Studies in Contrast

The Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, one of the Valley’s most reliable sources of worthwhile art year-round--even in the scorching final stretch of summer--has a policy of presenting two artists per month, who share the front gallery space, one wall facing the other.

This not only expands the art forum but also has the effect of luring viewers into a compare-contrast mode, seeking out or concocting links between artworks that are sometimes barely related.

In the exhibits by Bonese Collins Turner and Teri L. Garcia, first impression yields more differences than similarities. Yet, on closer scrutiny, there is less distance than one might have assumed. Turner’s seeming complexity and Garcia’s seeming directness are deceptive.

Turner creates watercolor pieces with liberal references to Native American symbolism. In these composite images, there is a convergence of landscape elements, allusions to spirituality and superimposed symbols. “Malaleucca I” finds trees on a pale, dreamlike ground, with leaves blending into bird feathers and, in the hazy distance, industrial reality represented by the windmills on a wind-energy farm.

Another intriguing piece, which could be an allegory for Native American displacement is “The Voice of the Turtle.” A desert-scape is speckled with a half-dismantled Native American dwelling, bones and an empty turtle shell. A lightning storm dominates the sky and the dirt underfoot reveals a deep chasm, as if from an earthquake. It’s an image of transition, and not of a gentle sort.

With “Layered Cognition,” the inherent layering process of other pieces in the show is taken a step further, with overlapping pieces of paper supplying a hint of three-dimensionality. “Formation and Soulkeepers” departs from landscape entirely, instead depicting a swirling cosmic vortex or continuum, with a recurring image of a baby--a being fresh from God (or the gods).

In various arts, the temptation to tap into Native American cultural vocabulary has increased in recent years, an understandable desire to hearken to indigenous roots and a sense of lost, or banished, innocence. It’s risky business, but Turner manages to do so with enough personal expression and stylistic processing to give her works distinction.

Across the gallery, Garcia presents her ostensibly basic iconography of fruits and vegetables in still-life settings. From a distance, they appear as fine, delicately rendered watercolors, but there’s more.

Up close, her unusual method reveals itself. These pears, pumpkins, peaches and eggplant renderings are, in fact, created by means of intricate, multicolored skeins of hash marks in colored pencil, in a technique that functions as a lateral cousin of pointillism.

These images celebrate the aesthetics of still-life, creating a sense of timeless poise and beauty. But they are also subversive, in their own genteel way. Great, meticulous effort has gone into suggesting the appearance of effortlessness, and, in her hands, the art of drawing takes on a painterly grace.

BE THERE

Bonese Collins Turner, “Legend Series: Passages,” and Teri L. Garcia, “Observations,” through Aug. 28 at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tue.-Sat.; (818) 789-6012.