ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘Telephone’ Is Based on Rotary System : First artist chosen for Security Pacific Gallery exhibit chose a second, who chose a third, and so on, until nine in all were on line to make the show come full circle.

Remember the children’s party game called “telephone”? It involved whispering a message to someone else, who whispered it to another person, and so on, until the last person in line would repeat the message--now hopelessly garbled--out loud.

At Security Pacific Gallery in Costa Mesa, curator Mark Johnstone used the mechanics of the game as a way of organizing an exhibit of work by nine artists (“Telephone,” through June 13). He chose the first artist, this person selected another artist; that artist made the third selection, and so on.

Sure, it’s a gimmick. But in its pure form, it might also serve as way of tracking kindred sensibilities among artists, illuminating influences as well as divergent treatments of similar themes. Substituting one curator’s viewpoint for multiple opinions about art worthy of being shown could be a good thing, too, in this age of distrust for monolithic institutions and “canons” of supposedly good work, chosen by the few and the privileged.

In the real world, art politics and acts of generosity are likely to play as big a role as aesthetics when artists are asked to choose one another. (Why not help out a deserving young colleague dying for a show? Why not offer gallery space to a mentor who hasn’t been in the limelight lately?) Quality control can get pretty iffy when the only ground rules are that everybody gets the same amount of space. And it’s the rare artist who is capable of standing back and picking out his or her best work.

This exhibit starts out bravely, but it sags pretty soon, as telephone games tend to do. Possibly this approach would have been worked to better advantage with a narrower range of artists who all work within a particular aesthetic or who incorporate social or political content of a particular stripe in their work.

Some formal affinities, especially among the assemblage artists, are obvious. But other than references to the natural world--which link some, but not all, of the work on view--it’s hard to find a particular thread that runs through this exhibit. It might have been a good idea to have the artists write a few words about the reasons for their choices. In any case, the exhibit ultimately fragments into nine mini-shows of varying quality.

Johnstone’s choice was Peter Zokosky, a meticulous painter of improbable or otherworldly scenes in natural settings. His best work combines finely observed details with an eccentric point of view.

In “Two Saints,” two young men--who appear to be St. Sebastian and St. Bartholomew--meet each other in a clearing. The scene is reminiscent of Edenic paintings by the American Hudson River School painters of the mid-19th Century, with lush, delicate greenery and the blue mist of distant, unexplored landscape.

Sebastian was an officer in the Roman imperial guard under Emperor Diocletian, who ordered archers to kill the young man because he refused to disavow his Christian beliefs. After he was nursed back to health and still refused to change his tune, an enraged Diocletian had him clubbed to death. In Renaissance art, St. Sebastian typically is shown in agony: bound to a tree, with his body shot full of arrows. Zokosky’s Sebastian is a youth whose pale body bristles with arrows.

St. Bartholomew, one of the 12 Apostles, suffered the excruciating martyrdom of being flayed alive. (In Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” he is shown holding the skin stripped from his body.) In Zokosky’s painting, the bizarre transparency of St. Bartholomew’s body makes him look like the Illustrated Man. He is at once startlingly vulnerable--after all, we can see right though him--and yet athletically powerful, and seemingly at ease. The shadows cast by the two figures mingle on the pathway, as if to underscore their spiritual oneness.

The thought came to me that--because of the landscape setting and St. Sebastian’s red “skin”--he might be portrayed here as an American Indian, stepping out of the woods to welcome a “pale skin,” a believer from the Old World who has come to the New World for salvation.

The rest of Zokosky’s paintings on view lack the compelling oddity of this piece, however, generally depending either on a one-shot pun (“Hare/Hare After”) or superficial attractiveness achieved through lighting (“Citrus Grove”) or shape and color (“The Eels Circle”).

Zokosky’s choice was Michael McMillen, a kindred spirit in terms of his interest in enigma and concern with history. He once said his installations have to do with “the inevitability of entropy (the degree of disorder in the universe, which increases while energy decreases) and constant change.”

“Deliverance,” his new piece, offers an odd echo of “Train of Thought.” Shown at Security Pacific Gallery two years ago, the older work incorporated a conveyor belt dropping a continuous fine stream of alphabet pasta on the floor. In “Deliverance,” buckshot moves erratically--like balls in a pinball machine--through a motorized wooden gizmo mounted on the wall and finally zips through a long tube dangling over a small table set as if for a meal.

The title of the piece recalls the eponymous James Dickey novel, about the violence that befell a group of unwary suburban guys out in the wilderness. After the Los Angeles riots, it is hard not to see the McMillen piece as a symbol of the way the random pattern of violence in the streets can threaten the supposed sanctity of the home.

The photo of a woman working on an assembly line reinforces the sense of an endless line of senseless activities; the “International” sign (probably a fragment of a brand name) recalls their ubiquity.

McMillen’s “The Locker,” formerly part of a larger installation called “Atlas Worked,” is simply a rusted, padlocked metal locker that makes gurgling water sounds inside. The aural and visual image of a natural force dammed up in a forgotten storage place has a bizarre fantasy quality, as if the answers to environmental despair somehow could be found among those piles of memory-laden junk we’ve locked up and consigned to oblivion.

McMillen selected Kai Bob Cheng, an assemblage artist who is something of a cult figure in Los Angeles. Cheng is represented here by too many pieces of varying quality, but when he’s cooking, his work has a gee-whiz, homespun appeal.

“Spacecraft” seems to be about American fixations: tinkering, sports, nature (preferably faked), eating on the run, and boasting of having the biggest and the best. The miniature craft is equipped with such items as a pull-out boat that works like a Murphy bed, ski poles, a fish “catch,” a pocket knife, Christmas decorations, plastic orchids, miniature elk and a roadside-type banner reading, “FOOD.”

Here’s where the show begins to droop, a bit too soon for comfort.

Cheng’s choice was George Herms, a venerable presence on the Southern California art scene, whose punning, wistful assemblages helped define the Beat aesthetic of art in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. His eye for the visual possibilities inherent in such castoffs as rusted bedsprings, old wooden handles or a squashed baseball remains acute, but the sweet, hippy-dippy ethos of his work now too often looks like formula cuteness.

Letters spelling out L O V E in several of these pieces are the most obvious signs of this cloying, dated approach. Some of these works have the air of real throwaway stuff, meant for an audience of one pal who shared the joke. Recycling such pieces for an exhibit smacks of the “every doodle he does is art” school of artist worship.

The thinness of this work, with its pat visual rhymes (like the circular objects in “Untitled/Wheel Chair”) make a viewer wonder whether Herms has settled down to make the visual equivalent of limericks from here on out. Even in “Totally Obsessed”--a more ambitious piece based on collaged news accounts of eclipse-watchers--photographs, printed matter and objects just sit together in glum silence. A rim of stained coffee filter, imitating the eclipse in reverse, offers a rare sign of the inventive Herms we remember.

Herms’ choice was his young assistant, Mark Teresa. While his large, untitled piece with live birds inside is simply baffling, his assemblage boxes--filled with small, perky objects, new or vintage--lack the right kind of mystery.

“Draft” contains a photograph of a man in a loincloth, a ruler, a meter, a fragment of a tiny ladder, a spiral shape, and screws running through a fragment of box labeled “sold.” The allusions to the military draft are pretty clear, but what’s missing is the feeling that we are in thrall to a certain kind of wit, a certain knack for letting objects speak to one another and tell us things we didn’t know before.

Teresa moves the game off the playing field of assemblage by picking Lavi Daniel, a painter who switched in recent years from making evocative figurative work on the edge of abstraction to gossamer memories of images that threaten to disappear into the mist. The works in the show are an untitled series of eight pastels on paper.

The squarish gray and black shapes in the first piece resemble blurred Han Dynasty Chinese ideographs. In the second piece, the ghostly imagery begins to look like crushed sacs of insect eggs. From there on out, Daniel pushes his mark-making toward the edge of formal disintegration, concluding with a golden glow that winks out of brownish space. No doubt this wispy realm is an area that gives him pleasure to explore right now, but I really miss the potency of the work he used to do.

Daniel chose a fellow painter, Ned Evans, who is working with loose vertical stripes of muddy color these days. These canvases seem utterly bland and stiff; they look as though someone else had set out the rules by which they were to be painted, leaving the artist an unwilling participant. Evans selected his wife, Barry Campion, who paints large-scale landscapes with hedges that look like such things as upholstered furniture (“Big Hedge”) or an elephant’s foot (“Italian Hedge”). On a smaller scale, this form of whimsy might be more digestible.

Campion’s pick was Rebecca Jo Morales, who neatly brings the game full circle. She happens to have been an undergraduate at Otis/Parsons in Los Angeles a decade ago, when Zokosky was a graduate student, and she also paints the natural world in a precise, keenly observed fashion--so keenly observed that one can forgive her use of Latin names as titles.

The presentational quality of her small, exquisite renderings of insects sometimes recalls much larger animal still lifes by 19th-Century American painter William Harnett. In a painting on vellum, “Sphyrapicus nucalis imm.,” Morales achieves the extraordinary textural qualities of a bird’s feather; on found pieces of metal she evokes in minute detail the undersides of insects and details of their wings.

Just what to do with all this technical skill is the question. Perhaps part of the answer lies in “Melanerpes formicivorus,” in which the contours of a painted bird resemble a damaged area on the enamel-coated metal surface--nature’s work revealed as no more than a happy accident; or perhaps a sign of the fortuitous nature of all that befalls us.

“Telephone” continues through June 13 at Security Pacific Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free. (714) 433-6000.