Visual Arts

Creative thinking at a few of Orange County’s smaller art exhibition venues promises to punctuate the coming year.

Ruben Ortiz-Torres, a much-lauded artist who divides his time between Los Angeles and Mexico City, will have his first survey show at the Huntington Beach Art Center (Sept. 12-Nov. 8), curated by Programs Director Tyler Stallings. Ortiz-Torres’ work in photography, painting, video and installation reflects peculiar and pervasive misinterpretations of one culture by another.

Brad Spence, acting director at the UC Irvine Art Gallery, has chosen work by Yukinori Yanagi (March 3-April 4). The young Japanese artist, included in the 1997 Venice Biennale, is known for his wry and subtle musings on national identity. His best-known project consists of ant farms made of colored sand in flag patterns: As the ants went about their business, the flags gradually blended together or disappeared.

Of the year’s themed shows, the most tantalizing is “Juvenescence,” coming to Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University in Orange on Oct. 19 (through Nov. 20). Curator Maggi Owens is rounding up work by mostly little-known, up-and-coming artists who use images of children or adolescents to address issues of vulnerability and eroticism.

The Huntington Beach center continues to lead the county in forward-looking shows. Its other top contenders include “The Unreal Person: Portraiture in the Digital Age” (April 25-June 14), guest-curated by free-lancer Irit Krygier, and “Alan Rath: ‘Robot Dance’ and Other Sculpture” (June 27-Aug. 16), organized by Renny Pritikin, chief curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

The portraiture exhibition deals with the way in which computer technology (including morphing and seamless cut-and-paste techniques) has made possible a new kind of fictional photography. Artists include Meg Cranston, Richard Hawkins, William Wegman, Pae White and Joseph Santaromanna. Rath, an electrical engineer from MIT, makes computer-controlled objects with a disarming human presence.

At Cal State Fullerton’s Main Art Gallery, “Last Dreams of the Millennium: The Reemergence of British Romantic Painting” (Feb. 8-March 12) spotlights the work of such contemporary artists as John Virtue and Tony Bevan, whose out-sized landscape and figurative paintings are imbued with intense emotion.

Historical shows announced for ’98 include “Manuel Neri: The Early Works, 1953-1978,” which pays tribute to the expressively textured work of the Bay Area Figurative school’s lone sculptor; it comes to the Orange County Museum of Art (Jan. 10-April 19) from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The year’s most ambitious project is the Laguna Art Museum’s “Art Colonies and American Impressionism” (Oct. 17-Jan. 10, 1999). Guest-curated by Deborah Solon, an American painting specialist in New York, and former Irvine Museum curator Janet Blake, the exhibition will examine early 20th century American painters (among them such luminaries as Childe Hassam and John Twachtman) in terms of their clustered--and cloistered--lives in small picturesque towns on the East and West coasts. The show’s broad scope may yield some valuable insights about an enduring social phenomenon in American art.