ART REVIEW : ‘In Site’ Tries to Breathe Life Into Urban Dead Zone

Something there is that doesn’t love a corporate entryway. The great minds of urban planning have tackled the problem of what to do with the dead zones that spring up like patches of stubborn crabgrass in buildings otherwise streamlined for maximum efficiency, but they’ve yet to find a solution. Foliage doesn’t help, nor do plush carpeting, piped-in music, sectional sofas and soothing lithographs. These unwelcoming stretches of real estate resolutely resist habitation, not so much because of their physical qualities, but because of the psychological space they take us into.

Like Jacques Tati in his brilliant spoof of modern life, “Playtime,” we know when we enter these daunting cathedrals of chrome and glass that we’re in the very bowels of the System, and we feel ourselves dwarfed by the gleaming wheels of industry. Stern security guards prowl the floors in this Kafkaesque realm, where video surveillance cameras record our every move, hall passes are required for access to upper floors, and red tape has been elevated to a high art.

“In Site,” an exhibition of six art installations designed for the lobby of Security Pacific Corp.’s world headquarters, attempts to breathe some life into one of these miniature urban deserts, but none of these works quite succeeds in commandeering the space it occupies.

Selected by curator Mark Johnstone, these artists--all but one of whom hail from Los Angeles--have come up with highly formal, rather austere solutions to a problem whose chief characteristic is austerity. The show (which continues through March 25) plays a bit too much by the rules; none of these pieces violate the space or overstep the boundaries of what’s acceptable in this context.

Judith A. Sugden lands the most effective blow against the empire with “Between Columns III,” an unsettling mixed-media work that one might dismiss as a section of the building under renovation if one failed to notice the label designating it an artwork. Incorporating a section of scaffolding pushed askew and fragments of toppled columns and arches, this oddly menacing piece suggests that the world isn’t quite as controllable as the corporate axis would have it.

Steve De Groodt explores the collision of high and low culture in two works that grew out of a visit to New Guinea, where the artist recalls seeing “a native woman whose face was decorated with scars and tattoos operating an airline computer.” That striking image is echoed here in “Nuplea Poisin (New Magic),” a mixed-media work built around a TV set with a blank, flickering screen, encased in a primitive box fashioned out of twigs and perched on a small sand dune.

Daniel J. Martinez’s “Eagles Don’t Catch Flies” conducts an inquiry into ways in which language and people are manipulated. Installed around a row of elevators, the piece combines 90 identical figures fashioned out of metal and wood, 28 signs imprinted with words and their definitions, and a massive net woven out of nylon rope that looms over the escalator cavity. It’s a very big, dramatically installed piece, but its theme of oppression and control is almost upstaged by its decorative charm; it’s a rather pretty work.

Maryland artist Gillian Brown offers the most nakedly emotional piece on view with an untitled assemblage exploring the subject of memory and the idea of home. Brown has fabricated a nearly life-size, three-dimensional model of a fragment of a middle-class home; painted on to the walls of this house haunted by the past are photographic images of Mom and the kids.

Sculpture and photographic etchings by Diane Buckler are awash in a similar melancholy, while David Furman injects a spot of whimsy into the show with “A Cubic Yard of Art,” a colorful collage fashioned out of artists’ materials--paint brushes, erasers, pencils and so forth.

All told, this is an engaging enough show; however, the most telling thing about the effectiveness of “In Site” is the fact that most of the people bustling in and out of the building on the morning this reporter visited seemed to go about their business without so much as a glance at the lobby of Security Pacific.