ART REVIEWS : Tribute to Yellowstone, Up From the Ashes : Exhibition: The works explore the rebirth of a forest and help define the delicate balance between ecosystems.

It’s rather arrogant of us to be surprised when our tenuous contract with nature is periodically forgotten and fire upends our lives. As is pointed out in “Of Nature and Nations: Yellowstone, Summer of Fire,” an exhibition opening today at Security Pacific Plaza, fire has always been one of nature’s most efficient tools for cleansing itself and clearing the way for new life. Though we tend to view the incineration of homes and possessions as a devastating loss devoid of purpose, in fact, natural catastrophes serve to strip our lives down to the bare bones--an oddly liberating experience--and remind us just who’s running the show here on planet earth. It ain’t us.

Inspired by the fire that ravaged Yellowstone National Park during the summer of 1988, “Of Nature and Nations” pays tribute to one of America’s last surviving wilderness areas while attempting to educate us about the delicate yet enduring balance that all ecosystems maintain. Each of the seven great fires that raged in Yellowstone that terrible summer had a distinct personality and behaved in complex and mercurial ways, and much of the work explores the baffling behavior of fire, while other artists concern themselves with the rebirth that came in the wake of the flames.

Located in the Northwestern corner of Wyoming, Yellowstone was the first national park in the world. A 2.2-million acre parcel of land set aside in 1872, this relic of the frontier West is a fertile network of mountain ranges, forest, watersheds and wildlife. Long a favorite subject for artists (painter Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson both based some of their best work on Yellowstone), and a lure to tourists for its network of 200 geysers and population of grizzlies, Yellowstone was permanently changed two years ago when the fire below its ground was matched by a raging inferno above. Devouring flames zigzagged across the park for four months, making a mockery of man’s feeble attempts to control this natural apocalypse. Over $150 million was spent trying to tame the fire, all to no avail. It wasn’t until nature herself tired of this deadly sport and sent forth a light snowfall that the fire was finally quelled (the snow quieted the fire in a matter of hours).

This is an inquiry into the cycles of nature more than a documentation of a specific incident, so most of the 15 artists included attempt to communicate the spirit of Yellowstone, rather than depict its actual physical appearance. Much of the work--pieces by Deborah Butterfield, Stephen Glassman, John Buck, and Neltje--make use of charred and weathered materials that look as though they might’ve been damaged by fire. A few of the artists working in this manner veer dangerously close to the terrain of kitsch driftwood sculpture, while others use the technique quite effectively. Neltje’s “Tessa’s Husband’s Hat,” an elegant collage of objects that look as though they were salvaged from a fire, has a wistful power that alludes to the Yellowstone disaster with great eloquence.

Merrilyn Duzy offers three unabashedly romantic oil paintings that underscore the reckless, sensual beauty of fire, while Larry Friedman shows a series of traditional black and white landscape photos a la Ansel Adams. Robert Weiglein’s lushly colored Cibachrome candids of people on the fringes of the fire are in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson, and Lucy Blake-Elahi’s large mixed media sculpture reads like a strange neon forest.

Taking a highly poetic view of the loss suffered at Yellowstone, the show espouses the reassuring Zen idea that death is but a phase of life. In light of recent events in Southern California, it’s a welcome and much needed reminder.

The exhibition closes on Aug. 12 with a performance by Elizabeth Richardson at 7:30 P.M. Security Pacific Plaza, 333 S. Hope St.

The McRight Stuff: Blue McRight’s paintings operate like visual lullabies; giving oneself over to them is akin to sinking into a deep, velvety sleep. Warm, orange nocturnal light is the unifying motif in her work, and it permeates her images with the sweet weight of honey. Working with a vocabulary of simplified archetypes (a child’s bed, a canoe, a cabin, a book and lamp) that look as though they were lifted from a book of fairy tales, she fashions lyrical meditations on the themes of home, security, danger and adventure.

This is not, however, to suggest that McRight’s work is ideal for the nursery wall; there’s something vaguely menacing afoot here. For starters there’s the disturbingly Surreal way McRight combines landscape and still life. Her large paintings (three are on view here) involve a central element (a bed, a house) that floats among the branches of a tree, attended by a quartet of birds. Things are out of scale--birds are as big as beds--and levitate to elevations they can’t logically achieve. They’re extremely strange compositions with unsettling implied narratives reminiscent of work by Balthus or George Tooker. And, as in work by Edward Hopper and De Chirico, the light in McRight’s work pulsates with strange significance, transforming the familiar into something exotic and new.

Smaller paintings include a portrait of a shirtless man wielding a dowsing rod by moonlight, and several works depicting the tea-cup ride at Disneyland. Also on view is a trio of small wooden boxes, each of which is a variation on the theme of Van Gogh. “The Sower,” for instance, features a knock off of Van Gogh’s “The Sower” painted in the lid of the box; the base is adorned with a painting of a hand on which are scattered actual sunflower seeds.

Like William Wegmen, McRight is a mining a craftsy Boy’s Life aesthetic that occasionally gets a bit too rustic and quaint for comfort. Mostly, however, she does a masterful job of manipulating commonly understood images pertaining to dreams and the subconscious.

Also on view are photographs by Steve Lavoie. Investigating formal problems of composition, light, and perspective, Lavoie appears to be of the Edward Weston school and he turns out classically shot still lifes that are technically impeccable, but rather dry. Lavoie does indulge in an occasional flourish of whimsy a la Boyd Webb--an untitled work from 1989 depicts half a squash plopped on the top of a table, while the other half juts out below the table--but more often, these handsome photographs come across like a beautiful woman with no personality.

Fahey Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea, to July 7 .