O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Show Exhibits a Multiple Personality : Security Pacific Gallery spotlights works of 23 artists who use series of separate images to get their points across. The show already looks like a candidate for everyone’s Best of the Year list.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but sometimes you need more than one picture to get the message across.

It’s hard to imagine comic strips, for example, without the familiar multipanel format. It lets readers follow the flow of a conversation from each character’s point of view (as in “Mary Worth”), observe successive states of self-awareness in a single character (Feiffer) or track the sequence of events after one character does something goofy or unexpected (“Garfield”).

Or consider the “before” and “after” pictures in ads that tout weight-loss programs, potions to reverse baldness or new windows guaranteed to turn a dowdy home into a stylish showplace. If seeing is believing, this kind of documentation is all a consumer needs.

Of course, artists usually have something more complicated in mind when they corral multiple images. An engrossing exhibit at the Security Pacific Gallery in Costa Mesa--awkwardly, if aptly, titled “the frame: multiplied and extended”-- includes work by 23 American artists who make pieces incorporating a series of separate images or objects. There is so much rich material here, not to mention opportunity to see works by worthy artists rarely or never seen in Orange County, that this show already seems destined for a Best of the Year list.

By making demarcations between images (or texts or objects) which are hung individually on the wall or divided by lines or grids (very few of these works actually have frames), the artists selectively isolate and reinforce details that make up the big picture. In some of these works, the images are designed to show how different conclusions can be drawn from the same set of visual references.

Other works tell intriguing stories that involve the passage of time. Still other pieces play off the rhythmic repetitions possible with multiple imagery.

One of the simplest works in a show that tends toward fruitful complexity is “Untitled No. 2,” a photo-and-text piece by Lisa Bloomfield. Color head shots of two women flank a panel of text in which different type styles differentiate two stories interwoven with each other.

According to the text, “Emily” (who seems to be the young blond woman in professional attire) is a professor of ancient languages who spends her days in the library “methodically searching each text” of ancient writings for similarities that eventually will lead to breakthroughs in her field of scholarship.

“Sara” (the dark-haired, somberly dressed woman who looks a bit vague around the eyes--at least, after you read the text) also spends her days in the library. She “orders and reorders” her stack of index cards while “frowning” and “nodding.” Riding home on the bus, she comments aloud on the contents of the cards. Other passengers notice all the cards are blank, and move away.

These women share similar activities and a similar effort of concentration--and yet one set of actions results in a supposed benefit to humanity while the other is a sign of mental illness. The piece is somewhat flawed because Bloomfield doesn’t treat each woman in a parallel fashion--in Sara’s case, the artist describes only what a spectator could see, but she gives us extra information about Emily.

Still, the quasi-sociological approach is intriguing. You begin to wonder whether Emily’s researches really are all that significant, beyond giving her personal satisfaction--which is what Sara’s “work” also seems to give her. What is important work, anyway? Some people would view Emily’s abstruse occupation as a pointless waste of time. Perhaps Sara looks at those blank index cards and imagines extraordinary sights. By implication, the piece questions the ways we structure our lives and how the tasks we care so much about are perceived by others.

In Jack Butler’s “Separating the Dancer from the Dance,” a red panel printed with the title phrase runs underneath two large black-and-white images. In one, a ‘50s-style couple (pageboy hairdo, halter dress, dotted bow tie, square jaw) is dancing. In the next panel, the man is shown hitting the woman, who shields her face.

The title phrase alludes to Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ line, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?,” by which he meant that all of nature is interwoven, interdependent; a dance doesn’t exist without the presence of the dancer.

Butler uses dance imagery and the poet’s words to underscore the social commentary he is making. He seems to be saying that there is an organic connection between the way sex roles are exaggeratedly emphasized in dress and demeanor in a particular culture and the tacit permission of spousal abuse. An alternative reading would be that the male dancer breaks with the organic wholeness of nature when he stops moving in concert with his dance partner and physically attacks her.

Dotty Attie’s “The Tomahawk,” takes the notion of narrative and gives it a highly sophisticated twist. Her piece consists of dozens of tiny canvases, interspersed with panels of text, that purport to tell a story within a story.

A group of male painters in 19th-Century dress is shown in a studio. A text explains that one painter is recounting an incident that involved his mother’s distant cousin and took place in the American West. Succeeding paintings and text panels illustrate this story, redolent with cliched moments from centuries of myths and adventure stories (the dog sniffing danger, the sensual young woman appearing to the resting young man).

And yet the actual narrative remains unclear. Who attacked whom? What happened? There is no resolution of the climactic moment, either, because the narrator’s cousin ran away from the scene.

Another peculiarity is that the paintings are actually details--painstakingly repainted by Attie--from other paintings (of biblical, landscape or Old Western subjects, or of artists). The works are by artists ranging from Baroque masters (Guido Reni, Velasquez, Zurbaran) to American neoclassical painter John Vanderlyn.

Attie seems to be doing several things at once here. She demonstrates the malleability of visual imagery--created for one purpose, it can be employed selectively to serve another. She emphasizes the universality of storytelling itself and its relationship to the experience of making and viewing art: the intimate, “let’s gather around the campfire” atmosphere (the artists meet at dusk, by candlelight); the narrator who paints verbal “pictures” for his listeners; the expectations that are either confirmed or foiled by the outcome of the story.

Attie also appears to be exploring other parallels between the lush embroidery of storytelling and the making of art: the romantic mythology on which both are based; the psychic distance between the maker of art and his subject (akin to the historical distance between the narrator and his cousin); and the twin roles of fact and fabrication.

In a different vein, Donald Bradford offers a meditation on companionship and art in “Letters from a Friend.”

In the first panel, we see a tabletop still life: a flower in a glass, two postcards, a bundle of letters. The second panel reveals the same items in close-up. The writing on one postcard, addressed to the artist, becomes visible (“ . . . I need you. My first day in S.F. I spent learning how to ride the bus . . . “); the other card turns out to be a reproduction of Thomas Eakins’ famous painting “The Swimming Hole”--a group of handsome young men gathered for a skinny-dip.

In the third panel, Eakins’ figures make another appearance under a different guise. Rendered in gauzy--almost imperceptible--gray and white, they suggest the content of a daydream that mingles the American 19th-Century artist’s idealized image of companionship with the artist’s personal feeling of loss.

Russell Crotty’s obsessive ballpoint pen drawings consist of a fine grid of lines creating a mind-boggling number of tiny boxes on a huge sheet of paper, each inhabited by tiny stick figures.

In “Violent Figures with Explosions,” the figures--who fight with clubs, guns and fists--are interspersed rhythmically with boxes containing cartoon-like, scribbled “explosions.” The sheer multiplicity of all this violence flickers over the page with the numb inevitability of a week’s roster of TV shows.

Susan Hornbeak, a Newport Beach resident who was one of three finalists in the “Emerging Artists of Southern California” contest at the University Art Gallery at UC Riverside last year, has two sculptures in the show that explore the notion of rhythm for its own sake.

“Drum Machines” consists of three very large aluminum contraptions, like quintuple-jointed arms, that jerk into motion, hitting a trio of goatskin drums in a perversely ragged, unsynchronized way. “Silent Drums” are 68 goatskin-wrapped wood blocks, hung at regular intervals near the ceiling. By alternating the way she wrapped goatskin around the wood, Hornbeak gave these package-like pieces a “silent,” purely visual rhythm.

Other artists in the exhibit include photographer Robbert Flick, known for his dispassionate views--sliced into grids--of urban and landscape sites; and Serge Spitzer, who “deconstructs” the painter’s canvas into pieces of wood and a piece of linen that engage in a witty series of tense stunts on the floor.

Oh, and it wouldn’t do to leave out Nancy Macko, who used wax, wood, honeycomb and other objects to construct a delicate set of allusions to an ancient Greek amulet against female jealousy--or Nancy Barton, who combines home photographs, Dow Jones charts and the voice of her father, a failed actor who invented the TelePrompTer, to conjure up a vanished “can-do” era that believed motivation and hard work were the keys to success.