After-Hours Art

Historically, art has often taken refuge on the fringes of society and of available real estate. Galleries and co-ops pop up in lofts, side streets and warehouse districts, where rent is cheap and hopes run high.

The Available Light Gallery, tucked away inconspicuously on a street in Burbank’s industrial section, belongs to that category of alternative art space. But there’s a critical difference.

By day, so to speak, Available Light is a company working with digital special effects for the film and television industries. The artists in this field, as in other specialties, have personal creative impulses not necessarily satisfied by their work. A copious, well-lit gallery space was created in the building to showcase such art.

“After Effects” is the second exhibition mounted in the gallery, and its title could be taken literally, presenting the wares of artists working after hours. The most intriguing art in the show cuts across cultural boundaries, touching on film visuals and fine-art schemes.

Rodd Miller’s paintings show him to be the surrealist of the bunch, mixing up contexts and ideas in ways that allude to Max Ernst and Terry Gilliam, by turns. A few paintings depict bizarre dwellings precariously perched on ledges and rocky spires. “Untitled (Self-Fulfilling Prophecy)” bows to the influence of Giorgio de Chirico, with its twilight palette and romantic view of lonely avenues.

Show business meets art business in “Untitled (Drifting into Consciousness).” Here, we see a small island, the visible tip of a potato-shaped form propped up with rickety wooden scaffolding, viewed in a cross-section with a fictional sea above a basement-like space. Its sly behind-the-scenes quality--as if we’re looking at a movie set--belies its irrational charm, in the long shadow of the post-surrealist painters.

Miller’s visions suggest the inherent subversion and re-creation of reality, which is Hollywood’s stock in trade. Even apart from obvious examples--films by David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and others--cinema is a medium that gets away with surrealism on a mass culture scale.

Michel Gagne’s paintings abound with references to gears and machines. These works could be machine blueprints, cropped and taken out of context, but they also echo art historical models, such as machine Cubism or the precisionist linearity of Charles Sheeler. The tangled gears in “Engines of Creation” cannily disguise a text reading “PRELUDE TO EDEN,” and “CHAOS” defines the moment at which the machine realm loses its sense of order. It’s like an explosion on the assembly line.

Of all the art on display here, William Arance’s images stem most directly from special-effects work. His seamless computer-generated action shots show old fighter planes in action--Hollywood magic at work. Steven Wilzbach’s photographs go in a very different direction, with their close-up views of walls and textures, which, stripped of their larger contexts, take on an abstract life of their own.

Some of the art here suggests work done on a lark, as a vehicle for stress relief away from the day-job drawing board. One such work is John Van Vliet’s cartoon, “The Effects of Time and Animation on the Body,” in which we see the gradual decay of an animator’s body, from a trim young upstart to a hunched-over coffee addict, 30 years later. Van Vliet also shows a few small figurative sculptures, including “Frustrated Man Shouting,” which owes more to comic page angst than to Edvard Munch.

Also on the whimsical front, Marsh Gray Covington deals with giddy, cartoony imagery, whether with the outlandish simplicity of “Big Meaty Meatballs” or the observation, a la “Far Side” of “Life is Strange, & Then Your House Shrinks.” Here, a befuddled pooch ponders a tiny house, apparently having just been subjected to an unseen force of shrinkage.

Speaking of shrinkage, Alan Wolfson is a compelling and fastidious miniaturist who shows tiny tableaux, mostly of vignettes of desolate-yet-warm New York scenes that Edward Hopper might appreciate. The realism of his micro-sets and their adaptability into a gallery setting is reminiscent of Michael McMillen, another artist who mixes work in film and art circles.

But in Wolfson’s work, the mode is micro, which demands close scrutiny from viewers. There is no human presence in his slices of subway scenes, scrappy apartments and assorted settings. But a buzz of human activity--at least the after-hours residue--exists nonetheless.

With Wolfson’s work, high levels of imagination and craftsmanship add up to a personal vision that manipulates our sense of what’s real. In other words, he’s working with ideas suitable to both the big screen and the art gallery sanctum. At its best, that duality defines Available Light Gallery’s promise for the area’s art scene.

BE THERE

“After Effects,” through July 19 at Available Light Gallery, 1125 S. Flower St., Burbank. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday-Saturday; (818) 842-2109.