Dazzling Display

The first thing that hits you is the color. There it is, charging the air of the Art Dome Gallery at Cal State Northridge--a whirl of bright yellows, oranges and deep reds set into vibrant relief against beds of black and dark blue. As seen in her impressive show “Private Landscapes, 1988-1997,” the noted Chicana artist Patssi Valdez demonstrates that she knows how to mediate between the everyday and the dreamlike, armed with an electric palette.

The color seems to render things dizzy, as in the painting called “Virgin’s Room.” Its hyper swatches of fluorescent orange and a tilted perspective induce vertigo, which may or may not have to do with virginity.

Valdez’ wild color sense conspires with other aspects of her art to create a cohesive, personalized style. These paintings evoke a nether world depicting domestic interiors with enough mysticism and distorted reality to imbue them with a kind of vivid enchantment. Culturally, they resonate with the magic realism tradition of Latin America, and the sense of folklore, processed through Valdez’ own vision.

What that translates to is a style somehow both fantastical and earthy. Via Valdez’ perspective, nothing is quite what it seems. Evidence of paranormal activity might be as blatant as in “The Kitchen,” with utensils taking on a life of their own, emitting spikes (is it fire or blood?). In “Room on the Verge,” brooms spring to life a la “Fantasia,” and ambiguous white cloths take flight.

Subtlety prevails in other paintings. In “Red Room,” a goldfish swims lazily, and a letter opener seems to have been willed into levitation by a Buddha sitting fat and happy on a shelf. “Little Girl in Yellow” is ostensibly a simple, descriptive portrait of a girl in front of a house. But we also find a strange, slightly ominous air, through the use of exaggerated perspective and creepy shadows, as well as the halo-like layer emanating from the girl in the yellow dress and pink socks.

In the back of the gallery, Valdez’ imagination expands into three dimensions with an installation piece simply called “The Living Room.” As in her paintings, but here constructed in real space, Valdez uses this site-specific “room” to upset the balance of what’s expected. Furniture is cockeyed, and emblems of both the Catholic and Hindu faiths mix with such secular bric-a-brac as a tiny, twirling disco ball and bitty sombreros and other tourist kitsch.

Altogether, the work has a gently bizarre, quasi-ritualistic ambience, like the show in general. With this work, Valdez expertly draws on her cultural and personal background to create a surreal sensibility, one that dazzles the eye and the mind.

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Visual/Body Politics: Also showing in the back gallery at CSUN is an exhibition entitled “The Body Is an Analog and Bend: Two Works on Sight” by Christina Fernandez. Fernandez’ work is conceptual in nature, examining the elusive connection between documentation and reality.

She looks inward with “Fourteen Childhood Photographs, 1965-1971,” an altar of snapshots of the artist as a child taken by her father and set up on tiers under plexiglass. The piece wrestles with the relationship of photographic evidence and identity, the captured image and the prospect of truth contained therein. As she says of these pictures, with a twinge of irony, “I was a very happy kid, judging only by the photographs, which fill in and enhance my vague memory of those times.”

Accompanying a series of sepia-toned photographs of a trip to Oaxaca, texts describe the artist’s vain attempt to learn something about herself in these ancient ruins. In another piece, we calmly read pathology reports on infants who died, with such notes as “retinal hemorrhage consistent with child abuse.” Responses of rage and sadness are coolly suppressed, hidden behind official documents. The lack of something tangible and explicit only adds to the discomfort, which is the precise point of this art.

BE THERE

Patssi Valdez, “Private Landscapes, 1988-1997,” and “The Body Is an Analog and Bend: Two Works on Sight” by Christina Fernandez, through Feb. 28 at CSUN Art Dome, 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge. Gallery hours: Mon. and Sat., noon-4 p.m., Tues.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; (818) 677-2226.