‘Prom Night’ Exhibit Captures the Gawkishness of Teen-Agers

Got any last-minute presents to wrap? Newspapers to take to the recycler? Maybe you need to spend an afternoon cleaning out the garage or folding the laundry. Any of the above might be more worthwhile than taking in the ho-hum late December gallery scene in Orange County.

Your best bet is probably Alex Traub’s “Prom Night” at BC Space in Laguna Beach (through Friday). The 22 black-and-white images of couples at a 1981 senior prom in Las Vegas, N.M., are a study in teen-age awkwardness.

A few of the couples keep a wary distance, as if they barely know each other. Many look nervous and uncomfortable in their cheesy formal attire. Some strike the naive poses of play-acting children. Traub let each couple pose as they pleased, and the results capture with unusual intensity the time in your life when you’d rather die than think of yourself as a kid but are still figuring out how to be an adult.

Also at BC Space are a group of idiosyncratic, not fully resolved collages and photographs from Barbara Adelman’s “Gender Series” and a satirical silk banner, “Are You Telling Yourself a Little White Lie?” by Shelley Bachman.

New paintings by Eric Orr at the Works Gallery in Costa Mesa (through Jan. 22) look a lot like earlier paintings by this much-lauded fixture of contemporary Southern California art. His chi-chi small paintings on linen, often framed in gold, incorporate patches of jewel-toned color that flow into one another and glow as if illuminated by an unseen interior source. Some works incorporate tiny bits of crushed electronic circuitry, the latter-day equivalent of a shaman’s magical substances.

This is all supposed to create a metaphysical resonance--a meditative calm that taps the viewer into the great mysteries of the universe. Maybe you have to be a fan of New Age music or crystals or something to catch the drift.

LJB Gallery in Newport Beach has a lot more space to show art now, but the new 2,000-square-foot west wing apparently came with no guarantees of more accomplished or memorable work. Three one-man exhibits (through Dec. 30) showcase the work of Jim Ganzer, Ned Evans and Jon Stokesbary.

In a seemingly endless series of paintings and monoprints, Ganzer repeats the same image--a couple kissing--with variations in patterning and brushwork. The figures have the solidity and hairdos of characters from an old movie. But you don’t get the sense that the artist is rising above the cliche he has chosen; this stuff looks like it was deliberately made for folks who want a blandly romantic image that looks like “real art.”

Stokesbary’s ceramic faces are the kitschy sorts of objects you’d expect to see at a crafts fair. In the end, it matters little that these pieces were executed with elaborate and innovative techniques if the imagery remains at such a sophomoric, one-joke level.

According to the gallery press release, Evans, a UC Irvine graduate, has shown his work at the “Modern Museum of Art” in New York. His large paintings on wood and other materials are big on mix ‘n’ match patterning and texturing, with slices of all kinds of abstract painting ideas slapped together to make a piece. This is still a rather fashionable tack to take, but the risk is that you make a lot of noise signifying very little.

Gallery 57 in Fullerton also has a three-person show (through Dec. 30). Work by Darryl Curran lured me in and proved to be the main drawing card. His combinations of photographs and small objects are stubbornly enigmatic--sometimes too much so--but at their best they invite minute scrutiny and create an enveloping aura of reverie.

There are also a group of mixed-media table-top figures by Karen Feuer Schwager and a forest of wood and metal sculptures by Kaye Sullivan.

Schwager’s figures march to the beat of a drummer whose band stopped playing decades ago. Her pieces are either ultra-perky (an “Aerobic Figure” bends in half, its head twisted in profile) or laden, ‘50s-style, with ponderous meaning unfortunately unsupported by the banal imagery (two figures mounted face-to-face on a T-shaped spindle are “Figures Seeking Individuality”).

Sullivan’s “Spirit Oars” are elongated, totem-like pieces incorporating metal mesh, rows of copper nails, embedded wire and rusted hinges. The urge to decorate seems keen in these pieces; sometimes to the extent that the craftswoman’s joy in combining materials seems to override the simple harmonies of the work.

BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach, is open from 9 to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Closed Dec. 23 through Jan. 2. Information: (714) 497-1880. The Works Gallery, Crystal Court, South Coast Plaza (Suite 315), Costa Mesa, is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m to 6 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. Information: (714) 979-6757. LJB Gallery, 359 San Miguel Drive, No. 110, Newport Beach, is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday. Information: (714) 720-0133. Gallery 57, 204 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton, is open from noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Information: (714) 870-9194.