Weaving New Life Into Everyday ObjectsMetaphors in ‘Fabrication’

The Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University has becomeOrange County’s unofficial center for forward-looking contemporary art. The latest fresh idea from the gallery is “FABRICATION: formal, found and funky” (through April 20). Curated by Maggie Owens, the show highlights the ways 15 artists are using fabric to score formal points in an informal manner and cook up witty metaphors while they’re at it.

Some of the artists do odd things to canvas hung on the wall in the traditional way, others paint on more unusual surfaces (a Mylar blanket, cheap upholstery), and still others press into service fabric swatches, a pillow, bed sheets, couches or a long swath of chiffon.

By using everyday, sometimes downright ratty materials, the artists create new visual vocabularies that remake the world in a variety of piquant and allusive ways.

Linda Burnham revisits the idea of fabric in small untitled paintings in which enlarged plaid and houndstooth patterns join classic imagery from signs and cartoons (pointing index fingers, an empty “thought balloon”) and blobs of latex. These oddly appealing arrangements create a parallel universe in which symbols, woven forms and hardened pools of liquid become mysterious co-conspirators.

Equally pleasurable in a more visceral way, Randy Wray’s untitled paintings contain such unlikely objects as looped braids of fake hair, a crescent of fake fur, decoratively arranged corn plasters, cigarette-butt mandalas, “lace” made of string and swarms of tiny paint bumps.

These concoctions differ in one major respect from the projects kids make with dried pasta (another Wray ingredient): They are wry remakes of the abstract-painting tradition. Wray can coax aggressive vigor or lyrical sweetness with his ungainly resources, proving that the old hierarchies of art media matter far less than the eternal lure of pattern and design.

Laura Paddock muses on the thin line between art and artlessness in “After Gainsborough,” in which blobs of paint and encaustic on velvet and silk scraps reduce the 18th-Century English painter’s lustrous portraits of well-born women in natural settings to vague ghost images.

Paddock’s paintings also recall a passage in the photo-reproduction of Gainsborough’s writings that serves as a backdrop. Amid invocations of the beauties of nature (“the swallow in her airy course”) and complaints about his sitters (“people like froth”), the artist celebrates his own mastery of “grand form under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence.”

From the sublime to the sublimated, Steven Hurd (“Fringe in a Flash”) veils a scene of housebound debauchery in a thicket of drips. The focal point of Hurd’s painting of a sunlit living room is a table filled with empty bottles of Old English 800 malt liquor. Emblazoned with a phrase from a package of self-stick fabric trim, this scene links the overkill of cheap booze with the overkill of tacky decor. Both soften the painful clarity of the real world with false reassurances.

M. A. Peers uses a patchwork of odd-sized pieces of well-used upholstery as the “bed” for a painting of a luscious-looking Irish setter in “Big Red.” Is this a tricky way of making a contemporary sensibility fall for one of the hoariest of art cliches, a painting of a dog? Well, yeah. By painting on pieces of old couches--the dog’s own homey habitat--Peers short-circuits the distance between art and life and paradoxically teaches an old dog of a subject a new trick.

Conversely, Tad Savinar deflates lofty concepts in “Race and Gender,” a goofy silk-screened image of a horse and cow embracing on a fake wood-grain background. By reducing two of the killer topics of contemporary art to the banalities of commercial playroom decor, Savinar skewers the sound-bite rhetoric that often takes the place of serious discourse.

Steve DeGroodt and Carter Potter both invoke modern-art verities in tongue-in-cheek ways. DeGroodt rings funky changes on Mondrian’s grid, using such materials as folded swatches of orange cloth, wadded-up plastic bags and an object reminiscent of a kitchen organizer. Carter Potter’s elegant recombination of two sofas (“Bauhaus”) combines an unerring sense of design with an amused look at the way high Modernist strictures have come to dominate the middle-class household.

Laura Cooper is the poet of the group, turning bed sheets into large, soft sculptures, gently buoyed by air currents. “Flutter,” a hanging stack of drooping sheets layered with air, evokes the fluttering eyelids of the sleep-deprived and the gentle release of sinking into bed.

Other work is by Desiree Alvarez, Carole Caroompas, Kim Dingle, David Grant, Steven Seemayer and T. J. Wilcox. Art critic Michael Anderson contributes a cogent essay, available as a free handout.

* “FABRICATION: formal, found and funky,” through April 20 at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Hours: Noon to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Free. (714) 997-6729. *

If ever an exhibition represented a labor of love, it is “Greek Legacy,” curated by Greek-born Irini Vallera-Rickerson, director of the Orange Coast College Art Gallery in Costa Mesa.

Her intensive research and persistent courting of donors both in Greece and California have resulted in a two-venue show (also at the Decorative Arts Study Center in San Juan Capistrano) that includes vividly ornamental weavings and embroideries, intricately filigreed silver objects, flamboyant ceremonial masks, somber icons, furniture, musical instruments, puppets and other examples of 19th- and 20th-Century Greek folk art.

This sampler is visually appealing and significant in an age when folk arts largely have been replaced or hugely modified by Western pop culture. Borrowing motifs from the natural world as well as from the realms of magic, mythology, religion and politics, centuries of Greek villagers imbued everyday objects with beauty and spiritual values.

The special charm of the show stems from the way Vallera-Rickerson uses the objects to recall the ambience of village life, from the broad historical and cultural context she invokes in the wall texts and catalogue, and from her vital personal connection to the material.

More than 2,000 years after Homer told the story of faithful Penelope--secretly undoing her weaving project at night to avoid being married off to a suitor while awaiting the return of her husband, the wandering Odysseus--weaving was still a major occupation of Greek women.

Crafts were intimately connected to the life of the Greek islands. Ostentation was rejected--even in jewelry, where glass was more common than precious stones--in favor of skilled detail work. Colors came from natural dyes, evoking the hues of cypress trees, daisies, poppies, the sea and sky, and the bright yellow orb of the sun.

Weaving motifs, embroidery patterns and the carved designs on wood objects replicated the shapes of indigenous flowers and vines, animals and fish, as well as geometric figures. The double-headed eagle was a holdover from the Byzantine Empire, a symbol of its vigilance over a far-reaching domain.

Working-class Greek values also illuminated the Greek shadow-puppet theater. The main character, Karaghiozis, was homely and ragged, portrayed variously as a brave and clever super-hero or a bumbling, jealous man. Vallera-Rickerson writes that the rare female characters were uniformly weak and foolish.

At Orange Coast, brightly painted walls, rustic details and architectural mock-ups--the chapel-like area where the icons are displayed; a shadow-puppet “theater”--give the gallery a folkloric flavor.

The Decorative Arts center contains a cozy bedroom typical of Crete and a simple living room with furnishings from the Epirus region of northern Greece. Outdoors, a typical garden--planted with flax, aromatic rosemary and lavender, and olive and pepper trees--thrives alongside a small shed whitewashed to look like a Greek house.

With attention to detail that doesn’t bog down in specialist lore, these installations--produced on a shoestring budget, with student and volunteer help--offer a cultural introduction that piques the senses.

* “Greek Legacy” is at Orange Coast College Art Gallery (through April 20) and the Decorative Arts Study Center (through June 10). Orange Coast: 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Hours: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Thursday (also 7 to 8:30 p.m. on April 17, and every Thursday). Free. (714) 432-5039. Decorative Arts: 31431 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Hours: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. $3. (714) 496-2132.