ART REVIEW : Faculty Show Is a Grade Above the Others

Faculty art shows often seem unsatisfying, mostly because people get hired to teach art for all sorts of reasons that may not have much to do with the power and freshness of their own current work. But during the past few years, under Catherine Lord’s leadership, the art department at UC Irvine has made a point of hiring artists as visiting or permanent faculty who are fairly bursting with ideas.

Although “FACULTY/STAFF: NEW WORK,” at the UCI Fine Arts Gallery through April 30, has its share of pieces that seem didactic or just plain puzzling, it probably is the best--and certainly the most generously eclectic--faculty art show I’ve ever seen in Orange County. (Actually, the show encompasses not only art department faculty but also the technical staff, the people who run the labs in sculpture, photography, video and so forth, as well as the gallery itself.)

My favorite pieces in the show--by Mara Lonner, Young Soon Min, Steve Criqui, Jacci Den Hartog, Judie Bamber and Renee Petropoulos--have strong visual presence as well as conceptual twists that are rooted in aspects of contemporary life. Shelby Roberts’ work is more straightforward, yet its tinkerer’s delight in basic materials has an irresistible appeal.

Lonner’s “Screen” is a screen door on which the image of a formal gate with floral motifs has been “embroidered” in 32-gauge wire. The winsome-looking piece is actually intriguingly complex: It merges a traditionally upper-class female sewing skill with a mass-produced object sold in hardware stores, and the resulting hybrid involves such diverse topics as the expressive content of design and the home as a semipermeable fortress.

By superimposing the image of an ornamental physical barrier for trespassers (the gate) on a real barrier for flies (the screen door), and by subverting the viewer’s expectations of the scope and materials appropriate either to mass production or an embroidery project, Lonner underlines the idea of “screens” of all kinds as arbitrary mental constructs.

Visually, the piece is absolutely enchanting, with a delicately uneven, “handmade” look, reinforcing the notion of design as personal expression within a social context that determines the range of permissible forms, and how their encoded information is understood. (Floral imagery on even the most formidably constructed gate conveys a polite welcome.)

In a related but different vein, Min’s gateway piece, “Passing,” consists of layered strips of metal “curtain” (mimicking the fabric partitions in a traditional Asian home) that viewers must slide through or push aside to get from one part of the gallery to another.

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Each curtain strip is inscribed on either side with contrasting phrases that serve as labels for the mirror images of viewers moving through the piece. Whatever their political motivation, these phrases mostly reflect one-dimensional images and stereotypes: “Model minority” and “dragon lady” versus “lesbian” and “radical social materialist.” Various meanings of passing are at the heart of the work: “Going by without noticing,” “Satisfying given requirements,” and “Being barely acceptable as a substitute.” Passing --for members of minority and majority groups alike--inevitably means fitting into some predetermined mold rather than being accepted as a unique and perhaps contradictory individual.

Criqui’s painting “Temporal Garden” merges abstraction and popular culture in a way that has become his sprightly trademark. Brightly colored overlapping abstract forms resembling stoplights, billboards and movie tickets form an urban “landscape” against a swath of blue sky. The luscious piece of scalloped yellow plastic that serves as a frame is reminiscent of a fast-food restaurant sign; you practically expect it to revolve.

Using digital technology, Criqui reveals another side of his blend of the quotidian and the self-consciously “artistic” by transforming small photos of bland architecture into cultural jokes. A ridiculously arbitrary floating pole and bushes that float in midair like abstract blocks of texture give an innocuous suburban house facade the deadpan aura of a Magritte painting.

Den Hartog’s gloppy rubber and plaster pieces look almost like something made with one of those deliberately “disgusting” kits marketed to children fascinated by human excretions. But the artist uses the oozing effects to supply alternative versions of all sorts of unlikely things, as in “Chinese Landscape With Spring and Summer Foliage.”

Protruding from the gallery wall just inches above the floor, the piece is a compact blob of yellowish hills and crevices covered with a dripping blanket of green--a wonderfully bizarre cross between the generalized look of distant landscape in a traditional Chinese painting and the effects of certain types of glazing in traditional Chinese ceramics.

Bamber’s big subject is sexual warfare. In her satirical cartoon-like watercolor “How Do You Give a Woman an Orgasm? Who Cares,” a saucy, tiny nude in stockings, high heels and long gloves is shown accommodating her booted male lover, being scolded by a wagging male forefinger for perusing Playboy magazine, getting the short end of the wishbone when she dreams of acquiring a penis, and ultimately falling asleep by herself. As in her oil paintings, which usually contain miniaturized objects in vast empty spaces, Bamber uses scale to emphasize pain, indifference and subjugation.

Petropoulos’ tantalizing small circular paintings are titled with men’s or women’s names, but the “portraits” turn out to be mostly images of mutated headgear. “Frank” is a mortarboard piled high with unidentifiable red fruit; “Samantha” is a red and green chef’s toque. If these hats are keys to their sitters’ identities, what do they tell us? Is someone’s job, education, diet or nationality (red and green are common flag colors) an accurate measure of who the person is? Or do we just unthinkingly believe that?

The charm of Roberts’ pieces derives from being made entirely of stuff you can buy in a hardware store: peg board, hooks, C-clamps. “Bird,” which flaps its huge jigsaw-cut hardboard wings when you tug on a penknife attached by a string, is suspended from the ceiling next to an untitled pegboard piece sporting an octagonal wood frame that looks like a birdhouse opening, and a scattering of hooks resembling perches.

Some of the other work in the show, such as Andrew Freeman’s photo-and-text piece “North and South,” is intriguing without seeming quite resolved. Images of featureless landscape, ugly apartment complexes and a truck stop accompany Freeman’s musings about the conjunction of speed, daydreaming, familiar roadside objects, commuting and freeway accidents. Couched in more accessible, more precise language, these thoughts might be less elusive.

Although several works are problematic in one way or another, the biggest disappointment comes from the artist with the biggest reputation, Daniel J. Martinez, whose installation “The Sport of Kings and Queens” consists of a white mannequin head wearing a dreadlocked wig and a knit cap, a graduated stack of myriad bottles and glasses holding a thick white liquid, and paintings on velvet of the English royal couple.

The “sport of kings” is horse racing, and the containers presumably are 3-D representations of blood line diagrams for racehorses--in which all the “blood” is white. The point seems to be that the unofficial sport of European royalty is subjugating nonwhite peoples while borrowing aspects of their culture at will (as the mannequin does). Unless this reading misstates the point of the piece, it seems a lifeless, over-literal restatement of an unfortunate historical truth.

The show also embraces the diverse sensibilities of Judy Baca, Karen Carson, Eva Cockcroft, Jane Cottis, John Di Stephano, Cecilia Dougherty, Karin Higa, Tom Jenkins, Ulysses Jenkins, Betty Lee, Eve Luckring, Gifford Myers, Catherine Opie, Connie Samaras, Joseph Santarromana, Lisa Schoyer, Jerome Thomas, Anne Walsh, Pat Ward Williams and John White.

* “FACULTY/STAFF: NEW WORK” continues through April 30 at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery in the campus Fine Arts Village off Bridge Road. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturday s. Free. (714) 856-6610.