Taking On ‘Risk’ Turns Out to Be a Safe Bet

In a county starved for adventurous art and people willing and able to spot it and show it, it’s good news that the Loft is back in business after a two-year hiatus.

Owner Stuart Katz is running the show now with a partner, Richard Iri, former director of the defunct Works Gallery in Costa Mesa.

“Risk,” the opening group show (through June 25) in this tiny upstairs space, is a spotty affair--and risky only in terms of sales potential--but it has enough good stuff by newcomers to warrant a visit.

Terri Friedman’s pieces share a keen sense of design and fantasy. “Clarendon Court: Model for Perfect Gardening” wondrously combines elements of 18th century formal English gardens with designs and materials evoking Imperial exploration in the Third World. Mounted on a low-lying, moss-covered wire base, a small globe is decorated with round mirrors (representing reflecting pools), a green mossy pattern (landscaping) and sand-colored geometric designs.

Collectively titled “Between Spiders, Spinsters and Saccharine,” Friedman’s trio of airy pieces made of looped and bundled lengths of blue filmstrip, knotty bits of wire and old glass knobs evokes a deliciously hybrid charm concocted with spiders’ webs and a prim style of prettiness. More mysteriously, spirals, speckles and streams animate two untitled paintings filled with tiny imagery recalling a blend of Indian religious and genre paintings.

Shane Guffogg’s six paintings of ghostly, stain-like forms--some with the bilateral symmetry of body X-rays, others suggestive of chromosomal activity seen under high-powered microscopes--are rather wispy things that work better in smaller formats.

This work, shown in L.A. last year, is based on images taken from airport radar screens. The idea of using warning imagery from one system to suggest danger-laden imagery in another is intriguing. But with titles such as “A Relief for Me” and “Fifty Best Poems of England,” Guffogg seems to be after something more elusive.

Aaron Fine is finishing his studies at Claremont Graduate School, but his playful use of materials and imagery already has a distinctive personality. “Sweetie Pie” (a jury-rigged lemon pie with the superimposed image of a woman’s bare legs) veers into cuteness, but the jokey quality of “Whatever Happened to Aaron Fine” comes off much better. Fine painstakingly embroiders devil’s ears, an animal snout or the long locks of hair worn by Hasidic Jews on a generic image of a man’s face purporting to be a self-portrait.

Fine’s “Observatory” evokes the view from a telescope, with lumpy images of a planet and stars sewn in white thread on a piece of blue fabric caught in an embroidery hoop. The homespun quality of the piece recalls the appeal of astronomy to amateurs eager to scope out the night sky.

Constance S. Pohlman, another Claremont Graduate School product, uses her skill at depicting delicately detailed natural imagery to fine effect in “Botanical Record.”

Pohlman reinvents the venerable tradition of memento mori still-life paintings (reminders of the inevitability of death) with individual falling flowers, bugs and a lemon slice on a flat black ground. Two deep red-tinged slashes in the canvas add a contemporary touch--a reminder of the ubiquity of sudden violence.

Tina Hulett has been fashioning square arrangements of waxy, knobby protrusions for several years. If they no longer look entirely fresh, they still present the tantalizing duality of eye-popping exaggerations of “natural” texture achieved by frankly fake means.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what Charles Arnoldi is doing in this bright young company; his three small abstractions on paper are as pedestrian as anything else he has turned out in recent memory. Other artists in the show are Carlos A. Estrada-Vega (whose color-cube “Symphony” pushes the notion of obsessive art to the point of self-referential dullness), Debra Hargrove, Lori Precious, Michael Reafsnyder and Daniel Nadeau.

One picky note: Things are less than shipshape, at the reincarnated Loft, what with messily painted walls and a price list that doesn’t necessarily correspond with what’s on view and provides no information on media. Come on guys, spruce up your act.

* “Risk” continues through June 25 at the Loft, 2091 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and by appointment. Free. (714) 497-1098.