Nature Nurtured

In the last official exhibit of its academic season, Ventura College--one of the most reliably provocative art venues in the region--is presenting a group photography show, giving a respectful nod to a medium that deserves greater respect.

Here, four photographers with four distinct agendas contribute to the overall curatorial idea, all about the uneasy relationship of nature and culture, between the landscape and the human. While this theme seems like ripe material for eco-conscious grandstanding, the artists approach their work subtly, avoiding easy conclusions.

For Steve Sturges, the point of intrigue is the archeological domain of castle ruins and stone church remains, as evidence of both man’s ingenuity and his mortality. By depicting these scenes in carefully cropped black-and-white images, tucked into rugged pockets of nature, Sturges conveys the sense of these antiquated structures ever so gradually reverting to their stony source.

For Howard Steinberg, who brings leaves into the controlled setting of his studio, nature is both tamed and closely pondered. These are, in effect, portraits of lowly leaves, viewed with macroscopic affection and appreciated for all their translucent, veined and crumpled beauty.

By using aerial photographs to show the distorting effects of industry on the land, Mark Abrahamson is a canny observer of man’s intrusion into nature. On first impression, these long shots of revised landscapes take on the appearance of abstract images, but there are true stories told here. The wood mill in “Nooksack SP82” is strewn with piles of felled trees and crude dirt roads are carved among the foliage--a lovely visual presentation disguising sobering reality.

Wrapping up the show nicely are deceptively plain and lucid nature images by Alan Lemire, whose work comes closest in the show to a conventional landscape approach. He seeks out seductive patterns or arresting alcoves in nature, whether the sweeping stone “Archway at Dawn,” the dry, cracking earth of “Factory Butte” or the raked and rippling sand of his Weston-esque “Dunes at Dusk.”

The topic of nature vs. man is open to wide interpretation and suits much of what photography does best. Among other things, the medium offers viewers distilled--and stilled--images of the objective world filtered through subjective human consciousness. That’s the real story of this show, a personalized, cautionary tale about a world in danger.

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Window Dressing-Down: In the street-facing window space of the Performance Studio (alias the Gallery One One One Alternative Space), a large American flag on the wall offers a self-conscious backdrop for a shopping cart full of personal belongings, a figure in a trash can and other handy emblems of homelessness and human detritus in our society. The message is plain enough but is further hammered home by an explanatory text, in which the artist offers that “Americans spend too much time worrying about the flag itself and not enough time concentrating on the principles it represents.”

And so it goes inside the gallery space as well, as installation artist Lezlie Kussin addresses social ills in broad strokes and loaded imagery. “Fallen Icons,” the title work in her show, finds an effigy of the Statue of Liberty, broken into pieces after apparently tumbling from its pedestal and landing on a mattress covered with a slightly soiled and slightly scorched flag. It’s a bad day for the Republic, for which Lady Liberty no longer stands.

Kitschy metal lunch pails, equipped with plastic lunch items and extracurricular artifacts such as drugs, weapons and cigarettes, are the materials of “Packed for Lunch,” as the text spells it out for us, an indictment of the heightened aura of vice and violence in our schools. Kussin knows how to pack a punch by using found objects and explosive archetypes in her social critiques, but fewer words and greater subtlety might make her work less didactic.

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Grab Bagging: The current show at Art City is an unapologetic grab bag of mostly sculptural work, with no particular curatorial thread except that of offering City-connected denizens a place to show wares. And there’s nothing wrong with that, especially considering Art City’s idealistic embrace of diversity and its admirable gallery space, begging to be used.

On the gallery’s far wall, the sculpture “Skybird” looms, as if standing guard over the roomful of artworks. A collaboration by Matt Harvey and Michel Lino, the piece is fashioned from ceramic tiles, stainless steel and silicon. James Gerard’s “Embryos” is a semiabstract sculptural study, comprised of enfolded ovals, while Chis Lauer’s “Cody” is an irreverent bust of a man in serpentine chomping on a cigar in wood.

Photography has a humble presence as well, including Michael Helms’ “Mud Torso,” a female nude slathered in mud, and Kakine’s mystical landscape image, “Rocks in the Clouds.” The versatile Alain Sailer shows both sculpture and a painting of a figure in a psychedelic wilderness.

BE THERE

“Four Photographers Capture an Eternal Flux,” through Fri. at Ventura College Gallery 2, 4667 Telegraph Road in Ventura. Call for gallery hours: (805) 648-8974.

“Fallen Icons,” installation by Lezlie Kussin, through May 22 at Gallery One One One’s Alternative Space, 34 N. Palm St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri., 4-8 p.m.; Sat., noon-5 p.m. (805) 641-0111.

Art City, 31 Peking St. in Ventura. Call for gallery hours: (805) 648-1690.