SAN DIEGO COUNTY : Artist Hopes for a Common Vision--but Wonders

“You can think of him as heroic and you can think of him as a poor guywho doesn’t know what he is doing.”

That’s how artist Jo Ann Callis describes the figure in her photo titled “Man in the Grey Clay Suit.” Callis’ piece is part of the eighth annual Awards in the Visual Arts exhibit, opening Sunday at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

The show is organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., one of two organizations that Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) is trying to prevent from receiving National Endowment for the Arts funds for five years. (The other is the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Contemporary Art, which organized a controversial exhibition by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.)

In this year’s edition of the prestigious exhibit, there’s nothing as controversial, or potentially offensive, as “Piss Christ,” the photograph by Andres Serrano in last year’s show that has brought the contemporary art center and the NEA so much notoriety as well as Helms’ wrath.

Callis’ clay figure is remindful of a modern-day Everyman who represents a commonality of hopes and values. But the uproar being fueled by Helms has the artist doubting the notion of a common vision.

“Maybe I’m naive, but you tend to think most people are more or less like yourself,” said the Los Angeles-based artist, who has received two NEA fellowships. “You can get a lopsided view when you stay in your own little world.”

Artistically, Callis’ “little world” is represented in a big way--surrealistic tableaux staged in enlarged photographs, some of which measure 4 by 5 feet. The photographs can be considered mixed-media works because Callis, originally a sculptor, makes the pieces that appear in the photos.

She came to photography almost accidentally, a result of her frustration with sculpture and a fortuitous meeting with influential photographer Robert Heinecken at UCLA in the early 1970s.

“I had a class with him and that got me started,” said Callis, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UCLA. “I liked the idea that you could achieve results quicker. Sculpture seemed to take forever.

“I came to a period where I ran out of ideas. It was horrible; it lasted a year and a half. I tried to paint, but I was longing for something that would allow me to be freer. Photography allowed me to express some emotional qualities that I wasn’t able to before. The irony is that I’m making sculpture again for the photographs--everything comes full circle.”

Callis had been creating scenes using found objects, but reverted to her former craft to gain more control.

“I could make the objects look the way I wanted them to,” she said. “I could manufacture them, make them be more expressive. I didn’t want them to stand as objects by themselves, but to be in an environment that conjures up feelings, tableaux that remind us of familiar, but not necessarily real, places. There’s a difference between what’s tangibly real and what’s real in your head.”

Callis’ work successfully combines the real and surreal. Printed on German linen, the photos have a painterly quality, the image seemingly absorbed into the surface, avoiding the flat look of most photographs. Her process allows a manipulation of scale, creating illusions that attract and challenge viewers.

“I can make the objects small, but transform them into feeling monumental,” Callis said. “I work in a fairly small space and don’t need to reflect reality, but to transform it. Just like in the movies, where they create miniatures for special effects.”

Making objects for her tableaux has rekindled Callis’ interest in sculpture.

“I’ve enjoyed the process, having that tactility again,” she said.

She may continue the reconciliation by exhibiting the sculptural objects alone, and says she will experiment with painting on the linen--revisiting another medium that had previously frustrated her.

“Hopefully the boundaries will be less rigid, and allow me to make what I want to make at the moment.”

The 10 artists in the show represent various regions in the country. Besides Callis, they are Patrick T. Dougherty, James Drake, Ron Fondaw, Ed Fraga, David Hammons, Paul Kos, Erik Levine, Ann McCoy and Charles Wilson.

Jurors included New York artist (and former NEA visual arts director) Benny Andrews; Marge Goldwater, curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; New Mexico artist Luis Jimenez Jr.; Susan Krane, curator of 20th Century Art at the High Museum in Atlanta, and Susan Sollins, executive director of Independent Curators Inc. of New York.

The exhibit continues through Oct. 15.