SIGHTS : Salvaging Scenic Beauty From an Urban Slag Heap : Paul Bridenbaugh’s paintings, on display at Ventura College, revel in commonplace slices of city life.

In the course of his work, San Francisco-based painter Paul Bridenbaugh stops to smell the roses and the fumes, and pay close attention to the banalities around him. The field reports he brings back in the form of subtle, casually observed paintings carry an implicit appreciation of a world normally blocked from view.

Bridenbaugh’s show of work at Ventura College’s New Media gallery revels in commonplace scenes of his urban environment, but not with a typical approach adopted by artists throwing themselves into the sidelines of the visible world. Peripheral slices of life, the sidelines of urban life, are his wont, whether painting views of fenced-off yards, industrial areas, parked cars or conspicuously dull overhead views of a city.

Are these anti-landscape paintings, paying attention to places that remain a blur for most motorists and urbanites? Or are they, rather, spurs to awareness, scraping bottom to find inspiration in unlikely locales? The answer is, probably, a bit of both.

Generally, Bridenbaugh avoids either glamorizing his subjects or resorting to blatant irony and postmodern kitschifying. The closest he comes to basking in nudge-nudge vernacular painting is “Smokin’ Joe,” a deliberately symmetrical view of wedged billboards, mobile homes in a neat row and a ’76 ball looming in a sky it shares with a Fuji blimp.

Commercial signposts vie for attention, by land and sky, to the point where the data becomes generalized and products melt into a purely visual puree of stimuli.

Unpopulated by human traffic, these scenes bear an uncanny resemblance to still-life studies, sometimes with a formal elegance behind the triviality. In “G4,” the composition-defining elements include oil barrels, a Hopper-esque building fragment and a shadowy dumpster, all conspiring toward a disarming sense of balance and, yes, beauty.

Dry whimsy rears its head with “Tonka”--toy work machines painted in a loose, affable style reminiscent of Bay Area painter Wayne Thiebaud’s pastries. At their best, Bridenbaugh’s paintings are about beauty and wonder salvaged from the slag heap.

UNDERGROUND, OVERGROUND

If Bridenbaugh takes care to maintain a cool, objective distance from his everyday subjects, James Graca’s darkly wry series of graphic, autobiographical vignettes in the college’s Gallery 2 deluge us with info, personal and social. Graca, who works as a commercial artist and teaches a class at the college, presents a glibly gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson-like perspective in the exhibit he calls “Symbols and Memories: The Light and Dark of Growing Up.”

Like Bridenbaugh, Graca takes his material from everyday life, through the distorting lenses of memory and personal attitude. But he has something to say about everyday life, and a manner of saying it that would be at home in underground comic books.

In one series of pieces, digitally collaged and meticulously crafted, he recounts various interactions with derelicts in Los Angeles and Europe, such as the case in Downtown L. A. when a woman, drunk and nude except for a Maytag box, fell on him, pinning his leg to the ground. “I seem to be a magnet for the psychotic iron filings of the world,” he reasons, deadpanning.

Growing up, in the case of this life story, swerves from a childhood of strange encounters with strange kids to the dulling horror of the Vietnam War. “War is the excrement of human potential,” he writes in “Warrior 1,” replete with a copy of the government telegram informing his mother that he had been wounded in battle.

After an interval of soul-searching, we plunge finally into the professional period of his life, as he navigates through an army of foolish, foppish P.R. guys, one of whose toupees catches on fire as he’s dining a certain “major star from the old TV version of ‘Star Trek.’ ”

These are the sorts of jaundiced observations that make up Graca’s work here. He chronicles and illustrates the grotesqueries of his own private existence, however embellished and fabricated, and the results are more smirk-worthy than laugh-out-loud funny.

A DOZEN AND COUNTING

It has been a dozen years since Santa Paula gallery owner John Nichols first started presenting art exhibits, focusing mainly on fine art photography. These days, his store/gallery is across the street from its original location, in a spacious, defrocked bank building with plenty of headroom.

Fittingly, his current group show features many of the photographers we have seen at Nichols’ gallery over the years, including Charles Spink, the first recipient of a one-person show there.

Spink’s work, a kind of intriguing back-room Surrealism involving merged imagery and charmingly funky stagings of found objects, can also be seen in the Assembly of the Arts exhibit.

Spink’s jury-rigged collages, which evoke the subtle idea worlds of Man Ray and Joseph Cornell, are less contrived than noted Surrealist photographer Jerry Uelsmann’s work--more the product of puttering around in the garage than playing with the senses. Thus, we find an appealing portrait of a shovel framed by boards and donning a coiffure of prunings.

Also notable in the show are the dark, apocryphal stagings of Mark Matthews, contrasting with the close-to-home glory of Ron Smith’s dramatic panoramic view of the agricultural splendor and wide-open space along Telegraph Road.

Some of the most striking photographs in the gallery are by the gallery owner, himself an artist with a vision. Nichols produces strangely fragile, quasi-archival images of common subjects, such as a boat and the Marlin Club on Catalina island, but with a sharp eye for quixotic atmosphere and cryptic composition.

GOVERNMENT WORK

Meanwhile, on the walls of the Ventura County Government Center’s Administration Building is a group show by Conejo Valley artists, consisting mostly of conventional pleasantries and confections. Little of the art here, however deftly realized, would disrupt the flow of public traffic or government work.

But some exceptions jump out, such as Susan Gerard’s alarmingly, endearingly clumsy paintings of primary-colored felines and delightfully mangled facial proportions in a self-portrait. Her brand of naivete is fetching.

Most impressive of all, though, are David Hartung’s photographs, which are hidden on a back wall and well worth seeking out. With his images from Hong Kong, Hartung works a beautiful balance of intimacy and unwieldy attention to details.

We are drawn into the decay and rickety plumbing of a public well, the almost palpably aromatic haze of incense in another shot, and the claustrophobic clutter of a workshop inhabited by a lone worker and two parakeets.

These are powerful images, evoking mystery while also paying heed to the role of real world reportage. As is often the case, you find the finest fine art in the strangest places.

Details

* NEW MEDIA: Paul Bridenbaugh and James Graca through March 3 at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road, Ventura; 654-6400, Ext. 1030.

* FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY: 12th annual Group Show through February at John Nichols Gallery, 901 E. Main St., Santa Paula; 525-7804.

* GROUP SHOW: Conejo Valley Artists, through March 1 in the Administration Building of the Ventura County Government Center, 800 S. Victoria Ave., Ventura; 654-3964.