Renewed Energy and Ingenuity at Installation

Installation Gallery has launched its portion of the sprawling IN/SITE 92 program of artists’ installations quite literally on site. On each floor of the Mission Brewery Plaza where Installation now resides, an artist has transformed raw office space into the space of memory, history, fantasy and social critique. The results, though mixed, are an encouraging indicator of Installation’s restored energy and of the feasibility and ingenuity of the IN/SITE concept.

By far the most absorbing of the four installations are Daphne Ruff’s “Ruff-Wear,” on the ground floor, and Nina Katchadourian’s “30 years 21 minutes 17 tapes,” on the third floor.

Ruff, who received her master’s degree this year from UC San Diego, outfits her allotted space in the manner of a clothing design studio. Completed garments rest on hangers and other forms, and in the rear of the room materials lie strewn about the floor, among scissors and papers.

This pseudo-studio could hardly be mistaken for the real thing, however, because Ruff’s garments are rendered from the most unlikely of materials, including industrial rubber, rusty nails, bubble wrap packing material, cardboard and staples. One outfit is displayed on a traditional dressmaker’s form, but another is draped over a tank of the sort used to hold oxygen or helium. Plastic flowers adorn one dress, and another is made entirely of the flimsy plastic sheaths used by dry cleaning establishments.

“Ruff-Wear” is exactly that, with its collars of nails and picket fence casings. The artist’s punning last name helps describe her mock products, but it glosses over the disturbing undercurrent of her show. These clothes spoof the fashion industry by carrying it to extremes. Through clothes that are blatantly synthetic--even dangerous--the artist shows exactly how arbitrary and inhumane the fashion industry can be. She challenges the notion of clothing as protection and adornment, offering instead a vision of clothing as aggressive act. She sneers at feminizing fashions and snubs--albeit gently, with humor--those who subscribe to them.

Katchadourian, a graduate student at UCSD, has created a beautifully evocative oral history and visual autobiography through her video installation, “30 years 21 minutes 17 tapes.” On an unfinished mezzanine in the brewery complex, she has constructed an intimate viewing booth, lined with white, translucent scrim. Inside a bench sits before a television monitor and a shelf of tapes.

Each tape lasts only a minute or so and affords an abbreviated, condensed glimpse into a facet of Katchadourian’s childhood or family history.

In “How They Met in Five Sentences,” the artist’s Finnish mother describes how she met and married the artist’s Armenian father. Another tape with the same title gives the father’s version of the tale. Both are accompanied by footage of Lebanon, where the courtship took place, and snippets showing a couple cavorting in the woods.

“Always Wear a White Hat” pairs old family movies with a recitation of aphorisms, and “Shortwave Potato” mixes an audio montage of voices and music with an image of a woman’s hands peeling potatoes with a small knife.

Through these truncated tales and unanchored images, Katchadourian loosely constructs and defines her life. The tapes are like disconnected pages of a journal--filled with mundane description, quirky anecdotes or accounts of seminal incidents, but always rich with the flavor of distinct, individual experience.

Katchadourian echoes the process of learning about a whole through distilled fragments in another part of this installation. At the other end of the mezzanine hangs a long band of wood holding a row of 144 tiny glass bottles. They contain leaves, sand, flowers, spores, seeds and other organic matter that the artist collected in Finland, where she spends her summers. The way we compose the past, she writes in an accompanying statement, is “a process of collecting, sorting and framing, much like the process involved in collecting the tiny fragments of leaves, dirt and flowers in the bottles.”

The parallel here is direct and highly suggestive. Together, the two parts of the installation prompt viewers to slow their pace, examine the details and let intuition, knowledge, experience and imagination work their wonders by filling in the rest of the story.

Lynne Hendrick’s subtle installation on the second floor also plays with the fragment and its evocation of a place and time, but less powerfully.

She has created a slightly obscure shelf for objects using a pane of glass and the exposed I-beam that supports the ceiling. The honeycomb, animal bones, nest, stones, springs, rope, hook, vial and feathers that occupy this shelf are all displaced, the residue of prior functions.

Cumulatively, they suggest a material narrative of the space, but only in a vague, uncertain way. Through their obscure placement, which causes many visitors to miss them altogether, they also, perhaps inadvertently, call attention to the rich sculptural and textural qualities of the raw office space.

Carmela Castrejon’s photographic installation, “Elementos,” rests on the floor of Installation Gallery’s fourth-floor offices. Spare and obtuse, the combinations of black and white photo enlargements make fleeting references to racism, border crossing and the disparities separating Mexico and the United States. However, no real visual or conceptual glue holds these ideas and images together.

By staging these installations at Installation Gallery, and dozens more throughout San Diego and Tijuana, Installation has substantially expanded exhibition opportunities for local artists, at least temporarily.

The disparity between the number of local artists and showcases for their work continues to widen, especially with the flow of talent emerging from UCSD’s graduate department. Perhaps programs like IN/SITE will provide incentive for keeping some of that talent in town.

* IN/SITE 92, Installation Gallery, 2150 W. Washington in the Mission Brewery Plaza, through Sept . 26. Open noon-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and by appointment. 260-1313.

ART NOTES

The Public Arts Advisory Council, a county agency, has announced this year’s recipients of Voluntary Fund for the Arts grants. The fund, established in 1981, was designed to support arts outreach throughout the county. Of the 10 community arts projects selected, three are specifically geared to the visual arts: Xavier Cortez of Eye Counseling & Crisis Services received a $2,000 grant to fund a 40-week program of “counseling through art,” led by Chicano artist Salvador Torres; $2,500 was awarded to Kathleen Butler Kolk, Spencer Valley School, the Julian Arts Guild, the Julian Historical Society and Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation to design and execute the first mural in Julian; and Felicia Shaw/Installation Gallery and Harborview Community College were granted $2,500 to fund muralist Richard Martinez’s work with 10 at-risk teen-age “taggers,” or graffiti artists . . .

A new grant program funded by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund will send 24 American visual artists abroad on an international residency program. Among the recipients are four San Diego artists from the Border Arts Workshop: Michael Schnorr, Susan Yamagata, Juan Carlos Toth and Carmela Castrejon. They will travel to Australia for five months and will receive a grant of $12,500, along with additional funds to pay for travel, housing and studio costs. In addition, according to a release from the foundation, the Border Arts Workshop will receive $20,000 to support community programs upon the artists’ return. . . .

Local artist Cheryl O’Neill exhibits a drawings installation at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind., through Oct. 2. . . .

The fifth annual Coffee-Themed Mail-Art show has announced its call for entries. The deadline for sending in poems, postcards or other “customized mail-able objets d’art” is Nov. 27. The address: Quel Fromage, 523 University Ave., San Diego, 92103.