Identifying Marks

Artists who work for art institutions are often better known for their decisions about other people’s art than the aesthetic choices they make on their own behalf.

Though Tyler Stallings, director of programs at the Huntington Beach Art Center, has been showing his rather inscrutable outer space-related installations in Los Angeles for several years, his growing reputation has more to do with shows he curates for the center.

Happily, the first Orange County airing of Stallings’ art--in “Strangers in the Night,” a three-person show at Gallery Paradiso in Costa Mesa--coincides with a promising change in his work.

The new pieces are paintings--most of them apparently brushed or spilled on top of photographs--that alternate between clarity and willful murkiness, the better to investigate notions of identity.

“Rolodex, Full” is a small image of the familiar office accessory, each tab divider edge neatly demarcated with a skinny pencil line. This anonymous object bathed in a nimbus of light (a fluorescent halo, as it were) may be full of names, but it is utterly secretive and unrevealing.

Stallings added patches and pools of paint to a group graduation photo to make “In a Row, High School Boys.” Emphasizing the figures’ uniformity (all have black hair, white shirts, black trousers), he also muddies their bodies and faces with a scum of brownish liquid that has dried and wrinkled, suggesting the passage of time.

In a similar vein, “Trophies Over the Years”--a view of trophies and plaques obscured with soaked-in pink paint--suggests a dim, rose-colored memory of past glories, so remote that the specifics of each triumph no longer can be remembered.

“Weight Lifter, Female” and “Weights, Stacked” hang next to each other: two tiny paintings, one cheesily aggressive, the other quietly self-effacing. In both, identity is revealed as a product of the tension between expectation and appearance.

An eruption of silver paint obscures the head of the weightlifter, who wears a bikini and makes a dainty gesture with the red-nailed fingers of one hand. The pose, so stereotypically “feminine,” seems somehow bogus, as if compensating for the viewer’s expectations.

Looking rather like a stack of pocket change, the silvery “weights” persuade the viewer of their weightiness only by virtue of the graduated series of numbers marked on their sides.

Stallings pursues his theme of identity in a painting of a carnival booth offering likenesses for $6 (“Silhouettes”) that are just little black sperm-like blobs in frames (though, of course, if they were sperm, they’d be encoded with tons of identifying features--not that we could see them).

There is a slightness to these works, but their humble dimensions are well calibrated to their effect, and they have a subtle visual appeal.

Phyllis Green and Simone Adels (whose work Stallings selected for a recent show at the Huntington Beach center) join him in “Strangers in the Night,” organized by Meg Linton, curator of exhibitions at the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach.

Generously equipped with protrusions and orifices, and blazing with bright color, Green’s imaginary mixed-media pieces could be much-magnified primitive organisms dressed by Versace.

The best piece, “Reptilia Musica,” is a mottled ceramic pipe shape with leather-covered tentacles poking every which way as if waving helplessly. This creature reclines (if that’s the word) on a velvet and satin pillow, as if awaiting someone to tease it into life by “playing” it. The musical, sexual and quasi-zoological qualities interweave in a provocative way.

Other pieces by Green, however, are too closely locked in to one cutesy image (a boat, a clock) or swamped by a fatal dose of whimsy. Though one creature with contrasting-colored “ruffs” around its tentacles may be charming, a menagerie of them soon wears thin.

Adels also disappoints in this show, with objects designed to highlight tiny irregularities in the gallery’s physical construction.

A varnished strip on the concrete floor (“Tablet”) subtly calls attention to a crack that is also memorialized in a rubbing on a long sheet of adding machine paper (“Widow”). A tiny gold-plated bolt, exhibited on a pedestal (“House”), is a copy of a bolt lodged in the wall just above the varnished concrete.

But once viewers’ attention is drawn to such previously invisible details, the value of these pieces seems to be exhausted. Visually thin, they don’t pose interesting questions about architectural space or the vagaries of a building’s internal response to weathering and geological stress. Ultimately, the work seems too precious for its own good.

BE THERE

“Strangers in the Night,” a group show, continues through Wednesday at Gallery Paradiso, 1604 Babcock St., Costa Mesa. Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Free. (714) 650-3690.