Wall Sculptures With a Lasting Impression

SAN DIEGO — Jay Johnson’s new wall sculptures have an odd magnetism that is easier sensed than described. Made of a variety of materials that include wood, rusted metal, paint and flock, they are tight formal constructions with a loose, open interpretive range. They feel refreshingly earnest, occasionally coy and sometimes downright playful. They are philosophical, but never stuffy or overly erudite.

Johnson’s show, “Different Work,” currently shares the Thomas Babeor Gallery with the drawings and wall sculptures of fellow San Diegan Robin Bright. While some of Johnson’s works are like mere doodles, others feel like short essays on the themes of progress, extinction and the nature of soured love.

“Yourself, Myself and Between,” for instance, diagrams in three dimensions the great formless void that separates individuals who are not quite in sync with one another. At each end of a wall-mounted, tapered wood cylinder is a chaos of painted letters, some of which spell yourself on the top band, and myself along the bottom. In the middle runs a wide band of fuzzy black flock, dense and divisive. In another work, the rusted tin cylinder, “You Trust Me?,” Johnson repeats the title and other phrases dealing with confidence and fidelity in English and German. But here, too, love and the desperate hope of mutual trust rust, unfulfilled.

Most of Johnson’s sculptures take the same, tapered cylindrical form, which serves in some as a vertical timeline, with the broad top signifying the present and the diminishing base representing the fading past. Objects in the cast-resin cylinder titled “Found Story” begin on the bottom with an arrowhead and work their way up to a shell casing and a pottery shard.

Time, for Johnson, is clearly not always progress. In “You’re Special, Gone Forever,” he mocks our hypocritical approach to endangered animal species. However precious, we’ve squeezed them off the planet. “We Progress, They Evolve” gives away our self-serving attitude toward nature even in the title.

Johnson’s work has always had a quirky elegance, even now, when its shapes are somewhat clumsy and its textures often rude. And it has always probed conditions and states of mind with intelligence and irony. Just as these wall-mounted sculptures beg to be seen fully, in the round, but cannot be, so do they deliver meaty meaning while promising even more.

Though given equal space in the gallery, Bright’s work seems to recede into near invisibility, either because of the more buoyant, engaging qualities of Johnson’s work or Bright’s own quietly meditative tone. The show, “Hector Vex Continued,” is exactly that, an extension of Bright’s decade-old series of two- and three-dimensional studies of line and mass.

Bright confines himself to a finite set of formal ingredients: vertical lines, horizontal lines, flat planes, black, white, gray and a touch of pale color. In both his drawings on paper and his flat steel-and-plaster constructions, Bright muses on sets of opposites--solid/void, open/closed, inside/outside, symmetry/asymmetry--but always ends up with a harmonious whole.

Given his self-imposed constraints, he manages to create an admirable quantity of elegant and varied compositions, but even Mondrian, working with much the same vocabulary, could get dull.

John Rice Churchill’s second solo show at the Oneiros Gallery suffers from the same blandness that dampened the spiritual aspirations of his first show there in 1988. These paintings virtually aim lower, focusing on the earth and the sea rather than a divine source of power, but if they fail to lift the soul, they do occasionally entice the eye.

“Binary Benediction,” as this show is called, seems to evolve from the premise that teeming energies flow beneath the surface of things. Whether Churchill, a local artist, is painting his own garden or the sunrise in the Anza-Borrego desert, he concentrates less on the concrete contours of the landscape than on its luminous aura. In “Autumn,” nature is celebrated by swirling bursts of pumpkin orange and misty gold. In “Just Below the Surface,” a thin band of pale blue-gray keeps the lid on a swarm of gold, wine and deep lilac-colored shapes below.

Churchill’s blend of biomorphic forms with more recognizable images of birds, hands, masks and fish recalls the work of Arshile Gorky, and more broadly, surrealism on the cusp of Abstract Expressionism. Churchill collages bits of glass to the surface of some paintings but they remain gentle odes to the world and the fluid, pulsing life forces that vitalize it. “In the Playroom” is a welcome, edgy exception, a haunting mix of cheery golds and a pale, stretched skull.

ART NOTES

Jason Tannen will be leaving as visual arts coordinator at Sushi at the end of May to pursue his own photographic work. Tannen, who has worked at Sushi since 1990, expanded Sushi’s visual arts program with off-site installations and exhibitions by artists nationwide. He will be replaced by local artist Robin Brailsford. . . .

The Timken Museum of Art will close June 2 for six weeks, to prepare for the exhibit, “The Age of Elegance: France in the 18th Century.” The show, featuring paintings and decorative arts, will open July 18. . . .

Performance artist, filmmaker and UC San Diego professor Eleanor Antin will screen her latest film, “Man Without a World,” through June 4 at the Laemmle Monica Theatre in Santa Monica. The film, made at UCSD in 1990, has been shown at festivals worldwide, and will also be seen on television in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. . . .