Art Show Uses Space Seriously : Exhibit: Curator Howard Fox came up with a ‘resonant combination’ of installation artists at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.

Howard N. Fox recently tooled around Southern California in his Honda in deciding upon the two artists to be featured in Orange County Center for Contemporary Art’s “First Annual Juried Installation Show.” It seems the mileage paid off.

“I’ve juried (installation) exhibitions locally, regionally and nationally for more than a decade, and I have to say, this one was far and away the most engaging, the most serious, and the most challenging for me,” Fox said recently.

Curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fox said he and OCCCA member Libby Jennings developed the idea for the installation show, opening Saturday, after he organized the center’s annual multimedia juried show last year.

On the basis of artists’ proposals and previous work, he chose Nancy E. Floyd of Mission Viejo and Phyllis McGibbon of Claremont for the installation show, designed to give the artists a chance to do new projects.

Fox said he made his final selections because he thought Floyd and McGibbon’s work, while independently praiseworthy, would make “a particularly solicitous and resonant combination,” as they differ widely in concept and execution.

Floyd, Fox said, likes to “raid the family attic,” or public archives, in creating installations that are “partly documentation, partly reportorial, and partly fictive.” She’s interested in how people see themselves in society and the world, he continued. Last year she exhibited a work at UCLA dealing with her brother’s death in Vietnam, and how that affected her family.

“My Home,” Floyd’s OCCCA piece, is about League, Tex., where she grew up. It mushroomed from a community of 6,000 to 22,000 over 10 years, and her installation deals with the impact of that growth on the residents, Fox said. Full of snapshots of herself and her family, her crib and other domestic wears, the work bears the fruits of a research trip home she made earlier this year.

“She wanted to look at what has happened to American society as a whole by studying her own hometown,” he said.

McGibbon’s work deals largely with perception, or “how we form images, how we form ideas about images, how we form attitudes about the ideas,” Fox said.

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McGibbon, an assistant professor of art at Pomona College, tends to explore feminist themes, makes frequent use of existing architecture and plays with shadow and light. Her new installation will incorporate OCCCA’s skylight.

Titled “Incubating Shadows,” it is based on the mythical story of Danae, who was locked away from suitors by her father, who feared that any son she bore would kill him, Fox said. The work includes 400 gold leaf test tubes symbolizing Zeus (“all that reason gone astray,” the artist says), who transformed himself into a shower of golden rain to enter her chamber and impregnate her.

During the selection process for the show, Fox visited eight studios and viewed slides from roughly 30 artists working with such diverse processes and materials as slide projection and mechanized elements.

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“Installation artists can really only do their work when provided with a space, when they get the kind of venue an exhibit like this can offer, so they are particularly serious and committed,” he said in a phone interview. “It was clear this was a group of very fine artists.”

Installation, which has come of age in the past 15 years, produces some of contemporary art’s most interesting, vital work, Fox said, largely because it takes so much planning. Improvising on canvas is a lot easier, he explained.

“The forethought doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d say that the intellectual effort and labor and commitment that goes into it certainly has the potential to yield a commensurately rich and challenging and probing result.”

“First Annual Juried Installation Show” opens Saturday and runs through Sept. 11 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Space 111, Santa Ana. Hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free. Curator Howard N. Fox will give a free lecture on installation art Saturday at 7 p.m. at the center. Information: (714) 549-4989.