a partially visible object. These pieces seem to be more about making serviceable trompe-l’oeil works than about the element of secrecy or privacy so crucial to this exhibit.

Too bad more distinctive artists could not be found to validate the strong and ambitious concept of the show. A display of lithographs and a mixed-media mock-up of Christo’s “Wrapped Monument to Vittorio Emanuel” for the statue in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, gives a fleeting notion of the way one of art’s big boys has built an entire reputation on hiding things under wraps.

“Under Wraps” remains through Feb. 5 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. , 9 a.m. to 9 p . m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 552-1078 or (714) 552-1018.