Fryling Work Chews On Bread-and-Butter Issues : Art: She says she’s not so interested in lofty ideas and that ‘what you see is what you get.’ Her work is on view at South Coast Plaza.

Ask Dawn Fryling what shaped her approach as an artist and she recalls her nursery-school encounter with a mound of soft, silky cornmeal.

“The teachers had us run our hands through it, and it was very sensuous,” said Fryling, discussing her new installation at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza site.

The untitled work, on view through Aug. 4, consists mainly of five sacks of flour stacked by the gallery entrance, narrow shelves blanketed with the powdery stuff, and white toast, done to various degrees of light or dark, piled in a tidy heap along the floor. There also are large, detailed, color photo blowups of Jolly Green Giant-size toast and slice beside slice of toast stacked or upright on other shelves.

The straightforward presentation of such mundane objects may make viewers scratch their heads, searching for a deeper, metaphoric meaning.

But, according to the San Francisco artist who is included in this year’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition in New York, “what you see is what you get.”

In line with her tactile, childhood experience, “I look at things on a formal basis, and I’m interested in their sensuous, physical qualities” rather than concepts that they may symbolize, Fryling said in a recent phone interview from her home.

For instance, “I’m just interested in the sensuous qualities of the flour,” she said, “not any meaning or what it stands for, not even as a food item. With the bread, the texture of it is what’s really interesting, and the way you can take one piece of toast and lay it together with another piece to create different textures.

“Even art that deals with content, it’s the initial visual thing that strikes you. I’m more interested in that than dealing with lofty ideas and notions or political things like AIDS. If you’re going to do that, I feel you should be an activist.”

To avoid conceptual connotations, Fryling, who considers herself a sculptor, doesn’t title most of her works. “I’d like people to enter the work on a visual level rather than on an intellectual level,” said the 30-year-old, easygoing artist.

She likes to make viewers stretch mentally, however, and tries to do that by using new contexts. She did that here by taking “incredibly absurd materials” out of their normal settings to display them in a gallery within a pristine shopping mall so that people who don’t usually go there to ponder challenging art might view the everyday objects in an entirely new way.

“When you see toast or flour (in an exhibit), you have to question: ‘Is this art, or what is this person doing?’ It makes people think--at least I’d like to think it does.

“We don’t have many malls like that up here--it’s definitely a Southern California thing,” said Fryling, who grew up in Altadena. “So while I’ve shown this work elsewhere, I wanted to show it there, given the notion of trying to jolt people.”

Fryling, whose other installations consist of 50 empty black picture frames or two dozen Masonite boxes, also likes to use multiples to reiterate the point that, “that’s all there is, folks,” as San Francisco Examiner art critic David Bonetti said. Positioning one piece of toast after another is like “OD’ing people”--giving them an overdose of the idea--she said.

The artist is further intrigued by performance art, particularly its ephemeral nature, which she said is at the root of her work. It factors into her doughy endeavor in that “the toast won’t last forever,” she said. She’s not concerned about selling such perishable installations, though some have, in fact, sold already.

“That’s really interesting because it shows that collectors are willing to take that risk of buying something impermanent, and that gives me a lot faith in them,” she said.

With her focus on formal concerns, Fryling stands outside of the mainstream where conceptual art is more in vogue. While her work has received generally good reviews, she says she doesn’t pay much attention to critics and doesn’t ruminate about her own popularity.

“I haven’t thought about that,” she said. “The way I work and also live my life is I try to maintain a certain amount of humility so that the work is accessible, though I don’t think I always succeed.”

An installation by San Francisco artist Dawn Fryling will be on view through Aug. 4 at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa. Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Monday through Friday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 662-3366.