ART REVIEW : Fashioning a Fresher Perspective : The three best installations in ‘Symbolic Garments’ at Cypress College incorporate clothes into non-costumey, non-fussy works.

Clothing has had a checkered history in contemporary Western art: When the work isn’t goofy “wearable art,” it tends to be a passive tribute to the garments of non-Western cultures, a fussily stylized assemblage, or a stage costume that’s hard to appreciate out of context.

But three of the seven bodies of work in “Symbolic Garments,” at Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery through Tuesday, make this uneven show worth a visit. Kerrie Peterson, Suvan Geer and Kim Abeles have come up with several fresher ways of incorporating garment structures into works of art.

Peterson’s black linen dresses for famous artists’ sculptures are lovely, amusing and engagingly feminist. Shown on streamlined metal stands, “Standing Woman ((Alberto) Giacometti)” is tiny-shouldered, with a wasp waist and a pencil-slim, super-long skirt, while “Standing Woman ((Gaston) Lachaise)” is cut with an ample bosom, wide armholes and a broad swath of material gathered around the hips.

By viewing the Swiss and French sculptors’ typical female forms as if they were real women who would need appropriate clothing, Peterson gently reminds the viewer of the range of “acceptable” body types in art. The same era that fostered rule-shattering modernism in art also spawned a dictatorial world of fashion, in which “basic black” was de rigueur , and women’s body types were either in or out of vogue.

In Geer’s installation, “A Little Breathing Room,” a “coat” fashioned of tree bark wraps around a faintly ominous thick black spill, like the aftermath of a fire, that wends its way down the wall and onto the floor. A tattered black fan whirs slowly and silently inside the garment, as if the life force inside the wounded tree were still faintly beating.

The hum of a floor fan and the sound of airplanes nearly drown out the elusive, whispering voice that issues from inside the coat: “Solitude . . . bullfrog’s throat . . . small waves raised by the evening wind . . . this is a delicious evening . . .”

The extreme attentiveness required of viewers is akin to the delicate watchfulness that transforms a casual walk in nature into a series of tiny discoveries; the frustration level seems designed to mirror the tension between nature’s cycle and human impatience after such natural disasters as last fall’s Laguna Beach fire.

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Abeles has several pieces in the show, including “Cocktail Shirts,” two demure cocktail dresses made out of scorched men’s shirts--presumably botched by some tippling housewife.

The piece suggests various contrasts between public and private behavior: the well-documented secret alcoholism of women versus the social drinking encouraged at the “cocktail hour”; and the rigid 1950s household caste system according to which married women’s lives were largely concerned with household tasks and serving as ornamental appendages in public.

Combining elements of a kimono with a weathered clock and hanging fabric swatches representing time cards, Abeles’ “Sweatshop Down the Hall and Sometimes It’s Me” links traditional Japanese garments with the U.S. garment industry, infamous for abuses of immigrant workers.

The rigorous symmetry of this meditation on immigrant labor and the structure of a life also suggests the ironies of leaving one highly structured culture for the lock-step culture of another.

* “Symbolic Garments” remains through Tuesday at Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery (Room 114 of the Fine Arts building), 9200 Valley View St., Cypress. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday; 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays. Free. (714) 826-5593.