ART : Exhibit Spotlights Private-Type Work by Women Artists

“Move over, big guy. We’ve got rights, too. There’s more to art than the powerful gesture, the tough stance and the aggressively public presentation. Just because we may make art that’s small-scale, quiet and introspective, our contribution is no less valid.”

Well, maybe. It all depends.

In “Private Matters”--an exhibit of work by Angie Bray, Deborah Davidson and Julie Masterjohn at Saddleback College Art Gallery--curator Patricia Boutelle has set out to make a case for a “private” type of work made by some women artists that tends to get overlooked or dismissed in the larger world of art.

It’s invigorating to see a curator exercise a specific point of view, particularly when it concerns the larger cultural context of art. But Boutelle seems to be taking a rather blinkered look at what’s going on in art these days.

The macho, bravura gestures of the Abstract Expressionists and the immense canvases of the color field painters strike many younger artists as beside the point. They make conceptually motivated pieces that reconfigure our world of objects and images in ways that carry political, sociological, art-related or utterly private meanings.

Quirky, small-scale, personal treatments have no less stature than room-filling installations. It has long since ceased to matter whether a work is large or small, made with time-hallowed art materials or industrial scraps. What does matter--no matter what the race, sex or sexual orientation of the artist--is the level of thinking that’s going on and how successfully it is conveyed by the physical evidence of the work.

The aspect of feminist art that hasn’t been absorbed into the art mainstream, thank goodness, is the shrilly self-righteous, baldly humorless approach that aims to hammer home a highly specific point of view, complexity and allusiveness be damned.

The Saddleback show comes across--inadvertently, no doubt--as a kind of way station between older and newer conceptions of what “women’s art” can or should be. The work is serious and thoughtful but much of it seems oddly stunted--by failure of talent or nerve or circumstance.

Deborah Davidson’s paintings are would-be dreamlike scenes presented in a pat, stagy way that short-circuits the discovery of personal meaning. In “Life Preserver,” a vast, empty swimming pool stretches out under a night sky. Several small, sophomorically surreal landscapes feature such sights as burning trees--a hackneyed motif--and odd furniture (a chair with Dalmatian spots).

Dour, heavy-handed symbolism weighs down a pair of meticulous charcoal drawings. Both titled “Daddy’s Chair,” they are views of airlifted, wrapped armchairs, one in flames, the other doused--presumably indicating that the artist has come to grips with her anger at patriarchal dominance.

Angie Bray’s tiny figures--identifiably female, angularly male or neuter--balance themselves or step uncertainly on slim ledges or lengths of wood. Made of fly-away wire mesh, bits of plexiglass, a length of wire or a crumpled scrap of copper, the figures are metaphors for risk, challenge and decision-making. The doppelganger-like shadows the figures cast on the walls may suggest the phenomenon of wryly watching oneself stumbling through life, or the outside world’s simplified view of an individual’s personal journey.

In “Untitled (figure, seven times),” seven female figures formed from lightly indented pieces of mesh stand in a row on a thin perch of wood mounted on the wall. Each one leans over a bit farther, as if gaining a touch more bravery from the efforts of the others. A human silhouette airily sketched in wire--”Untitled (figure, walking off edge)”--balances on a minuscule pathway. In “Untitled (figure, walking down edge),” a copper homunculus sets off down the long, slanting road of a 2-by-4 leaning against the wall.

The scale of these pieces is absolutely right and so is Bray’s exquisitely minimal use of materials. But the work is too uncomfortably close to platitude and whimsy. Having followed Bray’s work for several years, I’ve begun to wish she would set herself more complex and diffuse tasks. It’s not so much a question of abandoning her beloved small scale but rather of figuring out more arresting ways of translating her vividly idiosyncratic take on the world into three dimensions.

Julie Masterjohn’s sculptures seem to be struggling--with greater and lesser success--to rise above their origins in the kind of passe “women’s art” that makes too tedious a virtue of private rituals, homespun imagery, woolly personal beliefs and the unmediated presentation of childhood experience.

“Taking it on the Road (Baggage House)”--a cardboard “house” complete with carrying handle, filled with worn stuffed animals--evokes a childhood fraught with upheaval, in which a real family might be supplanted with more loyal, inanimate allies. The image is touching but rather simple-minded; it engages the viewers’ sympathies but not their minds.

“Prayer House” consists of a large trough filled with clay, on a rocker base. Above it, on the wall, an inscription appeals to some larger power to “cast me aside/into the healing clay” and “mold me into a self anew.” Rocking implies a return to the security of infancy, mud connotes our primordial origins, and yet the piece doesn’t make anything happen on a metaphoric level. The mannered diction of the prayer also works against the stark simplicity of the visual elements.

In “With or Without You,” Masterjohn tackles a burning, highly emotional issue with a fine ambivalence. Within the skeleton of a house wrapped in Ace bandages, a group of child-size, rusted dry cleaner’s hangers form a vertical chain. The paper coverings contain passages from Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion rights, printed in the pale blue type that sanitary napkin manufacturers seem to favor.

The rusted hanger, of course, has come to be a symbol of illegal back-room abortions. But this self-effacing piece is more than the sum of its parts, conjuring up images of the ghostly child whose clothes might have been draped on the hangers, of suffering, of shelter, and of the reproductive cycle itself.

“Private Matters” continues through April 20 at Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Hours: 12:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 12:30 to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 12:30 to 4 p.m. Fridays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 582-4924.