Scene on the Streets : Ventura ArtWalk brings varied exhibits of innovative works to audiences around town.

The immediate purposes of the ArtWalk, which overtakes Ventura twice a year, may seem self-evident. It lures people out to walk the streets, presumably in search of art, and to get a progress report on the redeveloping face of downtown Ventura.

The event also can have a provocative side effect, as last Saturday’s ArtWalk demonstrated. Artists, normally confined to the protective sanctum of the gallery, can go public.

Granted, store-window installations tend to be innocuous, more window dressing than artwork. But this time out, multimedia artist and sculptor Paul Benavidez has taken his work to the streets. Through Sunday, he is showing pieces in three storefronts that represent a new wrinkle in his own work as well as challenging the status quo on Main Street.

These are colorful, convoluted assemblages, pleasant enough to look at, but which also pose questions about the fragile nature of art and throwaway culture.

Benavidez’s new work is funky, fashioned from found materials and castoffs that seem fitting on this street of thrift stores and antique shops. The largest works appear in the windows of Ventura Business Machines. “Portrait of a Lady on a Painting” and “At Play in the Zone of Temponauts” are flamboyant constructions of fiberglass, plastic, hairbrushes and toys. Melted together, physically and contextually, they suggest a random pileup of stimuli, of modern-day information overkill.

At Ventura Bookstore, he shows a piece with a tilted painting frame as a basis, out of which juts another frame, showcasing a mutant duck-like creature made from a plastic spray bottle. Pink plastic piping swirls around the outer edge, like frilly cosmic debris.

Next door at Bonnie’s, Benavidez creates a more socially charged work with “Homage to Mothers in Black/Women in Black,” in reference to a pacifistic Israeli/Palestinian organization. Included in the assemblage are clothes hangers and sheet metal crumpled and folded to resemble fabric, a surreal heap of keys from a computer keyboard, and a shiny pistol. In this ambiguously narrative setting, peace and the luxury of complacency are fragile things.

The Livery Arts Center on Palm Street always has been a bit off the beaten path--bless its soul. So art there is expectedly different than what shows up on Main Street. At present, poet-artist Gwendolyn Alley’s show at the Alternative Artspace, “Impressions from the Shadowside,” explores both aspects of her expressive media.

Here, Alley’s poems are interspersed with numerous strips of fabric imprinted with body paintings, an idea crystallized in artist Yves Klein’s conceptual art in which nude females--slathered in “Klein blue” paint--created female nude forms. The sum effect in Alley’s show is a shadowy dance of figures, a presence that is partly sensuous and partly apparitional.

Head nearly out of town, and you find Art City II, now in the midst of “Erotika VI.” Each year, this show brings out a potpourri of visual double-entendres and variations on the infinitely variable theme of eroticism.

This year’s sampling seems to have a naturalistic subtext, where found object takes on an erotic tone. Joe Cardella’s suggestive “Bamboo Root” and Barbara Pedziwiatr’s “Prickled Balls”--dried plant matter resembling testicles--show how easily context sways interpretation.

Frank Lauran’s “Dancing Woman” is a swooping blend of forms adding up to a neo-Cubist nude study. Matt Harvey’s “A Republican Trying to Support Erotic Art” cheekily mixes a steel elephant, a marble orb and the vaguest hint of a sculptural nude. Russell Erickson goes to the heart of forbidden-fruit mythology with “Bobbing for Paradise,” an apple with a bite taken out and a serpent’s tongue protruding where we’d expect a worm.

Alisa Gabrielle shows whimsical paintings in which interlocking bits of anatomy are playfully out of proportion. In “Man Trying to Grasp Woman,” a puny man is dwarfed by a mythic, epic-scaled woman, a funny, in-your-face metaphor. Kostas’ paintings of sexual encounters, meanwhile, are semi-primitive, semi-ritualized fandangos of color and interlocking pieces.

That’s the good news. This year, too, the balance of taste tips to the lurid with Taras Tulek’s inappropriate and shabby collage piece, in which hard-core porn images are cut and pasted next to images from the Kamasutra. If the artist is trying to make a point about the timelessness of sexual curiosity and explicit imagery, something is lost in the translation. The piece is glaringly out of place, and casts a strange pall over the show, besides making it unsuitable for children.

Up at City Hall, photographer Lawrence Janss is showing a selection of works with the title “Photographs From the Last Decade.” Janss’ best pieces include “Pax Angel,” a sculpture in Oaxaca, Mexico, with dramatic lighting suggesting strange chiaroscuro effect, and images of land, sea and native population in the distant islands of Micronesia.

At the ArtWalk, in the course of wandering from venue to venue, the art can become a blur, but certain images are bound to jump out and speak to the attentive viewer.

Take, for instance, Bruce Houchin’s rough-hewn, thickly painted image, “Little Church in the Woods,” upstairs at Cafi Banca D’Italia, amid otherwise unremarkable artworks. The painting has a commanding presence and an almost folk-art directness, unhindered by pretension.

You never know when and where art will stop you in your tracks. That’s one of the ArtWalk’s messages, and one that never gets old.

BE THERE

Paul Benavidez, window installations through Sunday at Ventura County Business Machines, 432 E. Main St.; Ventura Bookstore, 522 E. Main St.; and Bonnie’s, 532 E. Main St., Ventura.

“Impressions From the Shadowside,” by Gwendolyn Alley, through Aug. 17 at Alternative Artspace, Performance Studio, 34 N. Palm St., Ventura. Tuesday-Friday, 4-8 p.m.; (805) 643-5701.

“Erotika VI,” through August at Art City II, 31 Peking St., Ventura. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday; (805) 648-1690.

“Photography of the Last Decade,” by Lawrence Janss, Ventura City Hall, 501 Poli St., second floor. Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; (805) 658-4726.