Subtle Approach Works for Luna

The overriding impression of James Luna that emerges from his show at Saddleback College Art Gallery (through Feb. 20) is of a genial soul who invests his art with more serious content than is immediately obvious.

“Surreal, Post Indian, Subterranean Blues Experience,” Luna’s performance piece (shown on a videotape) features the Native American artist riding a feather-festooned stationary bicycle in front of a screen projecting moments from a ‘60s-era motorcycle movie.

Mocking daredevil high jinks with serene, one-foot balances on the bike and invoking ceremonial dance with a pair of feather-decorated crutches resembling wings, Luna offers a wryly, unconventionally ennobling image. Stalled on the route to the great American dream, hobbled by circumstance, he’ll make his own way. If he can’t be king of the road, he’ll “fly” over it, at least in metaphorical terms.

Luna’s other work in the show, based on Native American “sacred colors” (red, black, yellow and white), may initially look simple-minded. But the photographs and other pieces actually are the product of a humorously open-ended search for an intersection between tribal wisdom reflecting a harmonious universe and the fractious realities of contemporary life.

A photograph of members of four races each wearing the stereotypical color--yellow for the Asian woman, white for the Caucasian--illustrates the primacy of racial identification in the culture of the ‘90s.

In another piece, four models appear in separate photographs hung at compass points around a mirror reflecting the viewer’s midsection. This display literally involves you at a “gut” level in perceptions of racial assertiveness and divisiveness.

A display of four women’s underpants, each made in one of the four colors (“The Sacred Colors Are Everywhere”) is both absurdly banal and bizarrely wise, suggesting that the “sacred” appears wherever we choose to find it.

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In November, the art faculty voted to close the gallery until funding could be secured for a crucial and long-vacant support position. Happily, on Friday, Greg Bishopp, dean of fine arts and communications at the college, said that the gallery will have two more shows this academic year and that he is “hopeful” the staffing issue will be resolved before the college reopens next fall.

* Work by James Luna, through Feb. 20 at Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Free. Hours: Noon-4 p.m. Monday-Wednesday; noon-4 p.m., 6-8 p.m. Thursday. (714) 582-4924.