SIGHTS : Exhibit Puts 3-D Art in Favorable Light : The show at Art City Gallery in Ventura offers a range of sculptures--from the whimsical to the symbolic.

The Art City Gallery is Ventura’s equivalent of a cultural factory outlet.

Walk beyond the “City’s” fence and you’re greeted by evidence of art-making industry. Piles of precious stone are strewn about the yard, ready for the altering thwacks of chisels. Resident artists work with sculptures in various states of completion.

And the exhibition in the Art City Gallery, “Spring Exposure,” provides a neat and logical sense of closure to the experience of a visit. Sculptural work usually makes some presence in the shows put on in this gallery. This time around, the accent is on three-dimensional works and the variety of expressions possible under the heading.

Steve Giblin’s “Split,” if not the most striking piece in the show, may be the most symbolically and thematically fitting. In this definitive work-in-progress, a nude figure struggles to break free of the large slab holding her future. But that future, by conventional standards, has been canceled, frozen.

Even the few 2-D works lean toward physicality. John Forbes’ lunar-lit Cibachrome photographs exert an almost super-real presence. Craggy, snow-flecked mountain subjects in discriminating half-light tie in with the nature of the stone sculptures on view.

Alexandra Moroscos’ “Abstract Figure Studies,” too, resonate with the sculptural denizens in the gallery. They are rough-hewn, gnarled, improbable anatomies.

Her impressive construction “Skins” is a study-in-contrasts. Dried pieces of animal hide, hung from a rusty metal apparatus, hold an amorphous hunk of marble resembling a slab of meat. Beyond the odd sensuality of its materials, the piece registers as an indictment of the meat industry.

Animals--and suggestions thereof--figure into other works here, including Matt Harvey’s relief piece, “Yard Dog II,” a whimsical mutt image in mosaic form, and Frank Lauran’s “Light at the Bottom of the Sea,” whose sculptural tentacles take on a loony evocation of undersea life.

Human figures arrive in varying states. Kim Harvey’s “Dreamer” is a distorted, slender nude, lyrically rendered, while Paco Robles’ “Grandfather” is a figure reduced to featureless geometric modules.

Scott Donadio’s “Calvin” contains a strange power of appeal, with its rough, stacked marble slabs piled into a twisted hint of a figurative, gravity-defying form.

Relegated to the back of the room--actually, the most highlighted spot in the gallery--we find a selection of works by Doug Lipton, Ventura’s Found Object King. Lipton, no doubt a frequenter of old-town Ventura’s famed thrift shop-antique-junk row, is wont to collect gaudy “found” materials and enshrine them in artworks, often deploying cheesy puns to complete the picture.

Lipton’s shrine, in this case, centers around a large painted panel, the quasi-erotic “Zebagirls” (like something out of the credits of a James Bond movie). “Gam Vases,” flower vases made out of overturned, black-stocking-clad mannequin legs, flanks the panel, along with chintzy furniture refinished and bequeathed with importance by association.

Another kind of leg--a prosthetic one, holding a blue light bulb--is the main object in “Artificialite.” Cleverness and resourcefulness are their own rewards here. As he often does, Lipton gives new meaning and new life to the word cheap .

The Art City Gallery is a unique and ever-inviting enclave in the area’s wavering art scene. Literally off-the-beaten-path, nestled against the Ventura River on the city’s outskirts, the gallery remains one of Ventura’s most valuable subcultural suburbs.

BANKING ON IT

Painter Carlisle Cooper’s works--skewed portraits of government and religious leaders, hunters, soldiers, romantic views of artists and poets, and spacey, kitschy abstractions--are scattered liberally throughout the Ventura County National Bank in Oxnard.

Viewed as a dizzying whole, the artist’s work sends out wildly mixed messages. Such paintings as “The Prince” and other portraits of iconic authority figures whose surfaces are smudged and blurred seem to dethrone and demystify men of importance.

But his sickly palette and tendency to emulate stained-glass window or papier-mache effects link him more closely to Leroy Neiman than Francis Bacon.

On a more blatantly bothersome note, paintings of the artist with a model are downright creepy, sullied by unseemly macho posturing (or did we miss the satirical element again?) The artist is seen as a gallant poetic warrior, gazing reflectively into the distance, while his nude model stares with a come-hither look.

Another small work is a portrait of a “Girl Surfer,” although it sure looks like a woman to me.

A much less ambivalent response is generated by Emil Lazarevich’s crudely charming sculptures. These chunky miniatures mimic the effects and physical properties of concrete as well as sand castle-architecture, a connection made literal in “Shore Figures and Jetsam.”

Details

* WHAT: “Spring Exposure.”

* WHERE: Art City Gallery, 31 Peking St., Ventura.

* WHEN: Through May.

* ETC.: Call 648-5241.

* WHAT: Paintings by Carlisle Cooper, sculpture by Emil Lazarevich.

* WHERE: Through Aug. 12.

* WHEN: Ventura County National Bank, 500 Esplanade Drive, Oxnard.

* ETC.: Call 981-2600.