O.C. Art : Natural Reactions to the ‘World’

Good intentions notwithstanding, we’ve gotten weary of art-as-lecture, art waggling its fault-finding finger and telling us how to behave. And yet there’s no reason art shouldn’t be poking its nose into socially relevant topics. It’s all a matter of tone and style.

For what may be her best show thus far, former Newport Harbor Art Museum assistant curator Marilu Knode (newly appointed curator of the unopened Huntington Beach Arts Center) has filled the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University with vivid and stimulating works about our increasingly tenuous relationship to the natural world.

“Urban Artists and the Natural World” (through Oct. 7) brings together 17 little-known, younger East and West Coast artists (including two from Orange County, Hoang Vu and Laurie Brown) who approach the theme with wit and a specifically visual panache. Their view of ecological disaster is often wryly distanced. Aware and troubled, they nevertheless are not in the business of offering blame or solutions. Rather, they offer fanciful personal reflections on a complex universe.

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Several works incorporate real objects from the natural world, with an emphasis on their fragile life and eventual decay.

Eva Mantell’s “Ombrella” is a portmanteau object, a mating of discarded plant and castoff umbrella; the roots of the plant form a handle and ribs and poke through the top of the cloth. The piece is a piquant reminder of the protective role of plants (feeding us, filtering carbon dioxide).

Allyson Hollingsworth’s untitled rose petal window coverings filter sunshine into a deep blush; in time they will fade and curl. The piece extends the concept of the ornamental rose window symbolic of the Virgin Mary in medieval cathedral facades--to a secular realm where the meaning of “purity” is much more elusive and diffuse.

Living and artificial plants cling to a metal bank vault door in Richard Stein’s tongue-in-cheek “Growth.” The plants trail upward in “growth curves” on the horizontals and verticals of the door, mimicking graphs of profit and loss. But how often do economic growth and nurture of the natural world intersect in real life?

Marcos Lutyens subjects tree branches to mock experiments seen through the hermetic seal of shrink wrap. In “Jump strt,” jumper cables attached to a branch wrapped with copper wire presumably are supposed to shock the deracinated twig into an impossible growth spurt. The plastic covering suggests both protectiveness and aloofness: nature endangered, yet alien.

Carol Selter’s photographs of animal specimens in zoology department offices--plopped next to coffee mugs or dangling from acoustic tiles--are testimony to indifference toward nature. More startling and pointed are her outdoor “calendar” scenes (“July, the Great Blue Heron”) in which stuffed dead creatures, posed in pleasant outdoor scenes, appear as cruelly deracinated, lifeless props.

In Jacqueline Dreager’s “Zoo (for Peter Greenaway),” a colony of snails is clustered on top of a map with penciled-in camping dates. Below, a long list of objects--from “pick ax” to “Korngold violin concerto”--suggests the innumerable tools and cultural ties that (in imagination, at least) accompany a camper attempting to carry his home on his back. (The title alludes to the British director’s film “Zed and two Naughts,” which proposes wry comparisons between human and animal life.)

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Several works involve substitutions of man-made objects for natural elements, indicative of nature-culture linkages and dichotomies in the late 20th Century.

“Outorowith,” KristaH’s luxurious, ivy-like thicket of printed circuit boards and colored wires falling to the floor from an air duct, suggests that computer technology offers a parallel to nature’s powerful drive to survive and multiply--and presumably also its continuous death and rebirth. (Dylan Thomas’ “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower . . .” come to mind.)

Hoang Vu’s graceful, wall-mounted net pieces contain such unlikely, unnatural elements as a cluster of weirdly protoplasmic buzzers and fuse boxes (“The Fish Net”). Pollution? Perhaps. But such a seemingly dubious “catch” might be prized in a Third World culture eager to capitalize on industrial castoffs.

Some of Jill Poyourow’s tiny embroideries on muslin copy the appearance of actual, disease-causing bacteria under the microscope. But her more elaborate patterns of dots and whorls are of “fictional germs,” recalling nature’s tendency to dress up its deadliest plants in the loveliest colors--and the mind’s habit of imagining the worst.

A couple of pieces in the show appear non-judgmental--or even positive--about human incursions on the natural world.

Roland Jack Nault’s installation “Out of the Wilderness”--a large model of a radio tower that emits flashes of “lightning”--offers a part-scientific, part-mystical view of radio as a fruitful use of natural forces. A photograph of a stormy sky and a tesla coil (creating the flashing effect) represent the power of electromagnetism in ways that appeal to romantic notions of nature’s mystery and power.

Laurie Brown’s groupings of silver prints make open-ended comparisons between the barren wastes of latter-day development sites and ancient ruins. In “Proscenium,” an abandoned box in the midst of a tire-marked tract is seen as a cultural sign, in some way comparable to the ruins of an amphitheater in three smaller photographs. What do we value, and how will future generations judge our values? Can one land use be intrinsically less worthy than another? Brown--like nearly all the other artists in the show--lets the viewer be the judge.

* “Urban Artists and the Natural World” continues through Oct. 7 at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Free. (714) 997-6729.