SIGHTS : Borrowing of Images Adds to Uniqueness : Jane Sinclair’s Ventura College show combines painting and photocopies with art history details and snapshots while toying with depth perception.

This is the collage era, when borrowing and/or pillaging from every conceivable nook and cranny of the image bank--from advertising to art history--is not only acceptable practice, but fashion-mandated.

Long before the term appropriation was anointed, it was in the very cultural air we breathed. Art has always nourished itself through larceny--or by whatever other euphemistic name--particularly in the 20th Century, when ideas and trends rage, then burn out.

But movements have beginnings and endings, and “appropriationism” has already lost much of its sting.

But it hasn’t disappeared. The unassuming work of Jane Sinclair, showing at the New Media Gallery at Ventura College, makes no attempt to disguise its allegiance to the A-word. Sinclair cleverly blends Xerography and painting, flinging together details from art history, snapshots and other visual non sequiturs, while also toying with depth perception.

What gives her pilfered images a personal touch is her graceful, wry stitching process, through which her art investigates ways of seeing.

The currency of her show--as suggested by its title, “Image Scavenging”--doesn’t detract from the emotional resonance or distinctiveness of her art. Hers is not a willy-nilly scavenging, but an expression of personalized visual data and obsession.

Often, pieces of disconnected information collide, as in a dream. “Window of Morning/Mourning” combines a desert scene with a jail cell window, afloat in the outer space cosmic debris that underscores many of the pieces here.

Torn edges take on metaphorical weight, as evidence of the artist’s almost improvisational, unfussy assembly. But the fact remains that Sinclair’s work is processed, its surfaces reduced to a smooth detached sheen that denies the tactility of paint on canvas or the rough cut-and-paste surface of the collagist.

Most of the works have a trompe l’oeil element--usually art tools--that appear to sit on top of the images. At play here is an ironic art riddle: She knows that we know that she knows that nobody’s being fooled here. But the being fooled is a great tradition in art.

“Bitter Pill,” on a backdrop resembling a Currier and Ives winter scene, has a compositional scheme with a series of echoing ovals--faces of inert dolls and art historical icons, and a spoon with a pill.

Sinclair’s seemingly casual assortments yield hints of meaning without giving away easy, one-shot readings. More than making coherent statements, her art embodies a search as she sorts through personal mementos and collective memory, intercut, torn and pasted. She’s a scavenger with a good eye and a controlled palette of images.

Over in the college’s Gallery 2, Sally Warner shows her charcoal landscapes from the Hudson River Valley and Ojai--two legendary artist havens.

Warner’s pieces, almost photo-realistic seen from a distance, have a beguiling simplicity with a mystery that’s all in the cropping. Fragmentation and editing make their mark on her works, which, despite the fine detail, lean toward the atmospheric.

Thickets, river side vistas or visions of clouded sky aspire to an appealingly deadpan poetry.

MEANWHILE, IN OJAI PROPER

At the Ojai Center for the Arts, Yoshihiro Youkee Nishida’s show of work colors the main gallery with a tasteful flamboyance.

Festive, large, ceremonial-like paintings on burlap accent the thick, rough surface of the material. Biomorphic blobs, bacterial imagery and sweeping abstract gestures prevail, but are contained within formal devices such as multiple panels or underlying grids.

Surprisingly, subtlety is the end result. Nishida creates a happy marriage of control and abandon.

NUDE/NAKED

Also at the Ojai Center are the nude studies of Elizabeth Ranelagh’s show, “The View Outside.” Her small, likably whimsical works show puffy, bulbous nudes lounging in natural--but dream-like--settings.

Gentle sexual allegories are the general rule, with one rare polemical note in “Second Fiddle,” in which a man plays a nude woman like a violin.

For further studies outside the realm of being clothed, head out to Ojai’s Artist’s Gallery, where you can find “Entirely Nude.” Following hot on the heels of the gallery’s successful erotic art show, they’ve decided to continue the trend and make clothing optional.

Notable works in this show include Bill Back’s bizarre cartoony scenes of extra-human figures, and Jacquelyn Cavish’s “Multiple Figures,” a twisted tangle of breasts and other body parts.

Nancy Whitman, normally fond of landscapes or interiors, shows an impressive, warm-hued portrait of a nude woman on a couch.

From the 3-D camp, Bryan Yancey’s relief sculpture “Big Red” cagily evokes a nude woman in chaps, and Frank Lauran’s “Standing Figure” is a cowboy constructivist figure that achieves a stone-like appearance from wood.

Mary Christie’s porcelain piece, “Divine Decadence,” is an ode to an ample red-headed model, reclining on pillows and entirely naked to the world, and loving it.

Details

* JANE SINCLAIR, “Image Scavenging,” through Feb. 25 at the New Media Gallery at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road, in Ventura; also, charcoal drawings by Sally Warner in Gallery 2; 654-6468.

* YOSHIHIRO YOUKEE NISHIDA and Elizabeth Ranelagh’s “The View Outside,” through February at the Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St.; 646- 0117.

* “ENTIRELY NUDE,” through March at the Artist’s Gallery, 319 E. El Roblar Drive,Ojai; 640-1387.