ART / Cathy Curtis : ‘Art and Architecture’ Builds on Infirm Foundation

When I first drove around Orange County four years ago, I was struck by several unfamiliar sights: breathtaking views of the ocean, strange flocks of bobbing dinosaurlike oil wells and sprawling swaths of ugly new buildings.

Even after closer acquaintance, it seems clear that--except for a sprinkling of redoubtable old structures (such as the Old Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana) and a very few distinctive contemporary ones (such as Michael Graves’ San Juan Capistrano Library)--the county is largely an architectural desert.

That makes the idea of an exhibit of Orange County artists’ views of architecture particularly beguiling. How do artists dream about space? And how are their viewpoints shaped by living in a world of lowbrow buildings?

“Art and Architecture” at the Art Store Gallery (through Sept. 26) contains work by 10 county artists that deals with such topics as suburban interiors, ecological balance, postmodern stylishness and the ways light and space can interact. Although--as is often the case with theme shows--some irrelevant and unformed pieces seem to have been dragged in out of sheer desperation, several works offer fresh points of view.

Angie Bray’s “Blind Window/Blank Wall” is the most minimal and delicate of these: A series of seven white-lacquered wire rectangles are attached on one side to the wall, each positioned slightly above the next. Hanging from the top of each rectangle, like a window shade, is a single sheet of white handmade paper.

The shadow patterns created by lights beamed on the rectangles differ ever so slightly from one to another and vary according to the viewer’s position and the smallest gusts of air. The first rectangle--bent in such a way that its silhouette looks somewhat like a coat swinging out as its wearer walks--allows the paper to hang straight down. The others, twisting more discreetly, allow the paper to fly back or forth or curl up slightly.

With roots in minimalism and the light-and-space movement, the piece offers a gentle reverie on a basic component of architecture. Instead of penetrating solid wall, as windows do, these forms “draw” on it with the help of light, which real window blinds are designed to block out.

Paul Urban, who graduated from the masters program at Cal State Fullerton a few years ago, offers a promising group of small, punchy paintings that incorporate one or two capitalized words--rather like skewed environmentally aware versions of old-fashioned school primers.

In “Bumper Crop,” stacks of identical cars (like ears of corn in an agricultural yield diagram) fill in the contours of a giant building that rises against a blowup of an interstate map crossed with red arteries. “Concrete Hillside,” an oxymoron if ever there was one, offers an abstract pattern of man-made wavy-contoured “fields.”

Janice De Loof specializes in simple compositions of tiny profiled chairs and lone barking dogs within bland, blank interiors. In a slight departure from this formula, “Desert View/Conversation,” a mixed-media pastel, shows profiled figures sitting passively with their arms at their sides in sparsely furnished rooms that have no floors--which seems to paint a portrait of Sunbelt dwellers as rootless folk whose minds may be as unfurnished as their houses. But, as in De Loof’s other works, a cheery air of suburban uplift (bright colors, “cute,” tiny objects) waters down the stark flavor the artist seems to be after.

Linda Kallan’s rather self-consciously stylized paintings of airless spaces are littered with askew facades in rich marbleized hues and lurching poles casting strong shadows. Poised somewhere between abstraction and figuration, these images suggest a bruised, impermanent world of vague menace and delicate balances.

The works by Claremont Colleges graduate student Aaron Parazette, however--pink enamel paintings with cutouts representing the window-grid cliches of International Style office buildings--merely co-opt the blandness of their architectural sources.

Karen Cummings’ post-earthquake, cracked “Cement House” and her charred-wood, rope-fastened “Burnt House” are reminders of the ultimate fragility of our domiciles. Cummings, a graduate student at UC Irvine, is moving toward strong, elemental imagery that is still perhaps too much in thrall to the superficial tenets of good design.

John Hesketh’s eerily lighted Cibachrome photographs wander off in several directions without quite reaching any particular destination. In “Pickets,” cemetery crosses, dog paws and a pair of bare human feet mysteriously enter the unearthly green plot of grass inside a tidy picket fence. The effect is rather like combining the plot of a children’s book with the outre film “Blue Velvet.”

Other artists in the show are Doug Moran (inadequately represented by a few hard-to-decipher mixed-media drawings), Thomas Chambers (whose trendy asymmetrical vessels seem to have wandered in from another show) and Ray Jacobs (who does colorful toylike furniture and building facades offering bland, cutesy takeoffs on postmodernist cliches).

Missing, however--yup, here comes my theme song--is a full-fledged essay that comes right out and comments on what connection, if any, these pieces seem to have with the environment in which the artists live and work.

“Art and Architecture” continues through Sept. 26 at the Art Store Gallery, 4040 Campus Drive, Newport Beach. The gallery is open from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free. Information: (714) 250-7353.