ART : Borrowing From the Memory Banks : Nicola Atkinson-Griffith installation at Security Pacific Gallery in Costa Mesa relies on the childhood recollections of visitors.

“There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.” Remember the opening line of that vintage TV show? Well, “Charted, Collected and Carefully Counted,” the current installation at Security Pacific Gallery in Costa Mesa (through June 3) is an attempt to let a few of Orange County’s “stories” be told.

Los Angeles artist Nicola Rosalie Atkinson-Griffith has supplied the gallery’s Project Room with postcards inviting visitors to send her a memory of childhood, family, friends or a neighborhood--in 180 words or less--by May 23. As the postcards come in, Atkinson-Griffith copies the stories in marking pen on small sacks filled with wheat. The sacks hang on lengths of clothesline, which have lots of empty space available for more dangling reminiscences.

One respondent recalled being a 3-year-old New Yorker on a sunny late afternoon in 1918 and watching two elderly women riding around Central Park in a covered carriage driven by a coachman. The carriage disappeared around a curb, as if marking the end of an era.

Another person who grew up in Washington remembered gathering empty jars, filling them with miscellaneous foodstuffs (cracker, nuts) and burying them throughout the neighborhood, where they could be dug up in winter.

Still another person retained the memory for more than 70 years of being led by her grandmother through the “hot, silent air” of the Indiana countryside to a small building that turned out to be a fragrant smokehouse (“I believe that is why I love smoked meats to this day”).

Other recollections include: an acid trip with good friends at a New Year’s Eve party; a ride on the Staten Island ferry with “the derelict and the delicious huddled together”; a Christmas Eve discovery that the writer was colorblind; a “girl in a duffel coat” with “cherry-red cheeks” on a steep hill in long-ago Edinburgh, Scotland; a father’s ungovernable temper boiling over as he threw a screwdriver at his son; another father introducing his grateful son to professional wrestling in Boston; eating string beans in a West Los Angeles victory garden during World War II; stealing wood from houses under construction in a small town in Kentucky where each new house had “its own green pad.”

The vignettes that recall sensory details from the past are especially enjoyable to read, but the sheer accumulation of personal moments--whether banal or deeply personal--adds up to an unusual “portrait” of a community. Typical of the American West (and perhaps of most parts of the country, these days), the writers’ roots are likely to be in a distant city.

The parallel lengths of clothesline work pretty well as a nostalgic image of domestic life, symbolic of the kind of homey territorial “stake-outs” that are synonymous with putting down roots in a community. (The wheat in the bags--a metaphor for agriculture--makes the same point.) The clothesline also somewhat resembles telephone wires, suggesting the presence of a communication system linking members of a community with the outside world.

In a statement about her work, Atkinson-Griffith says her aim is “to allow the public to explore its own creative possibilities” and “to make the work accessible through the communication of simple desires.”

Her previous audience-participation pieces include “Gentle Breezes Blowing,” constructed in 1990 from the daydreams of residents of a Los Angeles neighborhood. The artist transcribed their descriptions of imaginary places and returned to hang maps and paintings of these made-up locales in their homes and businesses.

But even as an unpretentiously user-friendly project, the logistics of “Charted, Collected and Carefully Counted” could be improved on. You have to crane your neck constantly to read the messages on the bags, and the clothesline is strung too close together for comfortable perusal of each row. It’s frustrating when the writing continues on the back of the bags (do you flip them over with your hand, or step around to the back and hope you can remember which one is which?), and after a while even the vagaries of the artist’s printing begin to seem needlessly cute.

Other components of the piece don’t quite gel in their present form. Lining the walls are rows of drawings of what look like blank TV screens. Perhaps they are meant as equivalents of a “tabula rasa”--the mind (in this case, the communities of Orange County) before impressions are recorded on it by experience. Or maybe they are empty picture frames on which viewers might imagine any number of community snapshots. But the device seems pretty simple-minded, as does the mirror at one end of the room. (Gosh, we the viewers are part of this community, too!)

Atkinson-Griffith also has hand-lettered a blizzard of facts and figures and snatches of bureaucratic gobbledygook on the public side of the glass wall separating the gallery from the lobby area of the bank building. Surrounding a free-form diagram derived from the master plan for Costa Mesa (according to the press release), this material contains references to the city’s geology, education, housing, air quality, public policy, social services and economy.

The artist’s artless manner of squeezing words every which-way makes this piece of handiwork hard to read and defeats the artist’s apparent intention of contrasting the public and private aspects of community life (impersonal census figures versus personal histories). You would expect the public side of the piece to look more organized and “official.”

But the bigger problem with the current piece is that it offers the raw ingredients of a wonderful treat--all those memories contributed by the public--without fixing them in a sufficiently insightful framework supplied by the artist. The participatory aspect of the piece is positive and inviting, but the artist wrongly restricts herself to serving as little more than a conduit for tiny snippets of oral history.

It is possible to use responses from the general public to make a resonant and compelling work of art that doesn’t put on airs. For example, a few years ago, contemporary French artist Sophie Calle made a piece based on responses from a cross-section of blind people (old and young, male and female) who had been asked to name things they consider beautiful . Her piece consisted simply of pictures of these people and pictures of the objects they mentioned to her.

The poignancy came from imagining what it would be like to base your entire concept of beauty on a combination of first-hand tactile experience (one blind person mentioned the hair of someone he knew) and the not-always-reliable descriptions offered by sighted people. Calle tacitly raised a number of provocative issues--such as our tendency to base notions of beauty so overwhelmingly on sight, and the rigidity of conventional notions of beauty--without losing sight of the basic human curiosity about the lives of other people.