AT THE GALLERIES : Border Sculpture Show Fails to Chisel Out Standouts

Italo Scanga, perhaps San Diego’s best-known sculptor, shares the stage this month with several dozen of the area’s lesser-knowns. The Ilan-Lael Foundation is featuring Scanga this year in its show, “New Sculpture--San Diego/Tijuana 90,” at the San Diego Repertory’s Lyceum Theatre in Horton Plaza, through June 30.

Nearly 40 artists are represented, but few have shown their work extensively. Guest jurors Howard Fox of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and David Hopper, a California glass artist, selected pieces for the sixth annual Ilan-Lael show from more than 70 entries. Most of the sculpture that made it into the show nevertheless falls into that broad and bottomless chasm between the poignant and the puerile, that middle ground of well-trained mediocrity.

Moments of eloquence do emerge throughout the show, however--in a tattered doll tossed onto a bed of screws, in the mellow gleam of glass seen through triangular copper cutouts, in a whimsically macabre clay sculpture, in the chunky grandeur of a blown-glass crown, the primitive simplicity of a rusted steel animal, the lyrical network of small bronze figures, the coy comment on public art and the oddity of Japanese lacquer bowls filled with coins and dried peas. These powerful images are buried in blandness, though, and only a few works in the show maintain a consistently engaging tone.

Verda Friesen’s “These Five Stones” presents no stones at all, but a group of rusted steel objects. Each object sits on its own rusted steel platform, a waist-high table balanced on thin, crimped legs. Coarse nails driven into a metal plate, a crude cup with twisted wire handle, a pocked, double bladed ax, a few eroded metal flasks, and a small configuration of barbed wire sit on the platforms, heavy with implications. They spell out a poem of disjointed nouns and melancholy moods. They offer a meditation on another age through rusted, exhausted tools.

The show’s first-place award went to Jim Wilstermann for his “Ocotillo Necropolis.” Despite its small scale, the sculpture evokes monumental, looming proportions. Its miniature ocotillo cactus plants, cast in bronze, grow on the roof of a granite and brick structure whose articulated surface recalls a columbarium, or wall of crypts. Wilstermann enshrines the plants within a fence of barbed wire, isolating the living from the dead, the vital and organic from the stark and anonymous.

Like Friesen’s and Wilstermann’s work, Scanga’s cubist-inspired concoctions of branches, wooden dowels, furniture fragments and rope breathe much-needed life into this show. Splattered and stroked with color, they exude a refreshing energy and a tragicomic approach to life that helps put the rest of the show into perspective.

Some of history’s most glaring gaps and fallacies are addressed in the Educational Cultural Complex’s current show, “African Influences in the Americas: The Fragments of a Shared Legacy.” The show traces the impact of African culture in 11 countries over the course of nearly 3,000 years. Local historian and educator Charles Ambers Jr. assembled the show from his extensive collection of images and artifacts.

The ECC cultural affairs department, together with the San Diego Museum of Art’s African arts committee, invite the public to meet the collector tonight during a reception from 6 to 8 at the ECC (4343 Ocean View Blvd.). After the reception, Ambers will give a slide presentation and lead an informal discussion about the show.

“AIDS Art Alive” presents the work of more than 50 artists with AIDS and other life-threatening diseases. All of the artists live in San Diego County and have participated in a free art program sponsored by the San Diego Community College’s Resource Center for Disabled Students. The show can be seen through June 30 at Sweet Visions Gallery in Hillcrest (141 University Ave.).

“This class,” said one of the students, “proves that all medicines are not in a needle or bottle.”