SIGHTS : ‘Naked and the Nude’ Exhibit Proves Looks Can Be Deceiving : Sky Bergman’s photographs at the Carnegie Art Museum show classical sculpture in a new and revealing light.

Prepare to be fooled and have perceptions altered when visiting Sky Bergman’s exhibition at the Carnegie Art Museum. Stone becomes flesh, art from one medium is molded into art of another, and the photographer slyly crosses over archetypal boundaries. But she is less a prankster- provocateur than an explorer.

With an exhibition title as loaded as “The Naked and the Nude,” an implicit message comes across before we even absorb the visuals. Sexual politics seems to be rearing its head.

However, Bergman’s agenda is more complex. With these photographs of classically ordered sculptures, mostly from the 19th Century, she celebrates older, figurative sculpture while also bathing it in the skewed light of post-modernist irony. This is art about art, and art about flesh.

While the images are reproductions of patently still, frozen artworks, Bergman is after revitalization. The sinew and sensuousness of forms are brought alive with sensitive lighting and especially with the expressive, discriminating focus of Bergman’s editing eye. By meticulous attention to cropping, the details enliven the sculptures, suggesting life force by what is omitted.

Bergman began this series innocently enough when she photographed Rodin’s sculpture. In so doing, she sensed the germ of a concept, which led her to various museums around the world.

Taking these sculptures out of a strictly reportorial context, Bergman creates a new context of her own. She examines the serene, reflective atmosphere of museums in a way analogous to the pristine photographs of dusty, defrocked museums by Santa Barbara-based photographer Richard Ross in his noted “Museology” series. Ross, however, shows more of an interest in the fake archeology and grungy elegance of back rooms, while Bergman seems intent on breathing life into museum-bound objects.

The point of transcending a purely documentary function is made by Bergman’s refusal to identify or name her photographs.

One of the most striking images is No. 5, a dramatic, large piece in which a woman’s upper torso and benevolent face are seen from a low angle. Brushed by flattering, contour-defining shadows, she appears to be just short of a saint, just short of a nymph.

Other distinctly human traits and follies emerge in the show. In No. 150, a close-up of a young man, head in his palm, embodies a state of contemplation. The fleshy folds of an infant conform into an ideal of innocence in No. 121, abstracted by the absence of facial features or defining edges.

Upstairs at the Carnegie, the erotic ante is upped considerably, with large images of sculpted “flesh” that appears shockingly real from a distance. The fleshy verisimilitude is remarkable, at times, with light carefully draped across curvature--buttocks, breasts, the gentle slopes of a back--to give an unreal sensuality that is almost more intense because of the contextual deception involved.

We know, intellectually, that we’re looking at cold, pristine slabs of stone, but our eyes tell us something else. That very fool-the-eye-and-mind aspect is central to Bergman’s concept.

Without resorting to mere novelty for its own sake, she toys with preconceptions about the nature of art and the important distinction between naked (vulgar, instinctively base) and nude (lofty).

That we encounter these moments of enlightening disorientation in the Carnegie, itself a faux classical edifice made to look much older than it really is, seems entirely appropriate.

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AU NATURAL: As an odd sort of companion object lesson, a smaller show of nude drawings by William Stout is currently showing in another section of the museum. Stout has made his name in graphic art, as a painter of prehistoric wildlife and in other pop cultural niches, such as doing poster art for Monty Python movies and production work for “Conan the Barbarian.”

What Stout shows at the Carnegie, however, is “One Man and Twenty Women,” consisting of economically rendered figure drawings. The man of the show’s title is Edgar Allen Poe, clothed, of course. The group of women, unclothed, of course, consists of a variety of models.

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CHEZ BIRDS: In the Carnegie’s local artist showcase series, “Masters in our Midst,” Toni Stein shows her “Dysfunctional Birdhouses” with a good, healthy dose of color and absurdist whimsy, verging on the downright silly. A manic miniaturist sensibility is at work in Stein’s show, with fancifully decorated mirrors and impractical aviary inventions.

The unapologetic glee and glitz of Stein’s art is enough to make even the cliche-phobic observer think about dubbing this “art for the birds.”

Details

* WHAT: Sky Bergman’s “The Naked and the Nude,” William Stout’s “One Man and Twenty Women,” and Toni Stein’s “Dysfunctional Birdhouses.”

* WHEN: Through June 4; hours vary.

* WHERE: Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St., Oxnard.

* HOW MUCH: $2 (adults), $1.50 (seniors, students), $1 (children 6-16), free (children under 6).

* FYI: Admission is free Fridays from 3-6 p.m.

* CALL: 385-8157.