ART : Only a Few Standouts at Annual Juried Show

The 10th annual Juried Show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (through Aug. 17) contains 42 works selected by Judi Freeman, associate curator of 20th-Century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from entries by fledgling artists living in seven western states.

A positive trend that emerges is a new dedication to social issues: the homeless, AIDS, racial inequality, corporate self-aggrandizement, religious persecution. More pervasive, however, is the lackluster, dated quality of most of the paintings. There are only six sculptures, perhaps an indication of how hard it is to find even moderately acceptable beginners’ work. Photographs are mostly slick but vacant; drawings and collages, insipid or wispy.

Only a handful of works stand out from the crowd: Doug Minkler’s satirical screen print “Artists as Ashtrays”; Shimon Attie’s untitled photograph; Jonathan Barbieri’s painting “In a Time of Pestilence”; Michael J. O’Hare’s “Urban Life”; David Levy’s Cibachrome photo trio “Time to Collect”; and Mariona Barkus’ delicately minimal painting “Torso 60.”

Minkler, who lives in Berkeley, skewers Philip Morris’ print ads extolling the company’s largess as a corporate patron of the arts. A skull-headed creature with a body fashioned from a grand piano and an ashtray holds out an assortment of paintbrushes and cigarettes. On the facing page the text reads, in part: “Emphysema and bronchitis? Shazam! Now we’re the Whitney Museum of Art and the Joffrey Ballet . . . It takes art to make complacency great.”

Attie’s photograph is arresting because of its subject, the odd angle at which it was taken and its air of mystery. An elderly nude man looms up, seemingly about to fall over, while a woman positioned below him in an indefinite pocket of space presses a bandage on his upper chest. The San Francisco photographer deliberately refuses to clarify what’s going on, or even where the scene takes place: The vulnerable man hovers in space like a vision in a dream.

Barbieri, also from San Francisco, paints a nearly bald man groping his way through a dun-colored landscape under a lowering red sky. The work is clearly about the desolation of AIDS: A dark patch on the figure’s face is a sign of karposi’s sarcoma; the spiky plants with twin ball shapes growing alongside him seem to be mocking sexual references.

A resident of Phoenix, O’Hare fills a caldron with what appear to be burning steel coals, “lit” by a neon light buried low in the pot. On closer inspection, the coals turn out to be men’s heads, three of which glow “hot” in bronze. They are the casualties of urban indifference, the homeless whose makeshift cooking arrangements are reflected in the materials of the piece.

Levy, who lives in Laguna Beach, lines up three TV images for a rat-a-tat punch: a news quiz question about back taxes owed by Americans; two cartoon gunmen, and President Bush, making a palms-up gesture with downcast eyes, presumably as he admits we shouldn’t have read his lips after all.

Barkus’ painting is a gray square in which only a slightly whitened area of brush strokes vaguely indicates the shape of a human torso. The Los Angeles artist’s spare style works slowly and subtlely on the eye: The work is almost an optical illusion.

None of these works won any prizes. Several are still rather raw or naive. But each seems to have sprung into being because the artist believed strongly in something and attempted to find vivid, personal and contemporary means to make that “something” visible.

The 10th annual Juried Show continues through Aug. 17 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Space 111 in the Harbor Business Park, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana. Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Information: (714) 549-4989.