Works Miss Catching the Grass Ring

The newest sign of life in Santa Ana’s nascent art scene is Four Door Gallery, which opened July 20 in a small, airy, second-floor room across the street from the Santora Building and features work by L.A. artists Jeanne Patterson and Bill Radawec.

Proprietor Robert Mayer, an artist and art teacher who rents an adjacent office as studio space, says he realized the wood-floored room was just right for a gallery. Its name, courtesy of Radawec, not only describes the space but also hints at Southern California’s car culture, says Mayer, who plans to show mainly L.A. artists.

Patterson’s work is uneven but proves more rewarding than Radawec’s, which suffers from wedding unremarkable nature imagery to a farfetched set of impenetrable whimsies (described in a handout of an interview with former Huntington Beach Art Center curator Marilu Knode).

Most of Radawec’s pieces in this show involve either fake grass applied to small, square paintings that no longer can be seen or small, square, colored-pencil drawings of manicured grass.

Called “Small Soul (Patch)” or “Soul Patch,” these pieces appear to be (deliberately?) unconvincing reworkings of truisms about the way reproductions may seem more “real” than the real thing. In the interview, Radawec says the artificial grass represents a “burial” of the painting beneath it--but to what end?

Patterson’s work is also informed by a sense of fantasy, but it stems from visual information provided by the art.

“Sandcastle,” her best piece in the show, is a small sandy hillock on the floor, from which the sand-covered claws of plastic crabs protrude in an eerily fingerlike way. The piece is suffused with a curious sense of nostalgia and loss, as if the evanescent creations of childhood summer play were in fact connected with the mysteries of evolution and the burial of some essential life force with the passage of time.

Several 3-D photographs of “Fish Out of Water,” Patterson’s 1995 installation of small plastic fish dangling on monofilament from the ceiling, play with ghost images (blurry white fish that appear to ride on the surface of the photograph, phantom carousel accouterments). The effect is engaging on a visual level but lacking in metaphoric richness, as are Patterson’s disconcertingly commercial-looking “Caught in Midstream” pieces with small plastic fish embedded in colored hunks of resin.

* Work by Jeanne Patterson and Bill Radawec runs through Aug. 24 at Four Door Gallery, 204 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and by appointment. (714) 667-0696.

A Promising Debut Rises From the Dust

Simone Adels, a 1991 graduate of Cal State Fullerton, has an engagingly fey vision, responsive (quite literally) to the odd corners of life invisible to most people. Her installation, “Between a Thing and Itself,” at Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions in Costa Mesa through Sunday, consists of a batch of subtle hints about the architecture of the gallery.

A pull chain (“Full”) hangs on the wall, attached to a stopper perversely carved from soap (prone to rapid disintegration). It dangles teasingly at the small area where the wall parts company with the floor. “Bully,” a continuous line of blue chalk on both sides of a projecting section of wall, looks as though it might be marking off an area scheduled for demolition--except that the action would cause the stairs to collapse. The notion of a skinny chalk line “standing up” to a solid architectural feature is part of the charm of the piece.

The flat little sculptures that share the title of the installation are low profile in both senses. These schematic-looking floor pieces, constructed from compacted bits of dust, look like eccentric floor plans; they might evoke the shape of odd areas of wall, or even of empty space. Using dust--the thing that accumulates in forgotten niches--was a masterstroke.

Adels’ is an intriguing form of conceptual art, at once self-effacing and knowing. It’s hard to imagine what an artist working in this vein does for an encore, but her solo debut is promising indeed.

* “Between a Thing and Itself,” an installation by Simone Adels, ends Sunday at Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions, 1640 Pomona Ave., Costa Mesa. Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and by appointment. (714) 646-5665.

Shire Needs That Extra Dimension

Seen from afar, a forest of geometric shapes on a hilltop sculpture in Elysian Park, just above downtown Los Angeles, offers a playful alternative to the idiosyncratic L.A. skyline. This oversize “table,” with its cheerful assembly of triangular, arc and rectangular shapes suspended on long legs above the heads of passersby, is the work of Peter Shire.

Best known for his whimsical teapots, Shire has embarked on various public art projects during the past decade; his latest piece, for the Wilshire/Vermont stop on the Red Line subway, was unveiled earlier this month.

Through Aug. 4, Diane Nelson Fine Art in Laguna Beach is showing a selection of Shire’s sketches and maquettes for public projects (including the MTA subway piece), furniture, works on paper and insouciantly useless teapots. One thing this show proves is that Shire thinks best in three dimensions; his fanciful drawings, particularly the large ones, look forced and mechanical.

Though some of the freshness of Shire’s style has evaporated over the years, the bright and busy sculptures retain a gleeful air. Spotting a bus bench with a seat shaped like a surfboard and a canopy that rests on a giant Pepsi can and a pyramid of small rocks doubtless would bring a smile even to the weariest traveler.

Shire, who was once a furniture designer for Italy’s ultra chic, ultra postmodern Memphis Design Group, quotes upbeat forms from a variety of sources: Southern California beach culture, Craftsman house design, circus stunts, cartoon humor (tiny things where you expect big ones and vice versa). Particularly apt in anonymous urban spaces, Shire’s sculptures give postmodernism a smiling face and quizzical eyebrows.

* Work by Peter Shire, through Aug. 4 at Diane Nelson Fine Art, 435 Ocean Ave., Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday through Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday. (714) 494-2440.