SIGHTS : Show Capitalizes on Animal Instincts : There’s plenty of cuddly creatures and sinewy beasts among the sculptures, but not much from the 20th Century.

When faced with a generic, umbrella title like “Sculpture from Ventura County Collections,” one has to fight off the temptation to make generic, umbrella assumptions. And you know what happens when you assume things.

Looking at the large sampling of sculpture now crowded into the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, the observer might leap to conclusions about the general profile of collectors in this area. For one, they’re animal-lovers. Cuddly animals and sinewy beasts are everywhere.

We also find plenty of figurative pieces based on religious and mythological subjects, and artifacts from the Far East and Indonesia. Cowboys wrasslin’ horses is another popular theme.

And another thing: Sculptors seem to shy away from anything abstract, conceptual or ironic. Apart from renowned German Kathe Kollwitz’s “Farewell,” a small bronze depicting a couple melting into an expressionistic embrace, the 20th Century seems all but evicted from the room.

By its very nature, this show is a hodgepodge, a testament to the variety of interests among collectors in the area. One wishes, in a sense, that it could be even more diverse, reflecting a broader swath of what the term sculpture means in the late 20th Century.

Overall, one of the more appealing pieces in the show is a large wooden bird, with its form deconstructed and distorted, and rendered symbolic, by an anonymous African sculptor. We can trace the influence of this primitive art on the evolution of 20th-Century western art, from Cubism forward. It’s the kind of abstract art notably missing from this lot.

Amid the generally polite spread of the exhibition, Eduardo H. Xochitiotzin’s “Los Jenetes” (“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”) practically screams and leaps. A tangled mass of rusted welded steel, the piece makes for an almost threatening presence.

This is in stark contrast to the horse business of Frederic Remington’s “Bronco Buster” or John Strickenberg’s “The Sunfisher”--all portraying agitated horses and cowboys playing hero. The tables turn with Sid Burns’ “Spooked,” in which an agitated airborne horse is about to land on a grim, scrunch-faced cowpoke.

Bringing it all back home to Ventura County, we find a pint-size version, by C. Kubilos, of the Father Junipero Serra statue, which stands imperiously (and imperialistically?) in front of the Ventura City Hall. Serra, of course, is not a universally beloved symbol of California history, no more than this show is the final word on the art and texture of Ventura County art collecting.

As long as that’s understood, this is an enjoyable light feast of a show. Especially if you love animals.

SPEAKING OF CITY HALL

“A Touch of Ventura” is the name of the art exhibit upstairs at City Hall, and the group show boasts imagery of interest to fans of art and/or Ventura.

Of notable local color, Cynthia Bates’ scene outside Pierano’s Grocery is painted with a loose hand, and with attention to stark light and shadows raking their way across the composition.

In contrast with the more conventional, identifiable scenes, Sally Miller’s “Morning in Santa Paula” is an evocative creek-side image with spindly eucalyptus trees dividing the canvas. Nicole Erd’s “Anacapa Island” is a dark, smudgy landscape choked in purple, like an oblique tribute to Monet’s haystacks.

Barbara Newman stirs up wistful Americana in her watercolor “Piru Pump,” with its lonely archival gas pump gathering dust in post-war Anytown, USA.

In Ventura County, life and art and collecting go on.

Details

* FYI: “Sculpture from Ventura County Collections,” through July 17 at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St. in Ventura; 653-0323. “A Touch of Ventura,” through June at Ventura City Hall, 501 Poli St., Ventura; 658-4755.