Tourist Attraction

Is it a gift shop or a gallery? That’s the question visitors to Rudy Vega’s latest installation are asking.

“Scenic Point” consists of Vega’s framed, black-and-white photographs of tourists at famous national parks. They’re hung on the white walls of an alcove at Irvine Fine Art Center.

That part definitely looks like art.

But the artist also reproduced his scenic views on postcards, place mats, refrigerator magnets, key-chain trinkets and T-shirts, all proffered like souvenirs on racks inside the alcove. A little sign denotes their prices, $1 to $20 each.

That part definitely does not look like art.

“Are these actually for sale?” asked one visitor, leafing through the laminated place mats. Yes, answers Vega.

“I wanted to sell the stuff,” he says, “because it completes the project,” an interactive piece which, among other things, blurs the line between art and commerce.

“Consumption,” he said tongue-in-cheek, “is the greatest interaction there is in Western society. Feel free to browse and make a purchase.”

Vega’s work is part of a group show, organized by center curator Dorrit Rawlins, titled “Invented Truths: Myths and Manipulations in Contemporary Photography.”

Principally, it’s about using all-powerful photography to redefine the country’s vast open spaces, said Vega, who lives in Irvine and works as a photo-lab technician and teaches photography at UC Irvine.

TV, movies, ads, the Web . . . “We’re an image-saturated, image-dependent society,” he said during a recent interview at the center. “The image dominates our perception of how things are.”

The photographs, taken during the summers of 1995 and 1996, depict five national parks, monuments or memorials in the Western United States: Yellowstone, Yosemite, Devil’s Tower, the Grand Canyon and Mt. Rushmore.

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But these aren’t merely inspiring landscapes. In each shot stands or sits a tourist or two--or hundreds--either posing for a shot or taking photographs of fellow travelers with nature as a backdrop.

One shot (all are untitled) depicts rows and rows of picture-takers seated on benches strategically positioned in front of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful. There, they wait to shoot the perfect picture of the regular-as-clockwork geyser, which is nowhere to be seen in Vega’s photo.

Another picture, taken at Mt. Rushmore, depicts a family, all but one of whose five members grasp cameras. The famous presidents, however, can be glimpsed only as a distant reflection in the glassed building behind the mom, dad and kids.

Through Vega’s lens, America’s breathtaking landmarks exist to service hordes of hurried tourists who have little interest in communing with nature, he said.

“The objective has become to get a visual document of the setting and move on,” even if it means missing the real, live experience.

This isn’t good or bad, said the artist, who is interested in documenting, not passing judgment. But, as he writes in an exhibit statement, it “demonstrates the privilege photography enjoys in being the authority by which experience is validated.”

Indeed, tourists not only return home with their own shots but also buy professionally produced images like those packaged in myriad ways in “Scenic Point,” Vega said. And that’s easy at parks that are more like theme parks, “where you move on from one ride to another” and spend money at ubiquitous gift shops.

“I don’t think we can still hold dear the idea of the pristine, unaltered landscape,” he said, adding that Ansel Adams-esque views of a land devoid of humanity--which ironically attract the disruptive crowds--perpetuate a myth.

Vega, 40, presented a different version of “Scenic Point” in a group show at John Wayne Airport a year ago and it was his master’s degree project at UCI in 1994.

The installation also explores the idea that a photograph of oneself at a national monument reaffirms one’s “Americanness,” he said.

“The West has always been portrayed as uniquely American. It’s that whole idea of frontier, expansion.”

That concept, however, is about as serious as the piece, or any of Vega’s work, gets. At present, he’s producing large color photographs of artificial flowers. Irony and humor are his trademarks. In fact, in “Scenic Point,” some of the camera-laden, materialistic tourists, wearing pith helmets and Bermuda shorts, look like regular yahoos.

“Yeah,” he said, “but the photographs aren’t exploitative. I haven’t orchestrated any of the images. We’re laughing at ourselves. We’ve all been in that position.”

* “Scenic Point” by Rudy Vega is on view at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. Hours today: 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Ends Thursday. Free. (714) 724-6880.