Transforming the Ordinary With a Touch of Humor

Two artists display their work, and their sense of humor, in a show called “Out of the Ordinary” at Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks. In the assemblage work of Susan Sandler and the watercolor and acrylic paintings of Austine Morris, the artists are grappling with and reshaping ordinary things, pushing toward a personal language of expression.

The push to transform and transcend the everyday is nothing new, of course, but a dominant strain in culture during this century. These artists take the task to heart, but lightly: Rather than intellectualize the process or reduce it to conceptual schemes, they rely on simple, consistent artistic means and a tendency toward art as eye massage.

Sandler’s pieces are, mostly, wonderfully evocative constructions in which the interplay of two- and three-dimensional art blends with clever kitsch. Like a miniaturist who finds delight in concocting little worlds that are slightly askew, she happily combines elements of paintings, found objects and invented contexts.

Various modes fuse in “The Pond,” with a painting of woods in the back, buttressing a horizontal platform where actual tree limbs and a tiny, leafy pool of water extend the flat realm of the painting into real space.

“Thunder in the Key of” is a freely associated mix of imagery, including actual piano hammers, an iron grate and a small painting of a cityscape under a stormy sky.

“Down on the Farm” looks like an experiment in set design for a surreal movie: A painting of fields in the background builds from flat space to relief-like ridges; wooden constructions of a farmhouse and picket fence frame a small metal Chevrolet bumper.

In a very different, but related way, Morris proceeds on the art-making path with an innocent glee. The imagery is naive in a way, childlike in its palette of bright, cheery colors and unfettered assembly of shapes and in a manner free of the wink-wink irony of some artists.

In Morris’ paintings, colors and shapes collide, interlocking and overlapping in ways that suggest a crude Cubist attitude. Figures and faces advance and recede in the compositions, like characters half-formed and ephemeral to the core.

The raw effects and scant concept for polish or structure account for the charm of the work. This art, like Sandler’s, is anything but arcane, and anything but ordinary.

* “Out of the Ordinary,” works by Susan Sandler and Austine Morris, through Friday at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; (818) 789-6012.

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Media Mixers: The artworks of Jane and Paul Bouchard, at the Burbank Creative Arts Center Gallery, fall on the far side of tradition in their respective media. She makes sculptures with materials rescued from the scrap heap, more orderly than you’d expect from a bunch of junk. For his part, he creates relief pieces, verging on the sculptural. Somewhere in the attitudinal middle, they meet.

Paul’s “Flag” series of watercolors considers a tattered flag with a visual effect that mimics printmaking. His cast-paper pieces, with pulpy, irregularly shaped fragments, beg implicit questions: objects or representations, paintings or sculptures?

For Jane Bouchard, bent rusty metal bands, salvaged hunks of crumpled metal and rugged wood blocks are the provisions of a distinctive aesthetic. These elements are tastefully gathered into the sculpture “Village Fire,” evoking the aftermath of a cataclysm.

“Adrift in Time Kansas,” meanwhile, states an evocative and ambiguous case, just by virtue of its graceful balance of elements. An unpolished metal base, a rusty hoop and a conical protrusion add up to a piece with no easy explanation.

It could be coming out of an abstract approach, or it could be an illustration of the artist’s own private Kansas. Either way, it finds its own artistic resonance.

* Mixed-media work by Paul and Jane Bouchard, through today at Burbank Creative Arts Center Gallery, 1100 W. Clark Ave. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; (818) 238-5397.