ART : Reliving the Painful Search for One’s Identity : Exhibit spotlights the works of three artists, all involving the viewer in situations with roots in childhood experiences.

I drove up to Cal State Fullerton with the idea of writing about the exhibit in the Main Gallery, “Women and the Surreal Narrative,” a full-fledged affair that boasts a catalogue and an explanatory slide show with an audio track. But the exhibit that really caught my attention turned out to be a trio of visceral and thoughtful works of art in the small East and West Galleries, gathered under the title “Expedition: Paths to Identity” (through Sept. 29).

Each of the three artists--Mark Niblock-Smith, Mindy Faber and Daniel Wheeler--involves the viewer in situations with roots in childhood experiences: sexual impulses and the way they are viewed by others; the wishful and real sides of a relationship with a parent; and the personal conflicts underlying attempts to make responsible, “adult” choices in life.

Niblock-Smith’s installation, “Tales from a Boyhood,” vividly suggests what it’s like to realize at an early age that you are attracted to people of your own sex, when everyone around you disparages “queers” and promotes macho behavior.

Brief, compactly written narratives--illustrated sparingly, mostly with real objects (a window and a pair of binoculars, a pile of Playboy magazines, ears of corn)--reveal moments from the artist’s youth. In one instance, he is obliged to go shooting with his father and his father’s friend. He sits between the men, noting “the differences in their colognes and clothing and bearded stubble and nose hairs.” He finds the deer “so pretty” that his eyes mist over and he loses focus as he shoots, scaring the animal away. His father’s friend scornfully says he “shot like a girl.”

Other remembered moments involve dutifully searching with friends for “the good stuff” in a stash of Playboys while himself fantasizing a male pin-up, mischievously choosing “obvious misfits” first and jocks last when fielding a baseball team, and feeling immobilized while watching a male neighbor stare at him through the drapes.

Niblock-Smith also provides an ironic list of “15 ways to spot homosexuality in young boys and men” (“likes to dance, has very long eyelashes, has sloped or rounded shoulders”) and a display of what appear to be elementary school spelling exercises: hand-printed derogatory words for gays, adorned with silver stars and red-pencilled “teacher’s” comments (intolerance seen as an automatic part of early childhood education). But the strength of the piece comes primarily from the way it digs deeply into personal memory and yields intimate moments of painful truth.

Faber’s brief video, “Suburban Queen,” is a portrait of her mother, a hefty, slow-moving woman who spends her days cleaning, watching TV, eating, sleeping and taking various medications. Observing her mother exclaim over an empty dog dish, rocking in a chair and settling in for a nap on the sofa, Faber wishes the older woman would transform herself into a powerful earth-woman, in charge of her domain.

In a fantasy sequence, Faber shows her mother--lightly costumed as an “African queen” in a towel turban--as she picks up crab apples (in her tribal role as “gatherer”), strokes kitchen grease on her face (war paint) and glowers under a red light (putting a curse on her listeners, Faber explains).

With a smart and concise use of visuals--cutting, for example, from the glowering earth-mother to the prim pattern of Mrs. Faber’s bedroom--Faber exposes the unresolved relationship between reality and wishful thinking, between the woman her mother is and the woman she might have been. Of the same genre as Ilene Segalove’s videos about her suburban mother, Faber’s work differs by being passionate and rueful rather than coolly reportorial.

Wheeler’s piece, “Ecce Homo,” is the most puzzling and ultimately the most complex of the three. A sign asks visitors to remove “at least” their shoes before entering a darkened room. Inside, a light shines brightly on a smooth, knobby object (a hat block?). A wooden ramp leads past piles of discarded clothing, grouped according to the way it presumably was removed: shoes first, ending with underwear. Mounted along both sides of the ramp are various wooden objects that appear to be coat-hanger bases and “shape-retainers” meant to be stuffed in boots and shoes.

At the end of the ramp, the viewer’s body fits against a padded wooden contraption (even the feet sink into padded “footprints”) that combines features of a voting booth, a confessional and one of those gizmos optometrists use to keep the body still while looking at the eye.

So what is “Ecce Homo” about? Well, it’s about personal choice (the ballot, the question of surrogate birth, Baldwin’s speech) and feelings of vulnerability. The piece is about the pressure (soft, like the padding in the “footprints,” but insidious) to conform to the standards of others, the standards that govern notions of pornography or the uses one may make of one’s body. It make take awhile to make sense of the piece, but Wheeler cleverly involves his viewers in a physical way first--priming them for his metaphors to hit home.

“Expedition” co-curators John Karwin and Patricia Watts are graduate students in the exhibition design program at Cal State Fullerton, as is Eric Gaard, who organized “Woman and the Surreal Narrative.” Despite its painstaking installation, that show is disappointing--both because of the overwhelmingly ho-hum quality of the work and because Gaard’s point of view seems needlessly narrow and dogmatic.

As he explains in the catalogue, the exhibit developed “from an intense personal interest in the world of story art and the complex realities of Surrealism.” He believes the seven contemporary women artists in the show carry on the tradition of “ambiguity, autobiography, dreams and free association” represented specifically by Surrealist women artists (Merit Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage and others) prominent in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Gaard writes that the women Surrealist artists “emphasized the personal, spiritual, mystical and more autobiographical aspects of their art” while the men “looked at ideas and their subjects in a more clinical and scientific way.” But he never supports this questionable statement (what about Paul Delvaux? Joan Miro?) with concrete examples. And he quotes Surrealist theoretician Andre Breton without explaining that most of the Surrealists quarreled with his definitions of the movement.

Gaard also fails to acknowledge the enormous changes affecting viewers’ perception of art during the past 60 years. A once bewitchingly mysterious, even shocking approach to art--incongruous mixtures of objects and “taboo” references--has become a cliche long since co-opted by Madison Avenue. Artists working in dreamlike and/or storytelling modes these days are likely to be fuddy-duddy traditionalists, unless they devise radically new approaches. And those new approaches generally are beholden to influences quite distinct from Surrealism.

Photographer Eileen Cowin (who teaches at Cal State Fullerton) has devised such an approach. By carefully stage-managing scenes--adjusting costumes, poses, lighting--she focuses the viewer’s attention on psychological matters.

In an untitled pair of oversize photographs, the black-and-white image of a handsome young man wearing a wedding ring, sheltering a young woman with a coat, may be read as a tender scene of comfort. But the color image of an older man with a mustache and no wedding ring in the same pose with the same woman is likely to be understood in different terms (“is he spiriting her off somewhere against her will?”).

Such work--indebted to the visual influence of movies--is primarily about the way we interpret images, however, not about anything mystical or spiritual. I also fail to see anything specifically “feminine” about Cowin’s imagery; in fact, the catalogue notes that she normally does not participate in shows of “women’s” art.

Almita Ranstrom, on the other hand, leans on a prettified and bastardized notion of Surrealism in her sculptural tableaux, for which she packages various items together--bits of crushed glass, boxes, mirrors, twigs, glitter, playing cards, shells and so forth. But this bric-a-brac seems incapable of conveying any image or idea. It comes as a big surprise to learn (in a round-table interview printed in the catalogue) that one of these pieces, “Waiting for Uriel,” is “about” an artist friend dying of cancer.

Ann McCoy did rely on a series of dreams for her enormous, awkwardly stagy painting “Temple of Isis: Pompeii,” and Deborah Davidson, who paints vaguely eerie empty swimming pools, claims (in the interview) that she is “talking about very personal things in my life.” But she doesn’t say what they are.

In Cheryl Laemmle’s large painting “Assumption,” huge decoy birds in a stark landscape carry a dead bird in a huge gold frame. Janice DeLoof paints the interactions between figures possessing various degrees of bodily reality (some are represented as empty chairs). A painting by Hollis Sigler offers a charming little scene of broken classical architecture and vine-entwined statuary.

If such works indeed are part of the heritage of Surrealism--and that point remains debatable--perhaps we’d do better to remember its past glories and stick with contemporary approaches that reach us where our guts and brains live.