Two Shows, Two Entirely Different Methods of Criticism

Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison are healers as much as they are artists. Their remedies for renewing damaged, debased portions of the Earth come in the form of visual and verbal plans that assess the past and provide for the future.

In their current show at Installation Gallery downtown, the Harrisons, who teach at UC San Diego, present excerpts from five projects, with proposals ranging in scale from building a walkway in Colorado to restoring the native environment of Tibet. Both valid and viable, their strategies for each of the targeted problem areas are guided both by common sense and by a profound poetic instinct.

“Devil’s Gate: A Refugia for Pasadena,” for instance, proposes the opening of a dam and the clearing of a debris basin clogged with natural runoff from the adjacent San Gabriel mountains. The plan, visualized here in drawings and aerial photographs and described in a text panel as “neither difficult in the short run nor expensive in the long run,” would allow the release of a long-held breath, enabling both water and land to once again follow their natural rhythms, rather than those imposed on them by myopic urban planners.

If the Devil’s Gate dam were reopened, the Harrisons see a lake forming that would protect the area against drought. A series of interconnected ponds off the lake would appear, from the air, as “a string of emeralds.”

Much of what the Harrisons propose entails undoing what has been done by others and letting the organic forces of the environment rule themselves. Respect for the grandeur as well as the internal logic and self-sufficiency of the Earth permeates their work. If implemented, their projects would involve a great deal of human intervention but only at first. Theirs are earthworks without egos. Fully realized, they would bear no signatures and no scars. They would be simply living testaments to smoothly running, native environments.

Unfortunately, the Harrisons’ graphic presentations are rarely as stimulating, visionary and vital as the artists’ ideas themselves. The Installation show suffers as well from the abrupt abbreviation of the five projects shown. If the show had focused on just one or two projects in greater depth, it would have allowed the inherent poetry and alchemy of the work to emerge more fully. These are among the strongest qualities of the Harrisons’ work, they compensate for the starkness of the graphics and transform their environmental agenda into art.

Although the Harrisons are implicitly critical of crimes inflicted on the environment, they are as interested in solutions as in the problems themselves. Santiago Vaca, an Ecuador-born painter now living in Chicago, stages his critique of the state of things in a dramatically different form. His large paintings on unstretched canvas, gallery walls and floor fill the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park with anguish and rage.

Vaca’s critique bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the gut. Stiff, withered figures stare out of painting after painting with wide, red-rimmed eyes, their expressions frozen with fear. Military violence, imperialism and political oppression are the key culprits responsible for reducing citizens to victims. In “Fear Silence Miedo,” a central, standing figure is defined by the sum of atrocities represented in painted and collaged vignettes on his skin. Scenes of combat and captivity scar him, while written names for his condition--fear, silence, terror--echo in the constricting space around him.

“Invasiones” (Invasions), the most didactic of the recent works here, stabs at the domination of Latin American culture by outside forces. Foreign invaders approach an unidentified land by ship and helicopter, while those who have already arrived defend the turf and prepare a grave, marked with a dollar sign, for a pre-Columbian statue. In the background, a young couple, American perhaps, sunbathes in protected peace, while blood red paint drips from the top of the canvas.

Vaca is concerned with violence to the soul and spirit as well as to the body, and his paint-strafed surfaces intensify the impact of the images themselves. Several of Vaca’s paintings have been shown locally at the David Zapf gallery over the past few years, but the Centro’s show is San Diego’s first chance to experience the artist’s anger and passion on the scale they deserve. Vaca fights fire with fire, and his work is marvelously, dangerously hot.

Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, “Conversational Drift,” continues at Installation, 719 E St., through Aug. 3. Hours are noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.

Santiago Vaca’s work can be seen at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park through July 28. Open noon-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday.

CRITIC’S CHOICE: INTROSPECTIVE AND INVENTIVE

“More is More” is the title of Eddie Dominguez’s exhibit at Felicita Foundation for the Arts, and it is also the most apt description of his aesthetic sensibility. Working in ceramic, Dominguez gives multiple functions to such ordinary domestic objects as cups and platters. At once they are dinnerware, sculpture and tableaux.

Their surfaces pulsate with pattern and color, often in ornate excess. Dominguez’s installations, which can be introspective as well as inventive, can be seen at the Escondido gallery (201 South Kalmia) through July 13.