Smaller Than a Shoe Box . . .

In a world of big-shouldered ambition, working small has much to recommend it. Liberated from pressures to pump up an idea or a technique to out-sized dimensions, artists often produce more fully realized and cogent results.

But small also has a way of tumbling over the line into cute and contrived. The title of a traveling show at Brea Gallery--”The 6th Annual International Shoebox Sculpture Exhibition”--makes a whimsy-hater fear the worst. Art that fits in a shoe box? That sounds depressingly similar to artist-decorated go-carts or miniature “collectibles.”

Fortunately, this 75-piece exhibition--assembled by two sculpture professors at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery--includes a wide range of approaches by conceptualists and realists, mavericks and moralists. Although much of the work is unexceptional, there are enough captivating pieces to warrant a visit.

Some of the art is keenly, even poignantly, evocative of the artists’ nationalities, while other works speak the international language of postmodern art.

There is something innately appealing about the subtle tactile qualities in Japanese artist Kimio Tsuchiya’s “Light and Darkness,” a block of tightly compressed burnt matches--seen from the top--that abuts an identically sized rectangle of striated driftwood.

But the rigidly aligned matches also recall the Japanese saying about the need to hammer down the nail that stands up--in other words, to stamp out nonconformity. The burned state of the matches suggests an act of retribution. In contrast, the concentric curving patterns in the driftwood evoke the surface of a calm body of water and the larger harmonies of nature.

Reykjavik resident Haraldur Jonsson, one of several artists who used shoe boxes in their work, covers his in gray electrical tape to make “Icelandic Darkness,” which he describes in a catalog as “transportable darkness from one island to another.” The resulting mental picture of Scandinavian winter is enough to make a Californian grin and bear El Nino.

Senegalese artist Moussa Sakho’s “Horloge” (clock)--a box made from discarded metal containers that once held Sprite, Heineken and a French instant tuna dish--evokes the thrifty adaptations and cross-cultural milieu of the West African nation, once a French colony.

The three-dimensional outline of a strangely cloven foot that covers part of a “found” clock face attached to the box suggests a collision of tribal and Western notions of time.

Seung-Teak Lee made his tightly bound column of South Korean paper money in 1996, before the recent steep devaluation of Asian currency. But the untitled piece, which merges the stiff gravity of a formal, traditional society with the contemporary cult of consumerism, now seems rather prescient.

Unusual materials and an “outsider” mentality vivify several other works.

France’s Paca Sanchez constructed “Rosine”--a classic modernist abstraction enlivened by contrasting textures and colors--from compacted kernels of rice and vegetable pieces. By using foodstuffs in place of the expected wood or bronze, Sanchez evokes the primal, nurturing aspect of art. Replacing the hallowed, permanent materials of modernism with perishables also brings the hauteur of modernism down to earth.

Olivier Leroi, another French artist, attached a bobbin covered with lengths of different-colored thread to the center of a vaguely shoe-shaped wire form. This untitled piece has an elfin charm that relates to a type of current work known as “pathetic” art. The humble materials, the irregular, obviously hand-bent wire and the tiny mess of the thread ends create an oddly emotional resonance.

The French certainly seem to have a knack for diminutive pieces that linger in the mind. Bernard Calet’s curious “Mobile Home Image”--a cluster of detachable, variously sized “units” with tracing paper walls--breaks apart to reveal anonymous, grainy images of landscapes that seem neither urban nor suburban but something uncomfortably in-between.

For some reason, the Americans in the show are swamped, for the most part, by gimmickry and banal imagery. But the most successful one-liner belongs to Komar and Melamid, the internationally known Soviet emigres who live in New York.

Their “Freedom Can” is an ordinary tin can whose label, sprinkled with stars and grainy stripes, reads: “FREEDOM Copyright New! Made in U.S.A.” It’s the same crass hucksterism that made this country great, by gum, dryly proposed as the nation’s real foreign policy.

* “The 6th Annual International Shoebox Sculpture Exhibition” continues through Feb. 27 at the Brea Gallery, 1 Civic Center Circle. Wednesday, Saturday-Sunday, Noon-5 p.m; Thursday-Friday, noon-8 p.m. $1; 18 and younger free; free Thursday nights for those who live, work or study in Brea. (714) 990-7730.