O. C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Some Serious Thinking About Unlikely Things

Elliptical, weird, ironic, agonized, deadpan, gravely ceremonial. I recently saw two batches of work by artists who are just beginning (for the most part) to show in public places, and those are some of the adjectives that occurred to me.

This is work that still needs to be tweaked around some more--in some cases to determine what effect the artist really intends and how best to express it. But there’s a lot of serious thinking going on here, as well as an attempt to tease meaning out of unlikely objects, imagery, words and architectural spaces.

One set of works--three installations and a photo-text piece, by four Cal State Fullerton studio art graduate students in their final semester--is at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton through Sunday. The other pieces are in “Spectral Delinquency” (through May 31), a show at Stuart Katz’s Loft in Laguna Beach. It was curated by artist Yolande McKay, who, coincidentally, also did her graduate work at Cal State Fullerton.

In a statement accompanying her exhibition, McKay writes about “the elusive evil twin that is separated from us at birth” but allowed to “rejoin us at the head” through the medium of art. The works in this show supposedly demonstrate the machinations of our “evil twin” freed from the restraints of polite culture.

Actually, several of the pieces in “Spectral Delinquency” seem heavily--if sometimes confusingly--dependent on Catholic dogma or Christian belief. Even with a richly complex religious tradition to draw on, however, it isn’t necessarily easy to find imagery that successfully probes forbidden zones of the psyche. Materials and methods sometimes get in the way.

In Lea Whittington’s “Vagina Dentitus”--a large wad of soft cotton made from unrolled tampons, garnished with tiny strings of plastic teeth--the teeth look quite harmless. But the image suggested by the title is menacing, and perhaps specifically anti-male. Is that the point, or are we getting inadvertent mixed messages?

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Mary Matyseck’s piece, “The Sorrowful Mystery,” consists of an open gold box, a dagger and a chain of dog tags, each one labeled with a word or phrase from the Catholic rosary. Dog tags are a form of military identification; a dagger suggests a theatrical means of death.

The essential meaning of Matyseck’s piece remains as elusive as the obscured faces in Arthur Courte’s “Smother Portraiture” (great title, though).

Greg Gilbertson’s work seems so baldly self-evident that it leaves no space for the viewer’s imagination. In “Brannoch Device,” a foot-measuring device used in shoe stores sits atop several pages from “Cinderella.” (Silly prince should have carted the thing around with him to avoid all sorts of problems.) “Personal Space Designator”--front and side views of a fellow wearing a strange circular contraption around his waist--has a certain humorous appeal, but the joke doesn’t go anywhere.

The deadpan observations Julie Medeweff incorporates into some of her dark little paintings unfortunately come across as tepid variants of Raymond Pettibon’s famously epigrammatic drawings. Rather than conveying a nonchalant, faintly ironic ghoulishness, an image of an urban bridge scene with a white head (discovered, she writes, “when I was taking my walk”) seems merely flat-footed.

Similarly, Michael Redfern risks comparisons with Michael Kelley in making “Alchemical Rodents” and “Vegetable Hearts,” pathetic old patched and threadbare fabric toys re-sewn with ungainly black stitches.

Redfern’s three “Exquisite Troll” pieces are much cleverer. Each “troll”--sealed in a large zip-lock bag--consists of an ungainly medley of strips of fabric, clumsy appliques, cartoon imagery and combinations of words that sound as though they need a decoder (“Crack Barleys Un Corn”). This is a takeoff on the Surrealist game of “exquisite corpse” (in which different artists would each draw a different portion of a figure without being able to see the whole picture) in which the goal is to depict the dross of pop culture (a troll doll).

Deena Capparelli’s sculpture, “Soul Catcher,” looks like a gussied up church font. But the smooth red glaze on the inside suggests a vaginal lining, and a squashed bowl-like object inside is completely lined with waxy small nipple-like shapes--seemingly a reference to painful conflicts between women’s sexual freedom and Catholic teachings, between flesh-and-blood motherhood and the Mother Church.

Although Laura McMurray’s piece, “Any Mother’s Wig,” includes a visual component (a slice of bread with its center removed, holding a doll-size hairpiece), its effect rests on the ability of a lengthy text--repeatedly referred to as “a true story”--to convey the frustrations of an disoriented elderly woman.

The woman, who sounds like a bag lady at war with unspecified authority figures, claims that people are trying to “steal the child from the top of her head.” Clearly, more vital things than hairpieces are at issue here, but the viewpoint of the piece remains unclear and its histrionics threaten to overwhelm its sense.

In contrast, McMurray’s nude performance, “Hair Actions,” at the opening of the show (which I saw in abbreviated form on videotape) was utterly simple yet endowed with a compelling ceremonial quality.

McMurray stood in the gallery with her almost floor-length hair hiding the front of her body. Eventually she kneeled down with a rock (a symbol of the Church) weighted on her tresses. Then she removed the shoes of three people in turn (a woman, gallery owner Katz and a young girl) and carefully washed their feet with her dampened hair.

The gravity and extraordinary humility of this action suggests such biblical scenes as Mary of Bethany’s wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair while he was a guest in her brother’s house (John 12:1-3). The reactions of the sitters--which seemed to range from embarrassed acknowledgment of McMurray’s nakedness to fascination with the foot-washing process--were also part of this strangely compelling piece.

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The graduate students’ show at the Muckenthaler is ironically entitled “This Explains Everything.” In fact, the pieces pose a lot of questions and provide precious few answers. For some reason, the artists making installations also seem reluctant to engage viewers by means of genuinely allusive imagery and fully realized sensory effects rather than dry tokens of meaning.

Jeffminton’s multipart architectural installation, “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Room,” is installed in two separate rooms of the Muckenthaler. It’s up to the viewer to try to figure out the hazy relationship between the two parts.

The biggest clue Jeffminton offers is a note that purports to be about his father, who never returned from an unspecified stint at sea: “I pictured him toiling in some far-off place. In my thoughts he was always making the same gesture.”

Inside a huge wooden packing crate, a wooden table and chair are anchored to the floor with ropes, as if they were liable to slide away. A hazy pattern of light and shadow filters through holes punched on top of the room, above a table holding only an empty metal box.

Written directly on the table is a sadly resigned message, apparently from the lighthouse keeper: “With the constant repetition of the same tasks, I’ve stopped keeping track of time. . . .”

It’s hard to identify with the lonely resident of this prison-like room, except in the most superficial sensory way, because almost no information is offered about his background, motivations or personality. He is a cipher, a man with empty pockets (as he writes) whose sole task has been to await the annual arrival of a ship.

While this part of the piece has a sensual and literary appeal, the other portion (a giant painting of a ship’s prow facing a walk-in “lighthouse” equipped with realistic-looking flashing lights) seems stagy and overly literal--and doesn’t add any intelligible meaning.

Even more elusive is C.A. Lombard’s installation, “I Wanted to Cry.” A ladder made of neatly knotted and folded strips of white bedsheets, with sides that converge at one end, is suspended from one wall to another. For some unfathomable reason, the “shadow” the piece casts on the floor--rendered in a flaky substance resembling oatmeal--appears in reverse. A brief sequence of hands climbing up a rope is projected on a loop of film playing on a small square shelf.

In her statement, printed in the brochure, Lombard says her environments “give a new context to what once appeared familiar.” So novel (or esoteric) is the context, however, that the viewer lacks a perspective--other than the general idea of rescue--from which to make sense of the piece.

Kathy Haddad’s notes on her spare installation, “Cistern,” are more helpful, although the piece itself never really comes into focus. Based on her research into the former status of the Muckenthaler as a family residence, the work supposedly investigates “what happens when a private dwelling becomes a public space . . . what is covered up and what is incorporated into its new definition.”

Among the none-too-helpful “clues” Haddad offers are: a stained dress attached by wires to compass-point markers on the floor; a long white glove pressed against a window; piles of towels layered with cut oranges and stuffed into the fireplace; and a fragment of an old photograph.

Notations on the walls seem to refer to the far-off history of the house (“somebody was born in Placentia”) as well as to its recent past as an exhibition venue (“someone painted over paint”). But the references are too skimpy and elliptical to conjure up images or ideas of any substance in the viewer’s mind.

It seems self-defeating for an artist to be so obscure when dealing with a subject entirely unfamiliar to viewers. Add to that the lack of memorable imagery--except for the aromatic towels, which might be about the “absorption” of orange grove cultivation into present-day Orange County life--and the piece never really assembles itself in the viewer’s mind.

Tom Backer’s untitled tabletop altarpieces have the furtive, frenzied desperation of a closeted penitent. Copious laments (“nothing absolves this wretchedness”) and apocalyptic ravings are inscribed in a tiny, nearly illegible script on the surfaces of most of these works, but their sense can be gleaned only fitfully.

Images of a young man--sometimes shown as an exhausted athlete in an old-fashioned track suit--are juxtaposed with metaphors for spiritual agony: an array of hammered nails, a split copper ball covered with spikes. This is work that does a lot of private muttering, inaudible to viewers, but it rewards close looking with a manic, focused intensity.

* “Spectral Delinquency,” through May 31 at Stuart Katz’s Loft, 2091 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday (Saturday and Sunday by appointment). Admission is free. (714) 497-1098.

“This Explains Everything,” through Sunday at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. (714) 738-6695.