SIGHTS UP THE COAST : Masters of Pulp : In Ro Snell Gallery’s ‘Works on Paper,’ notable local artists take viewers to the outer edge of their medium.

Bestowing an exhibition with a title as blunt and matter-of-fact as “Works on Paper” helps to shake up residual preconceptions we have about paper art.

As an art-watching body, we’re still programmed to believe that drawings and works committed only to paper are dwarfed by the more significant efforts on canvas or in stone.

Ro Snell, continuing her commitment to developing a respectable contemporary gallery in Santa Barbara, has put up the current group show for a two-week, pre-holiday stint.

In fact, many of the artists shown are better known for their more ambitious works--at least in terms of sheer effort and physical results.

And yet, all this having been said, “Works on Paper” is a jolly fine show in more ways than one. Besides demonstrating the expanding definitions of what it means to work on paper, the show offers a glimpse of many notable Santa Barbara-based artists not often seen under the same roof.

An eclectic array of approaches to dealing with paper emerges. Harry Reese (the subject of this gallery’s first show, last summer) and Dane Goodman start their process from the source, by dealing with handmade paper.

Goodman, also a painter and sculptor, concerns himself with questions of object vs. representation, reality vs. archetype. Images of a potato, a seashell and a pear are subjected to an artful transformation of the commonplace.

The collage aesthetic is represented by Richard Shaffer, Jerrold Burchman and Mary Heebner, a collagist now turned painter.

Peggy Wirta Dahl, who had a one-woman show here, shows a monotype of her recent series, with a cruciform floating in a field of mottled rust. Marie Schoeff, featured at Ro Snell last month, shows smallish horizontal pieces revealing her interest in the interaction of natural vistas and the artistic process.

For painterly zeal, there are Patty Look Lewis’s hazy seascape visions and Erica Daborn’s vivid pieces, which tend to leap off the wall. Ingenuous mysticism and storybook surrealism fuel Daborn’s works. Perspectives have gone awry and they’re full of peculiar characters in scenarios left unspecified.

Dan Connally’s paintings have often been busy, knotty concoctions, bustling with forms and colors in the gray area between abstraction and representation. He has scaled down and pulled back for this show, with enigmatic charcoal and ink pieces, including one with a strangely muted, archaically oceanic atmosphere.

Sculptor Colin Gray is a resident Dada-didact whose works balance whimsy with formal questions. Here, Gray shows what appear to be working drawings of gears and ambiguous machinery in motion.

Stretching the curatorial premise just a wee bit, Joan Tanner exerts her visceral sense of abstraction by painting on sandpaper. The resulting tactility of Tanner’s rough-surfaced works is lent added physicality through the use of sheet metal framing.

On paper (pardon the pun), the show might seem slight. On the gallery walls, it turns out to be a small feast.

Socially Charged Art

Art with overtly sociopolitical agendas is presently in plentiful supply in Santa Barbara.

Contemporary Arts Forum and the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum are presenting shows in tandem that focus on work by artists alienated from the mainstream on the basis of race, sex or ethnicity. As eye-opening as much of the work can be, the weighty concentration of such work suggests tokenistic overkill.

The risk is that such a concentration of unapologetically socially charged work can tend to dull the sensibilities of the viewer, keenly aware of the fact that this is message-driven art.

“Counterweight: Alienation, Assimilation, Resistance,” curated by Joan Hugo and Sondra Hale, fills the CAF with provocative concepts and mixed-media projects.

As part of his poignant installation “Tales from a Boyhood,” Mark Niblock-Smith fills walls with slang terms for gays. Yolanda M. Lopez is more understated, with sculptures that softly rage against Latino stereotyping, while assemblagist Richard Glazer-Danay relies on dark humor to convey cultural ironies regarding American Indian life.

In UC Santa Barbara’s “Mistaken Identities,” Carrie Mae Weems imparts her message with frank photographic pieces derailing African-American archetypes. In one, we see the artist posing--a la Cindy Sherman--as four separate stereotypes of black women.

The accompanying text doesn’t hide behind euphemism: “we don’t laugh to keep from crying, we laugh to keep from slapping the inventor of these crazy-ass images upside the head, ‘cause you can bet they’re made by men.”

One of the most impressive artists here is sculptor Jimmy Durham, whose “A Man Looking for a Place” is a junk sculpture with a subtle reference to the dangers of racial homogeneity.

His deceptively innocent-looking relief sculpture “New Clear Family” is harsher in its drawing of racial-gender lines. Festive female stick dolls hang on the wall beneath the supreme blond white male, stripped of ornamentation and with a semi-erection--a symbol here of power and subjugation.

The message rings out, but it’s more a polemic than a howl.

Just Folk

Goleta latter-day folk artist Ralph Auf der Heide is back at the library from whence he came.

Only a few years back, after his retirement, the self-taught Auf der Heide began producing his wonderfully loopy images using the rare technique of behind-plexiglass painting.

The works would pop up at the downtown library like goofy volunteer plants sprouting in a garden. He has gone on to other venues--including a show last year at the now-defunct Frances Puccinelli Gallery.

But you can catch a sizable sampling of his work in the current one-man show in the Townley Room downstairs, through December. Images like “Balloon Fiesta” and “Dubious Egg” crystallize Auf der Heide’s genuine gift for the gently absurd and the stylistically freewheeling.

Life Goes On

Also at CAF this month is a 12th anniversary show for Art/Life, the monthly portfolio headed by the redoubtable Joe Cardella, an ex-Santa Barbaran and now Ventura resident. You can don the white gloves and pore over the handiwork of an intrepid idea turned into a concept with wings.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “Works on Paper,” through Tuesday at the Ro Snell Gallery, 926 Chapala St., Santa Barbara. 966-0903.

* “Mistaken Identities” through Sunday at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum in Santa Barbara. 893-2951.

* “Counterweight: Alienation, Assimilation, Resistance” through Sunday at Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara. 966-5373.

* Ralph Auf der Heide, through December in the Townley Room of the downtown Santa Barbara Public Library, 40 E. Anapamu St. 962-7653.