A Bridge to Brooklyn : Small in Scale but Big in Creativity, Works Show Innovative Spirit on the East River’s Other Side

Many Manhattanites snobbishly view the New York borough of Brooklyn as a distant and unlikely destination. But for the past decade, young artists in search of cheaper rents, more room and a modicum of independence from the narrow dictates of the art world have journeyed across the East River to Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood that is just a subway stop or two from the big city.

In a sparkling show of diverse and inventive work at Cal State Fullerton’s Main Art Gallery, graduate students Susan Joyce (a Brooklyn native) and Wiwan Suittiram pay tribute to the creative energy of the Other Borough.

One difficulty in curating such an exhibition is that there is no uniform style or outlook that neatly ties the whole thing together. But Joyce, who selected the artists, wisely didn’t try to shoehorn the art into artificial categories. Her good eye is all the show needs.

Still, some commonalities are obvious. Like their savvy contemporaries in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the 20 Brooklynites--a majority of whom are women--tend to use humble materials, work small and rely on their wits.

Dana Kane plays with the illustrations on sewing pattern packets of pert young women dressed in the featured garment. In “Kelly Girl Patterns,” she replaces the women’s dresses and skirts with flat, brightly colored abstract shapes of the sort that painter Ellsworth Kelly made famous. The way they flare out at acute angles amusingly suits the piquant poses of the models.

Norma Markley uses tiny sewing stitches in place of drawing and household paint “color chips” as tiny, ready-made paintings. Typewritten words function as a sort of visual and mental perfume.

In one of Markley’s works, the outlines of a mattress and box spring appear on two pale paint chips labeled with their decorator color names, “bouquet” and “cashew,” which playfully evoke female and male protagonists. Arrayed vertically, between the two images, the words “bulky, sticky, desire” suggest physical qualities of both the mattresses and the invisible people who make love on them.

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Charles Spurrier, represented by two untitled works, coaxes a daft lyricism from bits of cellophane, electrical tape, wood-grained Contact paper, plastic and even tooth-marked blobs of clay. His 1997 piece combines the airy appeal of floating vinyl ovals punched full of holes with wood panels with dramatic dark blue highlights that turn the grain pattern into a sort of faux-Expressionist parody of itself.

Mary Ziegler’s deliciously off-kilter sensibility reinvents the deterministic realm of mechanized sculpture. Hapless metal filings in “Limbo” are ceaselessly worried and batted about by three implacable magnets. This tiny drama--a miniature form of a basic human struggle--is absolutely riveting.

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Other intriguing work includes Jane Fine’s painting, “Buster,” an appealingly ungainly clustering of small, bright, irregular shapes, and Jennifer Weber’s “Flit Fluttin’ Fly Fly,” a casual grouping of unframed photographs in various sizes that calls attention to the way a traveler perceives and interprets unfamiliar sights.

Even when pieces seem thin, gimmicky or derivative, they generally have something positive going for them. While Mery Lynn McCorkle’s stuffed animal pieces (“Memory Boxes”) are deja vu all over again, her deadpan text about their histories is a droll delight.

Virtually everyone in the show is unknown out here, except for Spurrier (shown at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica) and Fred Tomaselli (rightly celebrated for his use of actual prescription and illicit drugs in visually stimulating compositions), whose work was seen last year in a one-man show at the Huntington Beach Art Center.

There’s not much point in comparing Brooklyn with Orange County (for starters, no Los Angeles artist would move here in search of cheaper rents!), but it’s hard not to wish for a local cadre of artists as promising as this lot.

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* “Redefinitions: A View From Brooklyn,” through Dec. 11, Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd. Admission is free (weekday parking in Lot A: $1.50; weekend parking in lot D: free). Hours: Noon-4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday; 3-7 p.m. Wednesday; 2-5 p.m. Sunday. (714) 278-3262.