States of the Arts

Sculptor Richard Aber, an established artist based in Summerland, can be counted on to tweak conventions. His work tends to make statements underlined with questions, as if to say, “Yes, sculpture is a fine thing, but what is it, really? What can it be in the late 20th century?”

In the case of his work now at the Ventura College Gallery 2, sculpture consists of a series of small bronze icons and designs scattered--almost littered--on the gallery carpet, as if the castings of a blacksmith-aesthete. Just by the nature of the multiple shapes laid out, we’re asked to view the pieces as a kind of nonlinear alphabet, waiting to be decoded.

But there’s a more elemental presence. The title “Bronze Burners” refers both to the process of creation and the burning ideas behind it. The casting process is documented on the wall with small color photographs of each shape on fire, born through extreme heat. The artist looks at creative combustion, and the concrete aspect of art-making, from more than one angle.

In a different yet complementary way, Jane Burgunder’s two-dimensional pieces in the gallery explore the artistic process. They depict shapes--tubular loops or knotty lines--against a milky background. Her imagery exists in a kind of suspended state, emotionally and visually, not complete but also far from incomplete.

In the New Media Gallery, Prentiss Cole shows conceptual assemblages based on texts that more or less paint a picture of existential alienation. In one work, nine vaguely figurative pieces hang on vertical poles, exerting a ghostly presence at the back of the gallery. It’s like a social gathering stripped of social intercourse, aptly entitled “Is Anyone Listening or Are We Just Talking at the Same Time?”

* Richard Aber, Jane Burgunder and Prentiss Cole through Friday at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road, Ventura. Gallery hours vary; (805) 648-8974.

*

Meaty Motions: There’s no punctuation in the title of the group show called “Rubber Icing Velvet Meat,” now at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, and there’s poetic justice in that. The artists involved--all hailing from Las Vegas (except Jane Callister, who left Las Vegas to teach at UCSB)--cleverly mix their metaphors and their materials, in ways that usually cop an ironic, post-Pop attitude.

Nothing is as it seems. The rippling textures of Victoria Reynolds’ paintings, in frilly ornate frames, suggest flowers but actually are close-ups of meat products and tripe. Mary Warner’s seemingly straightforward floral studies are set in a tawdry context, on black velvet.

Callister presents a prankster’s imitation of confectionary delicacies--the “icing” in the show. She works up canny blends of the prim and the lurid, as with the shadowy eroticism in “Dripped Cream” or the anarchic amphibian feeding frenzy of “Mosh Pit.” Then there is Christine Siemens, who shows big droopy fabric artifacts, like bizarre mutants from the pillow factory. The comforts of home have run amok, reduced to shrapnel-like forms.

One is tempted to read too much into the Vegas connection: Have these artists channeled, both artistically and conceptually, the neon and glitz of the Vegas Strip into their palettes, which contain glaring, big brush strokes? It’s a deceptively breezy show, funny on the surface and with a sober aftertaste.

Also at the arts forum, the gifted Santa Barbara-based artist Mary Heebner shows recent works, inspired by a 1995 visit to Iceland, and created in conjunction with poetry and a journal. Her past ventures in collage and multimedia works, as well as rustic landscape painting, converge in large abstract pieces made of pigment, binder, fiber, wax and graphite.

We get a sense of a rugged, geological frontier, intertwined with references to female form. Sometimes outlines of female nudes are cryptically woven into the imagery, an allusion to the female character in the mythic life force of Gaea.

* “Rubber Icing Velvet Meat,” and Mary Heebner’s “Pangaea: The Iceland Paintings,” through Saturday at Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday; noon-5 p.m. Sunday; (805) 966-5373.