ART REVIEW : Contemporary Coup : Juried Exhibition Brings Talent Out of the Woodwork From 7 Western States

Is nine a lucky number? Are the moon and planets in a special alignment? Did the magic name of the Museum of Contemporary Art lure good artists out of the woodwork?

Well, whatever the reason, the ninth annual juried exhibition of the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art--open to artists living in the seven Western states and selected by Kerry Brougher, assistant curator at MOCA in Los Angeles--may well be the best juried show ever in Orange County. Gone are the wishy-washy, conservative, plodding and confused works that clog most local art competitions. Instead, a large proportion of the work on view (until Aug. 11) is fresh and strong and aggressively contemporary.

There is a lot of photography, some painting, very little sculpture, a good deal of essentially conceptual work in various formats--and (for once) no jewelry, pots or handmade paper.

Right in the first gallery a viewer encounters encouraging signs: Anne E. Mudge’s “Mantle,” Brenda Luckin’s “Banner Crest,” Michael Brodsky’s “Big Questions/Bigger Answers” and two pieces by Tim McGuire.

A narrow snood of wire mesh suspended from cables and studded with nails, “Mantle” (which won Best of Show) bristles darkly and dangerously in a sleek fall that grows denser as it yields to the pull of gravity. Mudge’s reward is a one-person show at OCCCA sometime next year.

“Banner Crest” is a noisy sandwich of decorative elements cut out of enamel-painted plastic foam. Painted scrollwork borders, a crest and an enlarged egg shape from egg-and-dart molding are piled together, with a vaguely vegetative blue cutout slapped on top. The piece isolates details of display and design and saucily undercuts them with humble materials and a seemingly casual presentation.

Brodsky’s big laser-digital silver prints reflect the free-floating, media-numbed anxiety of our age, with impossibly enlarged pixel images of mostly undecipherable faces and fragments of words.

McGuire’s teasingly sexual, densely layered mixed-media works (“Guilt in the Shadows” and “Flaming Desire”) mates fabric and paper patterns, intarsia designs and magazine cutouts of fruits with fragmentary images of male and female anatomy and tiny details (angels, praying hands) from reproductions of paintings. To be sure, sex-and-fruit analogies are as old as the hills, but McGuire’s take on them is at once hip, conflicted and lushly enticing.

The photographs in the show encompass various approaches, from straightforward documentary with a Garry Winogrand-like edge (Meg Ryan’s untitled view of people waiting to board a bus) to Cindy Beltran’s elegant untitled image of the play of light, shadow and pattern in a house by the sea. Other photos are as firmly rooted in ideas as in arresting imagery.

Into her stylishly laid out color shot of a fish surrounded by vegetables on a cutting board, Tamarra Kaida slips a worried cook’s newspaper clipping about PCB levels in bluefish. Randall Scott’s untitled trio of grainy silver prints offers a series of abstract shapes that seem to represent, in telegraphic fashion, the action of shooting a balloon. Jonathan Clark’s “Naomi’s Buttons No. 5” may look like a straightforward photograph of an assortment of old buttons on a piece of cardboard--but it’s also an odd and engaging way of mingling an elliptical portrait of someone with an amusing sort of taxonomy.

In various other media, works that stand out from the crowd include: Rosemary Boost’s ironic diptych “Concentrate on Your Desires”; Gail Classen’s ruminative “Green Grass,” a mixed-media piece about change and growth; Ted Fusby’s sweetly imaginative extension of art history, “Breughel’s Gardener”; and T.R. Jahns’ wry, hermetic “What Happens to Wood.”

One more good thing about the show--one is tempted to call it “OCCCA Meets MOCA”--is that Brougher didn’t load up the small space with more art than it can comfortably hold. And although 33 artists are represented (some with more than one piece), the show has an order and logic that comes of selecting work according to one’s personal taste rather than the usual blandly democratic dictates of “broad representation.”

The Ninth Annual Juried Exhibition remains through Aug. 11 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Harbor Business Park, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd. (Space 111) in Santa Ana. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 549-4989.