Seat of Creativity

It’s functionally art, and it’s artfully funky. It’s another show of work from off the beaten path at Art City II, which goes by the mouthful, yet ingenuous, “An Industrial, Organic Functional Art Show.”

In the gallery, the ambience is at once homey and surreal. The space is full of furnishings and accessories fashioned from materials fresh from nature’s supply yard, and/or the scrap heap of post-industrial society. The point could be made that natural, organic materials recently co-opted for use by artists, and decaying, rusting castoffs from the man-made domain are somehow meeting in the middle, retreating from and returning to original nature.

But generally in this show, such philosophical asides are just that, asides. At root, this is art one uses, and sits on, and sets things on. There are couches made from logs and unpolished wood, and tables of driftwood. Art City head Paul Lindhard has made a snappy, if less than cushiony, chair from travertine marble, not far from Flintstone culture. Robert Eder’s serpentine lamp design places the lighting fixture at the end of a long and slithering pole, looking like an alien eye at the end of a tentacle-like creature.

What grabs the viewer’s eye immediately upon entering the space is the huge, gangly construction made from gnarled tree limbs, which hangs precariously from the rafters. This makes a starkly clear distinction from ordinary furniture showrooms, if the other pieces on display hadn’t already tipped you off. Suspended just above a smooth marble orb on the floor, the limb construct seems to engage in some metaphysical dialogue, between wood and stone.

Art on the walls continues the theme, as in Robert Wilson’s relief piece made from gently crumpled sheet metal, with hints of rust adding accents of color. From behind the surface, colored lights emit tiny beams through a few well-placed holes.

Off in a corner is an elevated roost, a nook with an ergonomic chair and a broad drawing board. It looks like the kind of weird meditative outpost from which the ideas in this room could have come. This is one of those surprising, unpretentious shows that bemuses and tickles the imagination, and invites a sit.

* “An Industrial, Organic Functional Art Show,” through Aug. 30 at Art City II Gallery, 31 Peking St., Ventura. Gallery hours: noon-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; (805) 648-1690.

Meriting Attention: The annual Merit Award show has landed at the Buenaventura Gallery. It offers a kind of one-stop overview of the artists we’re likely to see throughout the year, and mostly with their best foot forward.

The first prize award in painting went to Jane McKinney, a worthy recipient, for her work “Time at Rest.” One of her ongoing series of mystically charged landscape pieces, this one depicts a joining of two ambiguous sloping hillsides, a sliver of light creeping between them. The edges are soft, the effect not quite impressionistic, with landscape that broaches abstraction, and in a signature idiom that continues to intrigue.

In 3-D art, a first prize was awarded to Margy Gates’ “Cave Art Series X,” influenced by Native American imagery. That piece is in marked contrast with her other works in the show, conventional watercolors, which nicely convey landscape and floral subjects.

Not all the watercolor work here is conventional, however. Norman Kirk’s “Mission Images” is stark, semiabstract and in black and white. Suzanne Lamb indicates her twisted sense of humor in “A Dog’s Life in Hell,” with its evocations of Hades and canine forms.

Speaking of animals and the afterlife, Duane Simshauser’s “Deer in a Distant World” is an assemblage combining the artist’s pastel painting style and such found objects as driftwood and deer skulls, woven into a ritualistic effect. Judee Hauer’s “Wall Flower” is an assemblage that literally screens in its gathering of found objects.

In the landscape department, Sumiko’s piece, “Meadow,” exerts a quiet fascination, engaging the eye by small, subtle degrees. She portrays a green-suffused swatch of landscape but shows a unique sense of how to balance imagery, working her way in and out of clarity.

Carlisle Cooper’s large painting, “Seated Woman with Shawl,” envisions its subject in a characteristic style that takes the cues of Cubism into a different brand of dynamism. This piece, like many of Cooper’s portraits, captures the motion and the restlessness of a being in space--even if the subject is a seated woman. Stasis is not allowed.

Other pieces of note: Amy Kumler’s “Subtlety,” a cryptic photographic portrait of a woman; Betty Buckner’s still-spirited still life “Onion Harvest”; Stephanie Elise’s evocative, and moody, watercolor portrait “Mood Swings”; Katherine McGuire’s expectedly airy and graceful townscape “Poli St. III”; and Shirley Ransom’s dream-laden, candy-colored painting of a row of Victorian houses.

* Merit Award Show, through Aug. 22 at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; noon-6 Sunday; (805) 648-1235.