SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Artistic Roundup : Photographer John Nichols has organized a mixed-media show at his Santa Paula gallery, with his pieces the highlight.

The premise was simple. John Nichols wanted to round up a pack of willing artists for an exhibition of art based on the city of Santa Paula. The mixed-media show would be hung in his gallery, a kind of intellectual nucleus in the humble downtown quadrant.

What could be more Santa Paulan?

But the result reveals as much about the devious and probing ways of artists as it does about the town in question. Anytown U.S.A., indeed.

The composite civic portrait that emerges from this show isn’t the pretty-as-a-postcard one endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce. An undeniably picturesque hamlet, a last bastion of bucolia amid the Southern California despoilation, Santa Paula is still many things to many people.

It’s no surprise that photographers outnumber the artists working in other media here. Nichols himself is an accomplished and thoughtful photographer, and his gallery has thus far been focused primarily on fine art photography.

And, in the case of this show, the host is the hero. Nichols’ enigmatic “chance diptychs” are the most visually imaginative and conceptually satisfying images on display.

The works stem from Nichols’ concept of printing two separate frames from a strip of negatives that overlap and become instant, one-of-a-kind diptychs. Nichols took these shots around town with the inexpensive--and now out-of-production--Diana camera, the technical deficiencies of which produce a dreamlike look.

What results seems like peculiar existential slices of life. Reality comes in pairs, mated in a chance darkroom encounter.

A woman at a bus stop, in eerie late-afternoon light, contrasts with a section of wall. Suggestions of accidental voyeurism, as if we’re peering around corners, add to the appeal.

In another diptych, a brick wall to the right intersects with a shot of glistening tin-roofed houses surrounded by spear-like cypresses. These works make their own kind of on-the-spot logic, their own kind of irrational beauty.

Placed deliberately at the entrance to the gallery section of the building, Michael Moore’s “Are You Prepared?” is the first work you see. There we see old Mick’s Newsstand, in all its scruffy glory, before its gentrification.

Moore’s works are from a documentary project and are thus the most strait-laced pictures in the place. Still, he manages to slip an artful veneer into the images, whether it’s the odd bath of light on the Masonic temple or the almost deadpan composition of the Garden Market.

Diversity is the key to this mixed-media, mixed-message exhibition.

Ron Smith shows wide format Cibachrome shots of Santa Paula farmland, in sharp contrast to James Ponder’s close-up images savoring the rustic textures of old trucks and raincoats. David Whittemore also dramatically limits his view, admiring windows and doors at the Edward Ranch Adobe.

Charles Spink is another photographer with a keen eye for textures and gestures in miniature. A cheap couch in partial sunlight, a “cleat” that looks like a bellybutton on a wall, the last rays of sun on Vicki’s Beauty Salon: These are the small wonders he’s interested in. Less effective are his photo-collage images.

Robert Muschitz’s “Glen City Monsters” are pint-size portraits of kids in ghoulish get-ups. Meanwhile, back at another kind of ranch, William Hendricks shows several of his previously seen erotic studies in contrast, with a nude cavorting among the ruins against a wall of peeling paint and a rickety old piano.

Just as the photographers in the room interpret the town with individualistic attitudes, the painters also bring along their distinctive twists. They’re not happy to simply bask in the scenery.

In the front window, A. Hammer’s painting of a caboose, with its brusque brush strokes and seething red, has an almost expressionistic fervor--like a postcard view as painted by Max Beckmann.

Painter Gail Pidduck finds visual poetry tucked away in corners, feeling no obligation to supply context. In her most intriguing pieces, Pidduck exercises a selective eye, zeroing in on architectural nooks and crannies rather than grand long views.

The impressive, hundred-year-old Universalist Unitarian church on Main Street is depicted via a fragment of the entryway. The Guadalupe church is seen from a roof-level perspective as if the artist were perched in a tree.

Sue Ricards brings a nice loose interpretive eye, and a conspicuous sense of space and humor to her paintings of vegetable matters.

Beans, zucchini and other staples of still lifes are depicted as if lazily dotting the soil. Any sense of agricultural, industrial urgency is disallowed into the picture frame.

Anyone coming to the Nichols gallery in search of affirmations of Santa Paula’s small town quaintness or farm-town Americana may be disappointed. What you find, instead, are the artistic impulses of locals who love their town enough to poke, scratch and peer beneath the surface.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“A Look at Santa Paula: A Mixed-Media Show by Area Artists,” through Jan. 31 at John Nichols Gallery, 910 E. Main St. 525-7804.