VALLEY WEEKEND : Artist’s Works Are Attention Grabbers
In her exhibition at the Buenaventura Gallery, Oxnard-based artist Marcia Cummings shows landscape paintings and portraits that attest to an assured way with a brush. But it is her assemblage pieces, shamelessly cheeky and often pun-happy, that scream for attention and warrant the tease of the show’s title, “Hardly Traditional.”
In these constructions, Cummings relies on found objects and commonplace materials, such as the length of telegraph pole and insulators making up the cactus-like form of “Wyoming Skylight.”
Those materials also include a dispenser of plastic eggs (eggs being a recurring motif here) filled with rubber toy embryos in “Double Bubble,” and a plate of faux spaghetti and severed ears in place of meatballs in “Communion with van Gogh.” “Feet Planted Firmly in the Ground, a.k.a. Feet of Clay” is a rock garden planted with--you guessed it--feet.
Cummings’ assemblages elicit a response somewhere between knowing sniggers and groans accompanied by rolling eyes. Her sense of craft is stronger than her sense of subtlety or allegory.
Marcia Cummings’ “Hardly Traditional,” through Saturday at the Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara Ave., Ventura; 648-1235.
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