That Very Human Enterprise: Trying to Be in Control : Art review: The California Center for the Arts Museum’s ‘Three Dimensions’ exhibition sets up a contained universe of sculptors by bypassing those who defy its boundaries.

Jay Johnson, the first artist-in-residence at the California Center for the Arts Museum, spent much of April making the sculpture “We Attempt to Contain” under the watchful eye of touring schoolchildren and random visitors to this $74-million, 200,000-square-foot visual and performing arts complex.

Johnson’s work is a programming milestone for the museum, which opened last fall, and more: It acts as a conceptual anchor for the museum’s current show, “California in Three Dimensions,” which serves a narrow slice of recent California sculpture through the work of 17 artists.

Johnson, from San Diego, has created a concise visual analog of the human enterprise: a worktable, a tool and the task at hand--what to do with everything that floods by in the course of a life. He has made an exceedingly elegant wall of open-faced, raw birch boxes that rise from the glossy red table. This construction brings to mind the classic paintings of Mondrian, which themselves originated out of a desire to translate both fluid nature and the dynamic city into a consistent personal order.

In Johnson’s compartmentalized vision, there is a place for everything: There are small cubbyholes and larger niches; there’s room for secrets (a few of the boxes have closed doors) and even erotic passion, hinted at by the sexy, red-satin, cushioned lining of several boxes. A place for everything and everything in its place.

It’s beautiful, this triumph of the civilizing spirit, but ultimately a false model, earnest but inadequate. Johnson knows the limits of this vision and that understanding makes the effort, the irrepressible instinct to name, tame and control, all the more poignant.

The museum’s curator and director, Reesey Shaw, has fashioned a tight, contained universe of sculptors by bypassing those who revel in the emotional and physical muck that spills over and defies its boundaries. For the larger purposes of the show, however, the urge for containment is not the most exhilarating of curatorial approaches.

“California in Three Dimensions” favors beauty of an intellectualized sort and a clean, dry wit. It abounds with clever, surreal inversions of size, function and medium. Rob Craigie sculpts basketballs out of colored wax, for instance, and Daniel Wheeler hangs a 5-foot-high wooden hat on the wall--its shadowy inner compartment makes a punning, oblique allusion to Plato’s myth of the cave. Robert Therrien aggrandizes the mundane, stacking two dozen massive white dinner dishes (5 feet around and made of ceramic and epoxy on fiberglass) into a staggered, staggering heap, 8 feet high.

Mark Lere quips on the issue of torqued function in a copper-clad aluminum sculpture of an umbrella titled “Fountain.” In one simple, satisfying twist, Lere upends the umbrella and makes its hooked handle double as a gusher from below. Tim Hawkinson’s captivatingly simple “Eye Globe” strikes as a Meret Oppenheim gone kinetic: A flesh-colored globe rotates slowly at--what else?--eye level. As it turns, dolls eyes inset into its surface click open and shut in a sweet portrait of the Earth’s innocents waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping.

In a thoughtful grouping set apart from such cunning gamesmanship, the works of Mineko Grimmer, Mary Bates and Anne Mudge center on more profound, primal experiences of time, labor and the Earth. The wood and slate forms of Minoru Ohira are another highlight of the show. His one-armed “Warrior” stands as a timeless, universal emblem of both the strength and pain of the man of war. Armored in shards of slate, the figure’s reductive power recalls both the Hanniwa figures of the artist’s native Japan as well as pre-Columbian forms he came to know while living in Mexico.

Post-minimal seems to be the convenient term for most of this kind of work, encompassing both the artists’ debt to and their deviation from the rigor of first-generation Minimal sculpture. The artists here clearly inherit their respect for the purity of form from their predecessors, but they exercise greater freedom with their materials toward a more humane, emotive end. Still, the work feels tethered, bound to the notion of cool .

Abandon finally comes in the work of Melissa Smedley, who fears neither flamboyance nor grit and has a raw sense of humor that is wacky and wise. Smedley carries on the cruder line of the assemblage legacy while retaining a sharp conceptual focus. Her work here consists of an altered satellite dish, also known as a “Solar Teapot,” a “Portable Tea House” roughly fashioned of branches, and an outrageous broom, subtitled “Practising for the Millennium.”

All three objects are parked in the museum’s courtyard, where a video documents Smedley’s performances using these sculptures and others in rural environments. They are tools of survival, in a sense--adaptations of existing rubbish, endowed with new meaning and even spiritual purpose, that of intensifying the experience of living on Earth. The broom, with its long, meandering branch handle, bolted-on fins, rear-view mirror, springs and train of sensuously flowing reeds, invites a raucous spin into space. It’s a vehicle anticipating an apocalypse as much as it is the result of a breakdown in the social order that sanctions such scavenging for the basics. One can easily imagine the broom’s rider here--hers is the only howl among so many polite smiles.

* “California in Three Dimensions” continues at the California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido, through Aug. 25. (619) 738-4138. * “Ground Covers,” a site-specific installation by Peter Walker, will be added to the show beginning July 15.