Distinguishing Marks

The goal was to show UC Irvine students how artists are finding new ways to use materials without sacrificing conceptual smarts. The result--”TRANS/INTER/POST: HYBRID SPACES,” at the UCI Art Gallery--is also likely to be an eye-opener for viewers who can barely remember their student days.

For her last show before assuming her new curatorial post at the UC Santa Cruz Art Gallery, acting gallery director Pamela Bailey has gathered the work of a baker’s dozen of up-and-coming artists. They are, as Bailey writes in a posted statement, “less concerned with creating new forms than forming new meanings out of the fusion of old ones.”

Some of the artists deal with cultural dislocations; others are concerned with exploring intuitive associations. But while there is widespread evidence of societal upheaval and technological overload in this work, it is also marked by vivid and engaging visual qualities.

Jessica Rath’s massive clear vinyl object with rows of slightly sagging, compartmentalized tiers looks something like a giant closet shoe holder--until you read: “Untitled (Alfred P. Murrah Building).” By making a coolly abstracted, yet oddly vulnerable, image of the bombed-out Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Rath crystallizes its status as a cultural icon for troubled times.

Similar in its effect, though utterly different in its subject matter, Monique van Genderen’s “Standard of Living” consists mostly of neatly folded stacks of clothing on self-effacing plexiglass shelves. Spotlighting well-heeled consumer behavior patterns, they also link the possession and storage of upscale clothing to museum displays of Minimalist sculptures and the accretion of meanings that surround them.

Four unremarkable sweaters, labeled (on the wall) as to designer and date, throws out a mock challenge to the fashion-savvy viewer (which is last year’s Dries Van Noten?). Implicated in that exercise is a dialogue about the urge to acquire pieces by particular designers and the code involved in wearing these garments (communicable only to those in the know). This practice begins to seem not terribly different from seeking to buy work by “hot” artists whose styles are known to one’s social circle.

Peter Hopkins works with holographic fabric and homely liquids (such as toilet bowl cleaner) to produce big, twinkling swaths of luscious abstraction. Fred Tomaselli produces equally entrancing effects with arrangements of pills and other psychoactive materials.

Kymber Holt makes amusingly sensuous half-human, half-garment sculptures from swelling masses of waxed twine. She adds pale, creeping patterns and blurry “mistakes” to floral wallpaper, throwing into relief the gulf between machine-made approximations of nature and the unstoppable tumult and mutant possibilities of the real thing, as embodied in the artist’s own fits and starts.

Some of the artists restrict themselves to the familiar media of paint and photography yet still break through to something rich and strange. In Monique Prieto’s “Amigo,” a spreading yellow blob flattens out just before reaching the edges of the canvas, as if afraid of falling off. Lollipop shapes reinforce the centripetal pull of the four corners with the goofy gravity of a board game design for small children.

Martha Lewis paints roiling, brilliantly colored scenes of gorgeous disasters or spare images of mechanical meltdown on small scraps of paper scattered on the walls, as if the impact of all this activity was too much to concentrate in one large space.

Ruben Ortiz Torres photographs scenes that speak of a complexly hybrid culture in which tow-headed kids can be dressed as Mexican American settlers on a parade float (“California Taco, Santa Barbara”), or a border town can advertise itself with a plastic cactus and a neon figure wearing a huge sombrero and sporting a “South of the Border” sign in place of a torso. (The culturally deprecatory--and pointedly ironic--Spanish title of the latter print, “Charro de Neon,” subsumes several meanings of charro: “coarse,” “flashy,” “broad-brimmed hat” and “Mexican cowboy.”)

Linking these and other disparate works in this show is the artists’ tendency to view a mixed-up, sometimes frightening, always complex world with a certain amused tolerance and a fierce pleasure in making their own marks.

* “TRANS/INTER/POST: HYBRID SPACES” continues through Nov. 23 at UC Irvine Art Gallery, off Bridge Road on the UCI campus. Noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Free. (714) 824-6610.

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IRVINE--The dull, dated feel of “The Calligraphic Mark: Between Word, Image, Gesture,” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, begins with the title of the show and extends to most of the bland work in it.

Most of these artists are virtual unknowns, which comes as no surprise: They are plodding along in a groove mined by other, far more visionary artists many years ago. There are precious few new ideas here or new ways of seeing and little evidence that the era we live in is remote from the one that fostered Abstract Expressionism or the postwar School of Paris.

Thankfully, there are a few examples of work that do more than weakly attempt to rehash yesterday’s aesthetic pieties.

Robert Strati has the ghost of a good idea in “Composition in Hair,” a piece in which loopy strands of hair imitate individual strokes of paint and a bulky roll of cloth frames the composition. The problem is that Strati’s hybrid technique comes off as a clumsily high-minded attempt to substitute one medium for another, rather than as a deliberately cheesy reinterpretation of a high-minded style.

Qing-Min Meng also ventures a personal approach that doesn’t quite jell yet. His piece “#5495” is part of a series of drawings of Japanese monster cartoon characters. He copies each figure a section at a time to increase the distance between its cartoon signification and its status as pure line. Rendered in large scale on a big sheet of translucent polyester film--whose dimensions recall the format of traditional Asian scroll paintings--Meng’s masked action figure remains too recognizable, only vaguely suggesting a freshly skewed vision.

Marc Pally is best known of the artists in this show, and although “Push/Pull/Tug/Squirm” is a modest effort, the painting leaps out from the crowd as a distinctive vision. Drawing his inspiration, as usual, from a mixture of organic and molecular imagery, Pally trusses a root-like white shape with a harness of dry-brushed, muddy purple. Alongside it, a perpetual motion machine of fluid line causes the hot orange ground to shrink away.

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The most exciting new work is by Casey Cook, a master of fine arts candidate at UCLA who tweaks versions of trippy ‘60s graphics in funky color blends (brown, orange, purple, light blue). She radically reorganizes the viewer’s expectations of pictorial continuity, offering an insouciant, jagged rhythm.

In “Here Comes Trouble,” straight lines and crowded, collapsing rectangles look something like a deranged version of a floor plan. Willfully compacted and miniaturized, they stumble over the canvas, providing a loose matrix for the laboriously lettered, banal threat of the painting’s title. In this wrong-end-of-the-telescope universe, a goofy little figure with blue-ribbon eyes and a shoe-shaped body has oceans of brown space to itself.

Once again, irreverence, hybrid fields of reference and pop culture save the day for art in the ‘90s.

* “The Calligraphic Mark: Between Word, Image, Gesture” continues through Nov. 3 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday; 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Free. (714) 724-6892.