URBAN ART : Boxing Memorabilia

Steve Champeau was looking for just the right “Hallmark message,” as he puts it, for his father’s birthday last year, but he couldn’t find one. So he put black and red pens to paper and cut out images and letters from newspapers to create a card with a “ransom-note quality.”

“It was meant to be disturbing and it succeeded,” Champeau says. “People don’t expect something strange on their birthday.” But his father loved it.

Then, as his sister’s birthday approached, Champeau began work on “the box”: a black, 9 1/2x11 1/2-inch wooden container with one glass side. Mapping out an elaborate layered design on a computer, he then filled the box with pieces of old magazines, out-of-print books, Art Deco catalogues, maps, family photographs, all nestled in layers of painted cardboard and paper.

The combination of images is surreal. Some are about his sister, Rachel: a tiny piece of a Paris map (where Rachel studied); old black-and-white photographs of cacti (her favorite plants); a passage from the Old Testament referring to the life of Rachel. But other items are a mystery even to her: a silver dollar nestled under intricately cut paper, the bloodied face of a man, rats in a laboratory, an American Indian.

“To create a weird contrast,” Champeau says, “I find things that may be linked to each other, but are different.”

When someone commissions a box, Champeau asks them for personal items, and then combines these with his own impressions. “I put something of myself in whatever I do. In my own work, I have personal themes--gender issues, liberation of the spirit.”

He’s looking for a gallery to display his work, which might make him sound like the archetypal struggling artist. He’s not. A UC Berkeley graduate in civil engineering, Champeau, who lives in Sunland, works for the state’s Office of Emergency Services mapping and analyzing data from last fall’s fires in Altadena. He is also completing his master’s thesis in geography at Cal State L.A.

For Champeau, each new piece is an an adventure. “It’s like keeping one foot in an orderly world, and stepping into another one that’s strange.”