In Santa Ana, She Takes Her Inner Child to Outer Limits

Laura Whipple, the Los Angeles artist who burst on the scene a few years ago with wonderfully warped visions of art history and childhood, has a small show at Four Door Gallery (through Nov. 30).

Although the pieces in “Conjoined Twins and Other Childhood Memories” seem rather glib in contrast with her earlier work, her sensibility still idiosyncratically infuses the small space.

The “mummy” series--a stuffed bear, dog and white rabbit reconfigured as limbless blobs--preserves the memories of once-inseparable childhood pals. Denatured, softened into creatures even further removed from reality than the original toys, the mummies exaggerate the infantilization of toy animals at the same time that they pay homage to their undying importance.

A ceramic plate decorated with texts and childlike drawings recalls the wares of services that promise to “immortalize your child’s art.” But Whipple is recasting her adult self as that child, serving up an image of a wobbly soup can labeled “Campbell’s Primordial Soup” with the tag line, “My earliest memory.”

The tongue-in-cheek image co-mingles the marketing of cozy images of childhood with a Warholian art strategy, allowing the warm-and-fuzzy quality of the one to absurdly infect the other. It also inflates autobiographical investigation to the level of universal origins, which reflects the prime status of contemporary investigations into the self.

In “Playing House (In Vitro Fertilization),” a blanket-lined doll buggy ominously holding only an oversized upturned hand conjures a child’s anthropomorphic vision of the hand of God.

Whipple’s riffs on twin-hood include two stills from home movies in which she and her sister seem glued together as they accept cookies from an adult hand, or form a three-armed creature as they tread water side-by-side, in identical red life jackets. But this is thin, jokey stuff, not up to her standard.

* “Laura Whipple: Conjoined Twins and Other Childhood Memories” through Saturday at Four Door Gallery, 204 N. Broadway, 2nd Floor, #C, Santa Ana. Noon-4 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. Free. (714) 667-0696.

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Daniel Arvizu invited four Orange County art dealers to show their artists at his Santa Ana gallery alongside artists of his choosing. If you know the galleries (Sarah Bain in Fullerton, and Laguna Beach’s Diane Nelson, Peter Blake and The Loft), the results are relatively predictable.

The Sarah Bain artists go in for commercial grades of Surrealism (Justine Holmes) and Realism (Jason Lien), cutesy faux primitivism (Denise Falk) and tired Neo-Expressionism (Ray Turner). The eclectic Loft picks range from a clunky, art fair-style abstraction (by G. Ray Kerciu, better known these days as president of the Laguna Art Museum Heritage Corp.) to a pale, delicately nuanced painting (by Teo Gonzales) reminiscent of a grid of plant or animal cells.

More surprisingly, Nelson offers only a selection of paintings by Jerry Wayne Downs, a painstakingly detailed hyper-realist whose pastiches of Rene Magritte’s Surrealism are dubious at best. He’s more palatable in his Ray Bradbury-esque science fiction mode, painting an empty rural highway on which a tepee rises from a buckled patch of asphalt as the ghostly revenge of onetime Native American landowners.

Blake weighs in with several of Michael McManus’s vibrantly detailed “American Prayer Series” pieces, vintage James Strombotne trying once again to update the late 19th century visionary work of Belgian painter James Ensor, tepid stuff by Duncan Simcoe and Chris Gwaltney, and Joe Mangrum’s sprawling freeway interchange installation built out of computer circuit boards.

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By and large, Arvizu’s own picks don’t raise the temperature of this show very much. But there’s a tiny piece hanging all by itself that makes the visit worthwhile: Cornelius O’Leary’s “Elephant.” It’s a fragmentary photograph of an elephant whose trunk is the sleeve of a tattersall shirt. This little piece by Santa Ana’s tinker extraordinaire has an absurd logic of its own that answers to no preconceived notion of what art is supposed to be.

* “Dealers’ Choice” through Saturday at Daniel Arvizu Gallery, 215 N. Broadway (Santora Building), Santa Ana. Noon-4 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. Free. (714) 972-1212.