SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Women’s Works : Diversity of outlook and style are the main connective tissue in five-artist ‘Feminine Ascension’ exhibition.

Despite gradual changes for women, the art world is still dominated by white males. The archetype of the noble, working fine artist continues to be, by and large, a man.

Clearly, equal time is in order. Judy Chicago’s infamous “Dinner Party” exhibition of the ‘70s forcefully asserted a feminine perspective in art. Has that radical gesture sent out ripples in the subsequent years? It’s a slow- going revolution.

That women artists deserve better representation and have gender-specific concerns are the ideas that provide the curatorial glue for “Feminine Ascension,” the current show at Ventura’s Momentum Gallery. Diversity of outlook and style are the main connective tissue among the works of Pegan Brooke, Holly Crawford, Jenny Quint, Phyllis Shafer and Linda Stark.

Stoking the equal-time imperative for women is an admirable one. But there is also something culturally dangerous about the divide-and-conquer process by which women artists’ very womanhood secures membership in some perceived artistic subculture.

In a statement, curator David Walker makes some dubious assertions that seem belied by the art we see on the walls. Among the “observations and generalizations” that are the “foundations for this exhibition,” Walker states that “women make art to escape within” and that “women pursue sensitivity while men pursue strength.”

Them are fighting words. Isn’t it safer to say that artists, male and/or female, tap into varying degrees of the feminine and masculine psychic impulses that exist regardless of gender?

Of the art here, it is Quint’s sculpture that most plainly addresses a specifically feminine perspective.

Her three plaster “Moon Cycle” pieces are based on the myth of the phases of the moon representing the three ages of woman. Quint depicts these stages with plaster ovals (a symbolically fecund female form, rounded and womb-like) placed on earthy beds of sand on the gallery floor.

The first piece is pristine and white, virginal, graced with ornamental frills. The second stage, productive and nurturing, finds a dish full of stones, while, in the final piece, the dish is overturned and cracked, useless. It’s that last piece--a grim punch line--that gives Quint’s series an air of cynical observation.

A pointed feminist jab again pops up, almost sneakily, in a piece by Stark. One of her small, shiny-surfaced paintings finds rivulets of bright red paint gushing down right off the edge of the canvas.

An initial impression of decorative flourish, on closer inspection, becomes an evocation of sexual violence: suddenly, you can’t escape from the image of blood pouring from nipples on a fleshy backdrop.

In other, lighter-themed Stark paintings, curling, meditative forms conjure up some wonderfully weird referential junction of Hindu visions, Madison Avenue clip book art and latter-day Op Art.

Organic and biological elements are the bases of the other painters in the show, who show variations on personalized themes.

Crawford paints roots, literally. Roots amount to a symbolically loaded subject, as unseen sources of sustenance, and that which we long for and sometimes fetishize.

Roots are also tangly, unsightly support systems that make the more celebrated above-ground manifestations of flowers and fruits.

It is this secret plant life that Crawford plays off, creating brooding portraits that sit somewhere, visually, between abstraction and the mysterious realm of dirt. (David Lynch, of course, is the most famous dirt digger, sending his curiosity and his camera below the manicured ground-cover surface.)

Shafer, too, draws on ambiguous natural dimensions for her artistic turf. Her multicolored forms--rippling, folding, bulging--suggest brain tissue, coral, entrails, or some other unspecified membrane. She paints this enigmatic inner world with a rich palette and with strength.

In her work, Brooke occupies a self-imagined nether world. Nothing is quite true to our expectations. Figure-to-ground relationships are familiar but skewed. Landscape allusions are slippery.

Brooke’s paintings revolve around central subjects, round mystery objects adrift in space. That space and the objects it embraces are articulated in different ways in each painting. In one, it looks as if a mutant fruit is floating against thickly glossed wood paneling in your uncle Herman’s game room.

To her credit, Brooke’s artful dodging of specific references leaves plenty of room for interpretation as the viewer sees fit.

In the end, the exhibition is impressive not because of the gender of those involved but because of their aesthetic focus and expressive elan. In this case, anyway, it pays to heed the axiom of looking at the art, not the artist.

REQUIEM FOR A SOLDIER: With the poignant exhibition of art by the late Alex Singer at Brandeis-Bardin Institute, the process of getting there is part of a fitting pilgrimage.

An avid student of Judaism who sketched what he saw during his world travels, Singer died an Israeli soldier on his 25th birthday in 1987 during a terrorist attack.

In operation for almost 50 years, the Brandeis-Bardin Institute sits on a remote, rambling, and strikingly rural plot of land in Simi Valley. Singer’s drawings and poems line the hallway of the House of the Book, on a high hilltop above the rest of the institute and its campgrounds.

The dry, rolling terrain might be mistaken for Israel and other parts in the Mideast. Singer spent summers here and was inspired by its familiar atmosphere, explaining in one letter that his time there “was the closest I’ve been to Israel since I left the kibbutz.”

Singer’s drawings show a free expressive gift, and served as a means of crystallizing his own experience of a place. Often, the artist’s leg or sketch pad enter the picture, an I-was-there stamp.

Throughout the show, we are reminded of his tragically truncated life. One triptych shows a panoramic view from his guard tower in Israel. All was quiet for the moment. In a poem toward the end, he wrote “once in awhile, as I progress toward the course’s end, I feel a pang of fear.”

What we see here, though, is a measured-but-passionate appreciation of the world around him.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “Feminine Ascension,” through Aug. 29 at the Momentum Gallery, 34 N. Palm St. in Ventura. For more information, call 652-2820.

* Alex Singer: Art and Action, through August at the House of Book of the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, 1101 Peppertree Lane in Simi Valley. Available for viewing Sunday and Aug. 16 from 5 until 9 p.m. or by appointment. For more information, call 582-4450.