For Best View of Exhibit, Watch Your Step

Under normal circumstances, we who visit art spaces live by the golden rule of art appreciation: Art is something to be seen and not touched. Frank Rozasy wants to challenge that built-in reverence for art. He asks us not only to touch the art, but to leave our footprints on it.

The artist’s provocative installation piece, now showing at the Gallery One One One Annex in the Livery, involves a series of hundreds of reproductions and variations on a single image that have been liberally strewn all over the gallery floor. Visitors must walk over the art to get to the far wall, where an artist’s statement details the intention “to question the presentation of art in galleries, museums and homes.”

If the slyly designed, interactive process is king here, the artwork itself is fairly insignificant. Multiple treatments of a female nude inspired by Ingres--colored, Xeroxed, distorted--add up to a heap of casually rendered reproductions that we don’t really mind stepping on.

Call it art-as-doormat.

For all of its elaborate funkiness, Rozasy’s piece is the latest in an ongoing series of shows here that have, thankfully, helped make Ventura safe for installation work. This is work that can’t be bought and sold, but which can play an important role in stoking the dialogue about art’s function.

For more uncensored and undraped examinations of the female form, proceed to Rozasy’s Web site, https://users.aol.com/rozasy. The photographs “hanging” in this virtual gallery detail the photographic collaboration between Rozasy and his “model-muse,” Los Angeles-based Doe Gentry. These scenes of soft-core eroticism, often in garish or surreal settings, seem to lampoon the teasing visual qualities found in the realm of cyber sex, when the images don’t themselves step over the line into cheap titillation.

On the Edge

“The Annual Juried Show” at the Thousand Oaks Community Gallery is hanging this month, and the results are a bit more cutting edge than usual, thanks, we assume, to the aesthetic prerogatives of the juror, painter James Jarvaise. As usual, the range of art is vast, laid out in a smorgasbord that says something about the liveliness of the local art scene.

Visitors are greeted by sculptural oddities--Gene Schklair’s whimsical, nearly life-size golfer stands in the middle of the gallery, and Hy Farber’s “Slice of Apple” is a larger-than-life wood sculpture.

The two-dimensional contingent veers from Patrick Pike’s small, introspective intaglio work “Dusk” to Thomas Scott Nelson’s “Rose #8,” a flamboyant blossom-shaped canvas.

One of the most impressive works is Mike Breen’s “Various Gardens,” a hip, bustling piece organized into a festive patchwork. Ken Farkash’s “Summer in the City,” too, is a vivid, unconventional piece, a rhythmically charged, loudly colored painting with scraped surfaces and graffiti-like markings.

From the opposite end of the spectrum, Lynn Morley’s enigmatic paintings are muted, dreamy landscape works. Her “Two Trees” pits elemental forms suggesting orderly shrubs in a seductively organized composition. It has a secret life as an abstraction.

‘Suite’ and Simple

The paintings in Charlotte Olonoff’s show “California Suite,” now on the second floor of Ventura City Hall, deal with the familiar terrain of sea, mountain and floral themes. But it’s her natural, flowing handling of this imagery that gives it distinction.

“Poplar Trees on the Delta” is a lakeside scene strengthened by the solid forms in the picture plane--onion-shaped trees, a triangular A-frame structure, and the emphatic verticals of the poplars. “Malibu Triptych” portrays a property in the famed seaside burg, separated into canvases depicting house, garden and beach: Such are the building blocks in a dream life of bliss, Southern California style.

BE THERE

Frank Rozasy’s installation, Gallery One One One Annex, 34 N. Palm St. 641-0111. Through February. Hours: Tue.-Fri., 4-9 p.m.; Sat., noon-5 p.m.

“Annual Juried Show,” Thousand Oaks Community Gallery, 2331 Borchard Road, Newbury Park. 498-4390. Through Feb. 22. Hours: Thur.-Sun., 1-5 p.m.

“California Suite,” paintings by Charlotte Olonoff. Ventura City Hall, 501 Poli St. 648-1235. Through February. Hours: Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-5 p.m.