ART : Costa Mesa Group Exhibit Unified by Provocative Nature

One of the enduring mysteries of group art exhibits is why someone decides to put a bunch of works by different people in the same room. Sometimes the works seem as casually unrelated as strangers at a cocktail party.

Essentially, however, there are just two ways to organize a group show: Start with a particular premise and try to find work to illustrate it, or gather art that appeals to you for one reason or another and dream up some handy catch-all title for it.

At best, the choices will illuminate a certain style or approach, while still affirming the artists’ individual differences. At worst, individual works are squeezed into a slick, ready-made and ultimately falsifying mold. (That’s the problem with many shows purporting to represent the art of a minority group or organized around a slightly offbeat medium, like “fabric art.”)

“The Conceptual Impulse” at Security Pacific Gallery in Costa Mesa (through Aug. 12) falls somewhere in-between. The works are so disparate in visual terms--as well as in the kind of ideas they deal with--that they don’t really make a case for a particular way of working. Grasping the gist of one work doesn’t help you figure out the next one.

In the exhibit catalogue, curator Mark Johnstone writes that, over a period of several years, his thoughts “have been persistently invaded” by the works of the seven artists in the show, who are from Los Angeles, New York and Tupelo, Miss. But he didn’t see how to fit them into a specific show.

Finally, it occurred to him that he “was simply asking the wrong questions. What is common to these works is essentially intangible--each has a strong conceptual approach that is convincingly communicated or expressed by widely divergent styles and uses of materials in installation.”

Although “conceptual” has come to be a catch-all description for just about any art that is more about ideas than surface appearances, the C-word seems misapplied to works by some of the artists in this show.

Yet the exhibit is welcome as a roundup of fresh work by mostly little-known artists in their 30s and 40s. Each work is allowed to breathe in its own space, without being twisted to illustrate some overblown curatorial “concept.”

Most of Betty Tsou Fong’s minimalist bronze sculptures take their cues from natural forms. Although her wall pieces are too blandly Plain Jane, she offers a sweet conceit in “Floor Sculpture No. 2” of a swelling mountain form with a deep belly-button-like central core and sweeping sides that swirl around like an open coat. A group of table-top pieces--low-slung, wrap-around shapes with asymmetrical notches--combine volcano or sand-dune forms and elements of ‘50s-style design.

This is faintly quirky stuff, but it isn’t conceptual art. If more proof is needed, Fong’s pedestrian blank-verse accompaniment to her work (“The perfect geometry of a landscape / The sensuous curving of sand dunes / An ambiguous unease in the psyche . . . “) provides it in spades.

Ke Francis’ down-home brand of apocalyptic installation also seems ill at ease with the “conceptual” designation. His work incorporates expressionistic sculptures made with everyday “found” objects and huge, busy paintings. Whimsy and woe both stake out turf in these pieces without quite coming to terms with each other, and an air of faux- folkloricism hangs heavy.

In “Red Spirit Boat Installation,” the painting lays out a landscape in which a river whips through a forest and a mournful man is about to encounter a fantastic red-and-black beast. A separate area with three black-and-white skulls that look somewhat like gas masks suggests an environmental theme. The spirit boat itself, a red and metallic-painted three-dimensional object, ferries a one-eyed, painted steel silhouette and a snake that wriggles on the prow.

David DiMichele’s C- and L-shaped canvases mingle modern-art references and allusions to the ubiquitous urban infrastructure. In “The Origin of Cities,” a scratchy curtain of blue paint half-obscures the flat patterns of railroad tracks, smokestacks, a curvilinear motif a la Matisse, a calligraphic black design and an object that might be a helicopter. There’s something brewing here, but so far it’s mostly a dreamy play of forms and color that touches briefly on a fuzzy notion of cultural evolution.

The artists in the show who do rate the C-word, on the other hand, want to slow you down and dance awhile on your brain.

Michael Ballou offers coy glimpses of human flesh--fingers, knees, eyes and more ambiguous and suggestive creases of skin--wedged in-between sheets of colored wood veneer. In some of these works, the contours of the body glimpses look as weirdly arbitrary as the political boundaries on a map. That’s no accident--Ballou is concerned with the notion of covert glimpses at information some consider too provocative for public consumption.

Uta Barth uses optical effects to give viewers a hard time. While your eyes experience the retinal tease of looking at a four-foot-square field of thin black-and-white stripes, your mind tries to make sense of them as an evocation of danger lurking outside the tiny central photograph of a dwelling place with brightly illuminated windows.

Mel Chin concerns himself with elements of the scientific method; he seems fascinated with the processes of proof and cause-and-effect. In “Revival Field Documentation,” he presents an experiment intended to remove metal contamination from a planted field. The result was “an invisible aesthetic”--a geometric pattern, invisible to the naked eye, formed by the planting of the test and control sites.

Another of his eccentric-inventor pieces, created for a park in Houston, Tex., is a hydraulic system with two 6-by-6-foot planter boxes. A group of absurdly deadpan photographs and a colored drawing show how this contraption works. It lowers and raises oddly assorted individuals who happen to be walking by or tightly packed groups of people at once reminiscent of the first crowd to go up in a hot-air balloon (i.e., an occasion of some scientific moment) and college pranksters trying to see how many bodies can fit into a VW Beetle.

Ernest Scott’s moodily elusive mixed-media photographic work, “After the Flood,” is based on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” With one exception, each of the five pieces in the installation is titled after a section of the 1922 poem about the spiritual decay of modern life and the rise of the secularized city. (The exception is “Death by Fire”; the poem’s corresponding section is “Death by Water.”)

Precisely how word and image intersect is not always easy to figure out. It seems Scott is trying to do the same thing with Eliot’s poem that Eliot himself did with the works of earlier poets: pluck diverse elements and reassemble them into a deliberately discontinuous set of images.

In “Burial of the Dead,” a large kneeling figure with arms bent and upraised might be a knight setting out to find the Holy Grail (the grail legend is one of the cornerstones of Eliot’s poem). In “Game of Chess,” a broken pottery vase on a marble ledge is attached to a black-and-white photograph of the interior of a cathedral with a checkered floor. The visual pun (the floor looks like a chessboard), the reference to Christianity and the image of destruction (the vase might be one of the “heap of broken images” the poet refers to in another section) combine in a haunting way.

Vastly disparate though they are, enough of the artists in this exhibit offer idiosyncratic brain food of one sort of another. If the show is a cocktail party, it’s the kind that doesn’t make you want to bolt for a breath of fresh air.

“The Conceptual Impulse” remains through Aug. 12 at Security Pacific Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd. in Costa Mesa. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 433-6001.