OPEN TO INTERPRETATIONS : Artists in ‘Abstraction for the Information Age’ Are of a Generation Used to Seeing Things Differently

Artists born around 1960 are members of the first generation that doesn’t get fazed by computer equipment, prefers electronically transmitted data to printed matter, and soaks up tales of the ‘60s as if connecting with a lost universe. The art they make tends to reflect this view of the world--as well as visual information culled from many fields, and combined or interpreted in unusual ways.

In “Abstraction for the Information Age”--at the Works Gallery South in Costa Mesa through Sunday--guest curator Irit Krygier has assembled work by 16 young Los Angeles artists whose ages range from late 20s to mid-30s, and who are likely to be unknown to all but the most assiduous L.A. gallery-goers.

The exceptions are Fred Fehlau and Rachel Lachowicz (who both have had one-person shows at Newport Harbor Art Museum) and Fullerton-born Erik Otsea (included in “Project X” at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University last fall).

But maybe you’ve heard about Fred Tomaselli, whose work incorporates some objects more at home in bathroom cabinets or private stashes than in art galleries. In “Packed,” the small and slightly larger yellowish tablets wedged together to form a jumpy, irregular pattern turn out to be aspirins and Tums. The celestial effect of fern-like crosses on a sky-blue circular painting (“Untitled, Marijuana”) is actually created by flattened marijuana plants.

The irony of these works is that the drugs’ promise of increased sensory awareness or relief from nagging pain is both tantalizingly visible and unavailable--”spoiled” by the layer of resin that turns them into immutable art objects. Of course, that’s also the point.

Swept up into a composition that may evoke the “natural” high of a transcendent experience or the meditative purity of abstract art, the drugs become the equivalent of a work of art in the highest sense--transporting the viewer beyond daily cares to a new state of mind.

“Yellow Integrated Leader,” Carter Potter’s massive (94-by-45-inch) wall piece, was woven with brightly colored 35-millimeter film “leaders” and lengths of film on which tiny repeated images can be glimpsed. Using the raw material of another, highly expressive art form, Potter fashions a vivid, glossy and coolly content-free tapestry.

Adam Ross’s extraordinary abstraction, “Untitled ADR-100P,” contains tiny, ultra-precise phantasmagoric rivulets of colored paint--suggestive of nerve fibers or computer circuitry--which are partly blotted out by a wash of red paint. The work has an inhuman gorgeousness, as if made by an android with an exquisite sensibility; the spill of red paint could be a case of cosmic envy.

David Lloyd’s “Untitled DL No. 105,” another painting on wood, also exhibits a deft manipulation of paint. The effect is of myriad floating layers of shapes--stenciled crests, cartoonish blobs, geometric bands--some of which are half-hidden under the others. Here and there, the paint is worn away, revealing other imagery that (incredibly) looks as though it is trapped underneath the wood surface.

Although less clearly virtuosic, Shane Guffogg’s “Untitled No. 36” is still arresting in its recreation of the effect of a flash of light on a flaking colored surface. Poised somewhere between abstraction and the edge of literalness, the image recalls sunlight gleaming off a polished hubcap onto a street mural, or the burst of an Instamatic flash exploding at a family outing.

Thaddeus Strode’s painting, “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow (Mandala),” has a loopy silliness created by mingling notions of decoration, meditation and mindless doodling, and sending up the creative tension between machine-made and handmade contemporary art.

Strode’s painting--a huge, glossy, bright yellow rectangle--contains a concentric series of rectangles with squiggly, “decorative” corners. Closer examination reveals that these seemingly hand-painted rectangles were made with a slap-dash application of press-on car trim.

Otsea’s spiky, crisp-edged, black silhouette abstractions reveal a different sort of humor: an elegantly mannered wit. “Flatworm’s Interest Group” combines stylistic references to the “high” art of Surrealist abstraction as well as to the status of art as a commodity (repeated “price tag” silhouettes) and to a range of other objects from the natural and man-made world that extend the definition of parasite (the flatworm’s “interest group”).

Linda Stark’s untitled canvases are peculiar little objects. One is a red square with paint encrusted along all four edges to form skinny, stand-up peaks. Riding low on the canvas, a curvy peach shape looks like a pair of fat lips. Another painting by Stark contains two three-dimensional figural shapes (built out of thick applications of red paint) with bell-shaped, fluted “bodies” and lightly painted, halo-like “heads.”

Exactly what image of womanhood these works project is hard to pin down--but a determined unwillingness to make a clear-cut statement is part of the charm of this and most of the other works in this show. They frankly acknowledge that contemporary life is open to multiple interpretations, and perception is a quirkily personal thing.