ART : BRAIN BUSTERS : ‘Conceptual Impulse’ Isn’t a Show That You’d Breeze In and Out Of

“Conceptual Impulse” marks the first anniversary of the Security Pacific Gallery, the contemporary art gallery at the Security Pacific Bank headquarters in Costa Mesa. There have been some ups and downs during the past 12 months, but this exhibit contains some genuinely fresh and provocative work.

Which is not to say that the show is easy to breeze in and out of. Most of the seven American artists in the show--who live in Los Angeles, New York and Tupelo, Tenn.--want to slow you down and dance awhile on your brain.

Michael Ballou offers coy glimpses of human flesh wedged in between sheets of colored wood veneer. In some of these works, the contours of the bodies 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. Each of her four paintings is a four-foot-square field of thin black-and-white stripes with a tiny photograph in the center, of a house or apartment with brightly illuminated windows. While your eyes experience the retinal tease of the eye-popping stripes, your mind tries to make sense of them as an evocation of nocturnal danger lurking outside the comfort of the home.

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 a description and diagram of an experiment intended to remove metal contamination from a planted field and create “an invisible aesthetic.”

Betty Tsou Fong’s minimalist sculptures are sometimes too blandly Plain Jane, but she offers a sweet conceit in a bronze “Floor Sculpture 2” of a swelling mountain form with a deep belly-button-like central core, and sweeping sides that swirl around like an open coat.

Other points of view are offered by Ernest Scott’s moodily evocative mixed-media photographic work, and David DiMichele’s shaped canvases that mingle pattern-making, modern-art references and allusions to the ubiquitous urban infrastructure.

What: “Conceptual Impulse,” mixed-media installations by seven artists.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Mondays, through Aug. 12.

Where: Security Pacific Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to Bristol Street exit; go north. Anton is off Bristol between the freeway and Sunflower Avenue.

Wherewithall: Admission is free.

Where to call: (714) 433-6001.