ART : ‘Home’ Is Where the Art Is in Curator’s Swan Song : Mark Johnstone’s final Security Pacific Gallery presentation is one of the most engaging he’s ever organized for Orange County viewers.

Well, that’s the way it goes. “The Home Show” at Security Pacific Gallery (through Aug. 22) is one of the most engaging exhibits curator Mark Johnstone ever organized for Orange County viewers. But it’s also his swan song.

As a result of the merger between Security Pacific and BankAmerica Corp., the 3-year-old gallery will no longer be home to thematic exhibits of work gathered by Johnstone from Southern California galleries and private collections. Instead, by early next year, the 9,500-square-foot gallery (possibly reduced in size) will be showing art drawn from the combined Security Pacific and BankAmerica collections, now 18,000 pieces strong.

The mind-boggling size of BankAmerica’s holdings certainly bodes well for the variety of works we’re likely to see in the gallery. But displaying work from the collection is not the same as going out in the field on a consistent basis to find new work to show. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many places in Orange County where that kind of curatorial energy is at work.

For his final exhibit, Johnstone corralled a medley of objects--variously witty, cynical, humorous and mysterious--that are related in some way to the comforts and banalities of domestic life. Although most of the pieces replicate familiar household objects (rugs, chairs, tables, silverware), the artists generally do their best to let form stray as far as possible from function. For example, three of these artists--Anne Walsh, Mara Lonner and Sheila Klein--make pieces that look like rugs. But these are floor coverings with attitude.

Walsh’s “Oval Rug: Respiration” is one in a series of cut-and-pieced swatches of acrylic carpet that illustrate bodily functions. This oval patterned rug is inset with two identical pieces of maroon carpet--the familiar silhouette forms of human lungs. Other carpet works serve as giant diagrams of the bowels, kidneys and heart.

Walsh’s crassly pedestrian media and flatly didactic subject matter are not just untraditional, they’re also the logical extension of the in-your-face role of body functions in contemporary work by Mike Kelley, Andres Serrano and other artists.

The simplified shapes refer both to the pivotal role of symbols and signs in communication and to the basic relation between form and function in the human body. Incorporating symbols for vital parts of the body in objects meant to be stepped on might also be a swipe at conservative attitudes decrying frankness in works of art.

Lonner’s “Throw Rug” imitates the concentric circles of a country-style braided rag rug. But the rags are replaced in this piece by separate coils of heavy-duty aluminum, brass-colored and rusted iron chains. By using “male” industrial implements to make traditionally “female” handmade objects, Lonner gently confounds gender stereotypes and implicitly asks why some forms of work are valued more by society than others.

Klein’s “Kilim” is a handsome “rug” pieced together out of swatches of vintage linoleum, jumping with speckle patterns and bright linear designs. Klein’s other household object fantasies include “dishlets” (giant cuff bracelets) adorned with “jewels” made from arrangements of ornamental serving dishes or brightly colored pottery.

In Klein’s hands, an upside-down three-compartment serving dish suggests the shape of a female torso, while the stone in the tartly titled “Class Ring” is made of silver serving dishes routinely presented to upper middle-class brides. Even in her simplest and seemingly irony-free pieces, Klein’s treatment of vintage American housewares as the raw materials of craft projects serves to refocus our eyes on the decorative charm of the originals.

Other Lonner pieces include a “Comforter” made of chains, washers and wire arranged in an intricate, quilt-like flower pattern, and a “Sampler” made of Philips screws daintily spelling out “COTTAGE INDUSTRY” on a rectangular swatch of sprigged fabric.

Lonner’s “Wedgwood Pattern” plate--pieced together of carved wood shapes fastened with small, decoratively engraved metal hinges and latches--turns the whole idea of industrial and hand-worked design back on itself: In this object, the most utilitarian, machine-made elements perform nearly all of the decorative work.

Other artists rework traditional domestic forms in a range of eccentric ways.

David Perry’s furniture is stunningly ill-equipped to accommodate normal household uses. Two stacked upholstered pillows fill the seat of “Cliff’s Chair” so thoroughly, there’s no place to park your own body. A wood “Table” with doweled legs resting on a rocker bottom looks like a shaky proposition. Liberated from catering to human needs, Perry’s mutated “Table and Chair” have grown together so intimately that half of one of the table’s three legs is attached to the chair seat.

Jorge Pardo’s pieces of furniture evoke feelings of disquiet--a result of the overabundance, loss or inappropriateness of their component parts. His oppressively overstuffed chair, “Me and My Mom,” looks as though it might slowly envelop and squeeze to death anyone who sat in it. The title suggests the image of a child dominated by crushing maternal attention. Pardo’s “Susan Stein and David Alpert Cabinet” consists of two attached cabinet frames, stripped of their drawers but equipped with rows of metal drawer tracks projecting uselessly, and rather menacingly, into space.

Phil Garner takes a different approach to the mundane object: He invents stuff we never even knew we needed. Framed pages of sober drawings introduce such concepts as an Oiling Cap (wearable lubrication for the brain), a Clip-On Muff Bra (“works like ear muffs”), a Tissue Dispensing Necktie and a shoulder-mounted Personal Roll Bar (“safety in sports and jobs where body roll over is a hazard”).

These whimsies recall the unquenchable inventor’s dream of patenting some gotta-have-it gizmo that will change the course of history. In a different mode, Garner’s model of an “Ethno Basket Lamp”--a lumpy raffia receptacle dotted with small colored reflector lights and equipped with snake-like wires holding bulbs--gently tweaks the middle-class mania for converting objects from other cultures into living room “conversation pieces.”

In one way or another, the artists mentioned above all earn their stripes by subverting the functionalism of objects rather than gussying it up in “arty” guises. But the group of fantasy tables and a screen by Richard B. Hubbard and Judith M. Stauffer seem out of place in this context. Their brand of glitzy whimsy is commonplace in upscale home boutiques but adds little of value to the exhibit’s dialogue about form and function.

These cutesy pieces point up Johnstone’s overly inclusive and insufficiently critical way of shaping the contents of the exhibit. On the other hand, his genial inclusion of all sorts of stuff in this show also results in some unexpected pleasures. As it happens, Robert Wilhite’s “concept drawings” for such objects as a one-pot coffee pot, sculptured light bulbs, and flatware alluding to male and female body parts are actually more interesting than his finished pieces.

Wilhite’s measurements and notations about materials, function and placement on these drawings demonstrate how design remains the handmaiden of engineering in household goods. Most of us never think about such things as the angle at which the bowl of a spoon meets the table, or the distance between the tines of a fork, and yet such details help to determine how an implement feels in the hand, and the impression it makes on the table.

Wilhite’s drawings for dinnerware based on halos in early Renaissance religious paintings are examples of the long and durable life of ornament, which survives from century to century in vastly different guises. To a large extent, contemporary design has become a matter of rummaging through its own history finding new ways to recombine and reinterpret old details in new contexts.

The magazine ads for Wilhite’s tableware that hang in the exhibit soberly quote blue-chip modernists ranging from architect Walter Gropius (“The artist possesses the ability to breathe soul into the lifeless product of the machine”) to photographer Margaret Bourke-White (“Dynamos are more beautiful than pearls”).

It isn’t entirely clear whether Johnstone included these ads in the show with a tongue-in-cheek intent. After all, much of the art in the show represents a distinctly postmodern outlook that turns the pieties of an earlier generation inside out. By the time modernist catch phrases trickle down to commercial advertising, it’s a good bet contemporary artists are laughing up their sleeves at them.

The final installation in the gallery’s Project Room--”Pre-Columbus Quincentenary Primal Experience Extravaganza Sale”--is a bright and busy collaborative piece by Patrick Mohr and Craig Cree Stone. Attractively produced, it is pretty tame and tepid stuff in the world of satire.

The display of politically correct products includes a trio of brand-new camping tents labeled with the names of Columbus’ ships, large metal bowls of rice and corn, toy trains running around a buffalo silhouette made from coffee grounds, and a Mylar-clad “Shaman’s Poncho.” It is available for only $199.95, according to the recorded voice of a woman who continuously hawks various quincentennial products. In an awkward attempt at mimicking subliminal advertising, the voice occasionally utters the show’s fighting words: “Convert, profit, greed, theft.”