Finders, Keepers

With tongue only barely in cheek, they call their show “Out of the Americas,” and the two artists now at the Ojai Center for the Arts are literally that. Assemblage artist and painter Carmen Abelleira- White is a Cuban-born artist living in Ojai; photographer Hope Frazier has spent considerable time capturing images in the “other” Americas, Central and South.

The pair met in 1985 at one of Abelleira-White’s blithely subversive “Art DeTour” events, a kind of alternative affair coinciding with the annual Ojai Studio Artists Tour.

The art exhibition they have concocted celebrates Latin American culture, with a particularly Cuban spin. Abelleira-White’s unabashedly colorful assemblages are made from materials salvaged from the societal slag heap--”from roadsides, fished out of dumpsters or thrifted” is how she puts it in a hand-scrawled statement.

Her recycling aesthetic begins with the foundation, using old wooden doors as a base for elaborate constructions that have been given titles such as “Oregon Door,” “Chiclets Door,” and “Falling Guy Door.”

Interspersed with the door pieces are a series of semi-comic, toy robot-like creatures, jury-rigged together from junk and given such perky brand- name-inspired titles as “Lux Electro” and “Miss Buzz Bike.”

The main gallery of the center is packed with Abelleira-White’s works, and it seems extra dense by virtue of the ragged edges, loud colors and profusion of bottle caps, cigar labels, license plates and other tactile bric-a-brac.

Working with self-appointed structural parameters, Abelleira-White maintains a quality of symmetry and balance, and her work has an innate playfulness, along with a bucketful of junk.

If Abelleira-White incorporates actual, physical objects in the creative process, Frazier’s art is about depicting actual physical scenes from Latin America.

As Frazier puts it in a statement on the wall, “Carmen creates her pieces with found objects, and my medium is found moments.”

True to the dictates of photography, the best of those moments offers enlightening, surprising takes on commonplace things. “Island Dance” basks in an atmosphere of abandon, with its image of feet gone fuzzy. “Shining My Suede Shoes” is a close-up of a shoeshine boy’s slightly skeptical face, his hands busily in motion, as seen from the perspective of the photographer getting a shine.

The most striking of her images here is “Atitlan Reflection,” depicting a carpenter delivering an armoire by boat. By dint of an exacting camera angle, his face is reflected in the mirror on his furniture handiwork. It’s one of those images in which form and content meet, and come to near-perfect agreement.

* “Out of the Americas,” through December at the Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St. in Ojai. Gallery hours: Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; 646-0117.

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