O.C. Art Reviews : Exhibitions Wander Through Once-Taboo Territory

A postcard announces a new gallery specializing in “art of an intimate and personal nature: the beautiful and disturbing, art of the fantastic, oddities and grotesqueries.” A press release heralds another show called “The New Degenerates.” An envelope disgorges a catalogue for still another, titled “Nasty.”

Gloomy, peculiar and darkly provocative art has always been with us, but recently it seems to be surfacing more often in galleries--both fringe and mainstream--as well as in science-fiction comics, CD covers and youthful ‘zines.

At the moment, at least two Orange County art shows, both in Santa Ana, are poking around once-taboo territory. (“Nasty,” at Stuart Katz’s Loft in Laguna Beach, was reviewed previously.)

In the age of AIDS, it’s tempting to draw parallels with the Middle Ages, when plague mowed down whole populations and grotesque demons and emaciated saints populated church carvings. Medieval flagellants tortured themselves with whips; today, youth culture has embraced piercings in private parts of the body, tattoos, scarification and even experiments in bondage.

The flagellants, who lived in a culture of material deprivation and short life spans, were asserting the Christian primacy of spirit over flesh. But today’s self-torturers--adrift in a vapid, undemanding culture and faced with diminished career and lifestyle expectations--seem to welcome pain as proof of their ability to feel anything at all.

Variants of the same ironic, detached mood haunt heavy metal’s apocalyptic scenarios, grunge’s nihilistic, affectless rants and techno’s hypnotic sound assault.

The art in “DarkVision,” the inaugural show at Dark’s Art Parlour in Santa Ana (through May 15), is heavily involved with intense views of sex, the occult, death, disease, mutilation, deformity and, yes, even loneliness. Despite some cynicism about commercial culture, this is utterly apolitical art, concerned with interior worlds of personal fantasy.

Gallery founders Rochelle Phister and Gomez Flores (who uses only his first name) chose the 95 works in the show--by 80 artists from 20 states--from submissions received from around the country. (To get the attention of fledgling artists who are out of the art-competition loop, Phister said, they also ran an ad in Mean Street, an alternative-music magazine.)

Displayed against black-painted walls, the paintings, photographs, prints, assemblages and sculptures are overwhelmingly introverted and, if not downright painful or gloomy, at least weird or wistful.

Some are fuzzily amateurish, while others (like K.D. Matheson’s huge, eye-poppingly detailed painting, “Lord of the Flies”) are technically accomplished but seem too naively wrapped up in monster lore. Still, a few works combine technical finesse with emotional resonance or irony.

Anne Arden MacDonald poses herself in precarious positions within cavernous abandoned settings. One photograph, set in a vast barn, shows MacDonald swinging in a blurred, ecstatic arch from ropes binding her wrists. Flirting with self-inflicted pain, she appears to find a dream-like release.

In another image by MacDonald, an urban panorama is visible from within a huge garage that dwarfs the artist’s nearly naked body, lying under a huge jagged-toothed contraption suspended from the ceiling. A “Perils of Pauline” quality somewhat undercuts the image, which seems implicitly to compare a self-induced horrific private encounter with the pervasive yet hidden threats of city life.

Then there’s a bunch of unclassifiable stuff: Jefferson Steele’s photograph, “Terror-Eyes,” a blurred, bug-eyed face that looks sort of like Howdy Doody in a terrorist mode; and Nancy Nainis Garguilo’s “Jenny Craig on Ice,” a toy pink refrigerator stocked with tiny jars filled with crumpled towels bearing images of the diet queen.

John Brooks Gray evokes the moody self-consciousness of the early 20th-Century Pictorialist photographers in “Prosthesis,” a silver print of a nude, long-haired man plugged into a gleaming, unidentifiable metal contraption.

Robert Stolzer takes a matter-of-fact view of the macabre in “Juggling Heads,” a tiny box holding a painting of a headless figure with a tidy constellation of airborne heads.

In a deadpan vein, James Mitchell Clark proposes a singular messenger of death in “The Visitor,” a silver print of a bloody-faced fellow in a pajama top who holds skeletons in both hands as he stands behind the seated figure of a stupefied elderly woman.

Conversely, perhaps the chief fascinations of Jacob Leonard’s “Embryonic Death”--a skeletal, distorted image of a woman crisscrossed by bloody entrails, is its seat-of-the-pants ingenuity in using wadded paper towels.

Much of the extreme imagery in the show seems awkward, however, despite (or because of) its obvious earnestness. The most difficult thing, particularly for isolated, inexperienced artists, is finding an unhackneyed way to couch fantasies and fears.

*

Down the street, at the Caged Chameleon Gallery, “The New Degenerates” (through May 15) gathers 143 works from 18 Orange County artists. (The heavily ironic press release, which trumpeted the obligation of “responsible adults” to save themselves “from a future of subversive art, music, theater and thought,” actually elicited a few phone calls from ultraconservatives eager to clean up the county’s artistic profile, co-owner Richard Espinachio says.)

Compared with “DarkVision,” this show is much less focused, encompassing Emigdio Vasquez’s studiously realistic portraits of famous subversives (including Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm X and Che Guevara) as well as Cornelius O’Leary’s utterly absurd “Pubic’s Cube,” a Rubik’s cube filled with snips of human hair. Once again, many seemingly earnest attempts rely on passe styles or are too overbearing or inchoate.

Happily, there are a few exceptions.

Steven Veatch invokes a domestic world at war (Belfast? Belgrade?) in his oblique yet unnerving paintings of red-splotched figures with an oddly dated look--a couple in their evening finery, a bunch of guys hanging out--who appear to be under attack by sniper fire or bomb blasts.

Sylvia Bass’ “Pottage” is a child’s potty chair inscribed with a quotation from the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the meek . . . “) and outfitted with four ominous leather straps to encircle tiny wrists and ankles. (The title wickedly combines scatology with an allusion to the stew the Bible says Esau received in exchange for his birthright.)

Another of Bass’ unusual commentaries on child abuse is a children’s lamp she reworked so that the figure of a policeman directing a little boy and girl across the street sports a toy elephant trunk just above his legs.

Rochelle Phister’s mixed-media piece on cotton, “Miscalculating the Cure,” vividly portrays physical pain with an image of a man’s nails raking bloody lines in his back.

By combining the low-key effect of graphite (there’s not a speck of color in the entire piece) with the demure physicality of lines sewn with a needle and thread, Phister gets away with the shock value of ramming a real fish hook through the man’s hand.

Other works stand out simply for their visual beguilements. Ken Ruzik’s spiky, serpentine paintings of Tantric sex and other private rituals employ some of the linear effects of Indian miniature painting.

Gomez’s brightly colored, delicately linear, Surrealism-meets-pop culture paintings are delicious little treats. In “Song From Under the Floorboards,” a diva with a pink head in the shape of a gas mask and tiny pointed teeth sings into an old-fashioned recording device, to which she is attached by a plastic cord bizarrely issuing from under her bouffant dress.

Incidentally, this show is the final one in the Caged Chameleon’s present location. In early July, it will move to a 2,500-square-foot site with a performance space and a courtyard, at 1519 Main St., a short walk from Dark’s Art Parlour.

Both galleries are run as labors of love by artists who hold outside jobs. The owners keep sale prices and dealer commissions low enough to make up for the unknown and uneven quality of the art (mostly well below $1,000 at Dark’s and less than $250 at the Caged Chameleon).

Espinachio says he views the proximity of both galleries as the beginning of a grass-roots Santa Ana art district. And that’s exactly how such things happen: not by political fiat or marketing wizardry, but by people with a passion for art, pals who can donate plumbing and carpentry skills, and a dedication to serving the people in their own neighborhood, whatever their economic or social circumstances.

* “DarkVision” remains through May 15 at Dark’s Art Parlour, 1405 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Hours: noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 8 p.m. Friday. Free. (714) 647-9733.

* “The New Degenerates” continues through May 15 at the Caged Chameleon Gallery, 2103 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Hours: 3-7 p.m. Thursday and Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Free. (714) 836-5137.