Postgraduate Work

An alumni parade has settled into the CSUN Art Dome, where the group show called “Outlooks” brings back to the academic roost several artists who have found greater opportunities. And not all of them have chosen the fine-art world as their focus.

The show manages to be both a look at the trajectories of some former students, and, by extension, a broad survey of career options for the artistically minded. As any college counselor or pragmatic art teacher will tell you, there is a big creative universe beyond the Art World realm of galleries and collectors.

As much as the exhibition serves as a showcase for the university’s graduates, it is also one of those shows in which the willy-nilly diversity adds up to disorientation. The contrasts serve to undercut some of the show’s strengths. By bringing commercial artists, product designers and artists with more fragile conceptual agendas under the same roof, it’s hard to get a fix on any of it.

Nonetheless, there’s plenty to admire. The gifted artist known as Emek shows gumption and keen draftsmanship with his rock posters, which hark back to the golden era of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when rock poster art rose to expressive heights.

Emek toys with cultural cliches, as in his poster for Primus, in which the little Coppertone girl is not amused by the dog’s clutch on her bathing suit, which reveals a tattoo on the cheek. She turns around and zaps him with a ray gun. A Sex Pistols poster is more reductionist, weaving the band name into bar-code designs.

Ravi Sawhney channels his creative energy into work as an industrial designer, whose wares include sleek computer speakers, a bicycle brake lever and a high-capacity external disk drive. His display begs the question: Is it artistic or functional, or both?

In contrast, Wendy Wahl shows elaborate fiber-art pieces, including the refined paper and plaited wool construction, “Aperio Blanket, #3.” Farley Magadia has done airbrushed acrylic work for the show-biz industries, but her most striking piece here is an ad mock-up with a feminist slant. A woman, brandishing nothing but a snowboard and a pistol, taunts us with the text, “Who you callin’ Girlie?”

Things get more provocative in the back galleries, where more fine art-oriented work is hung. Large-scaled photo mono prints by Steve Peckman seem to exist in some poetic, hermetic domain between the real world of cumulus-choked skies and abstraction.

In the same gallery, the technical process veers toward the raw end of the spectrum in Erin Woodhall’s conceptual piece, “69 Blind Pricks.” It is a composite portrait of an Asian man, represented by numerous strips of photos snapped in a four-for-$1 photo booth, crudely pinned to the wall, like insect specimens. It plays like a statement about identity lost.

In another gallery, roughly devoted to conceptual sculptural work, Katherine Ng shows her delicately woven and manipulated paper works. Her aesthetic sometimes incorporates the analogy of origami, but with a dark thematic undertone, as in “1,000 Lives Yet Unfolded.” Here, a pile of fastidiously made origami birds are penned in behind a pane of glass and a border of Lithium pill bottles, defining a conflict between innocence and depression.

For David Lieb, the artistic sacred cow waiting to be slaughtered--or at least reshaped--is the tradition of figurative sculpture. His Dr. Seuss-ish assembly of ambiguous body parts called “glanets” and his truncated body parts of molded foam and pantyhose adopt an anti-romantic view of body art.

There is something vaguely, and not so vaguely, apocalyptic about Lynn Aldrich’s sculpture, which hints at renewal after a cataclysm. Or is the interpretation in the psyche of the beholder? “Fresh Start (the New Earth)” finds a huge plastic bag stuffed with tiny bits of foam, with a Tupperware bowl of foam on top. Will the new Earth be built from foam and Tupperware? “Small Shelf Life” is a cupboard full of unmarked tin cans, like survival rations in a fallout shelter.

Some of the most refreshingly spartan art in the show is by Carolee Toon. Her exquisitely finished and sanded wooden plaques technically may be relief pieces, but their cool colors and flat surfaces echo minimalist painting, while their asymmetrical forms lean toward organic design models.

We’re also made aware of the compromised, processed naturalness of her materials. She works, after all, with plywood, and it has been smoothed and sanded at an angle to reveal the glued layers, albeit in a sensuous way.

This is a group show that serves to point out the fragmented and often misunderstood nature of the artistic work force. These artists, shaped by time spent on this campus, have ventured forth and found suitable avenues of expression and revenue. That’s where the connection ends.

* “Outlooks,” through Nov. 8 at the CSUN Art Dome, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. Hours: noon-4 p.m., Monday and Saturday; 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Friday; (818) 677-2226.

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FRINGE-DWELLING ALERT: The San Fernando Valley is home to some of the City of Angels’ fringe areas, geographically and artistically speaking. Who hasn’t noticed the barren regions and strange rock formations at the north end of the Valley that pass for the Wild West in classic westerns?

And there are art spaces in them thar hills. Some fine art has been seen in the Century Gallery in Sylmar and the Village Square Gallery in Montrose, and now at McGroarty Arts Center in Tujunga, in McGroarty house, a historic landmark.

Currently, M.W. Lindenmeyer is showing a modest clutch of paintings that benefit from a lightly salted wit and understated pictorial skill. We find a mermaid-barmaid, sweeping up in a saloon, a cigarette dangling from the lip and her tail afloat.

Best of all, we find two paintings of that kitsch landmark, Santa Claus Lane, near Carpinteria, where the sight of a grinning Santa and Frosty the Snowman looming against a moody sunset sky might seem like bizarre fiction, when, on the contrary, it’s a strange fact. If we hadn’t seen it a million times with our own eyes, we’d dismiss it as a hallucination or the fantasy of an overworked painter.

* M.W. Lindenmeyer, through Friday at McGroarty Arts Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga. Call for hours: (818) 352-5285.