Exhibit Intrudes on Comforts of Home

Unsuspecting visitors to the Ross home in Santa Barbara are in for a surprise this month. They will realize something is up from the altered facade, now covered in mysterious black fabric. But the more dramatic difference is a sonic one.

Behind the black fabric are speakers, connected to microphones placed liberally around the interior. Inside becomes outside as the sounds of washing dishes, radios and bits of conversation are broadcast to the front yard. No doubt, the Ross family will be watching its tongue.

Welcome to an elaborate invasion of privacy, for art’s sake. The house--dubbed “Talking House” by renowned conceptual artist Vito Acconci--is fully wired for sound, blowing apart the cherished privacy that we expect of this place called home.

This is just one of the artful disruptions around Santa Barbara, as part of the “Home Show 2,” put on by Contemporary Arts Forum on weekend afternoons through June 2.

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Those who caught the original “Home Show,” curated by forum director Betty Klausner in 1988 and one of the organization’s more notable achievements to date, will recognize that this decade’s model is less of a sensory extravaganza. The original show entailed more elaborate sculptural inventions and installation schemes.

“Home Show 2,” organized by director Nancy Doll and coordinator Eve Rappoport, is, nonetheless, a provocative and ambitious exhibition. The show heads gamely outside of the gallery confines and asks viewers to reexamine archetypes of what home and art mean, together and apart.

If the scale is more modest this time out, the thematic gist is the same. Ten artists have been invited to create works that question the role of home in terms of its societal function and conceptual aspects, as well as its physical workings, the nuts and bolts.

Linda Hudson’s “Moving In,” for example, invites the question of what would happen if a visual artist worked with an architect in devising ideas for a remodeling job? The results, in Eve Rappoport’s downtown Craftsman home, are subtle and, well, strange. Wire webbing--half spidery, half utilitarian-looking--fans out from the rooftop. The kitchen table is a bizarre hinged metal slab tethered to the ceiling, and the attic has had a face-lift, fitted with translucent panels and readied for dormer windows.

Out Montecito way, Pepon Osorio blurs sociocultural lines by covering furniture in plastic, a preservation tactic more often found on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Comic relief in the show comes principally from Jean Lowe’s “Decorating Hints,” in which she radically alters the ambience of Eric Lassen’s interior merely by inserting a library of wacky papier-mache books and artifacts.

Book titles such as “National Guide to All-You-Can-Eats,” “The 10 Commandments--Are They Fair?” a box of “Tender Pork” in the kitchen and a magazine called “Armchair Agnostic” in the study create a wonderfully giddy air of the surreal. It’s as if we’re in Mickey Mouse’s house in Toontown, redecorated by a neo-dadaist.

On the mesa, close to the beach and just down the street from the “Talking House,” is another piece of startling simplicity. By placing a giant-screen TV, like a cathode ray monolith, on the front lawn of a tract home, Dan Graham has peeled the privacy away from one family’s viewer discretion.

One of the show’s disappointments is the last-minute reworking of Buster Simpson’s piece paying homage to “An American Family,” the groundbreaking PBS documentary about Santa Barbara’s Loud Family, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

The Louds have long since left town, and have mostly tried to flee the notoriety that the documentary series imposed on them: Mother, Pat Loud, ordered that Simpson cease and desist from using footage in his elaborately planned piece. But the Louds remain an almost folkloric part of this town’s history. Denied access to his main artistic putty, Simpson scraped together a last-minute sculptural construction.

Fittingly, one of the differences with the second generation “Home Show” and the first is that you can view aspects of the exhibition by gazing into a screen, without leaving the comforts of your own home.

For their project, “Hotel Shorts,” the art group called Haha documented the life of elderly residents at the Carrillo Hotel, a longtime downtown retirement hotel, which is slated for demolition. It is a poignant montage of interviews with people for whom the concept of “home” is often fragile, fading out of their control.

“Hotel Shorts” may be seen on video at the Contemporary Arts Forum gallery or every Friday at 5 p.m. on the KCTV Community Access Channel 17.

Margaret Crane and Jon Winet have created their piece, “Accommodations,” in a different kind of domicile--a humble mobile home in Goleta. But the artists have also created a sister address in cyberspace: (www.parc.xerox.com/pair/cw/home/).

As it turns out, the virtual address is as modest as the actual site. Web browsers will basically find a photo of the mobile home with some explanatory text--no bells, no whistles.

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In a city viewed as a coveted chunk of real estate, the “Home Show 2” tour takes the viewer to many pockets in the local topography, including those that harbor the disenfranchised have-nots in a town that sometimes has too much. In the Palm Park parking lot, near popular roosts for the homeless, architect-artist Allan Walker shows several pint-size domiciles, gentrified storage sheds, as a half-ironic solution to the housing problem.

George Stone’s ambiguous tent-like structure, “Sinking Giant/Rising Shelter,” is plopped down in a downtown vacant lot (long ago, the site of the YMCA). It could be read as either a makeshift homeless habitat or a piece of NASA machinery, expensive garbage from space. “Home,” in this case, is a flimsy excuse for shelter.

There are no easy or broad conclusions drawn over the rambling course of “Home Show 2,” nor should there be. Late in the century, the state of the home, as a physical entity or media-enhanced fantasy, as a sentimentalized harbor for family or a transient reality, is in constant flux.

That character, of change and diversity, may be as close to a coherent theme as can be drawn from this challenging exhibition. In an age of uncertainty, home is where you hang your hopes.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Home Show 2” by Contemporary Arts Forum.

* WHERE: At locations around Santa Barbara.

* WHEN: Through June 2.

* CALL: For information on sites, call 966-5373.