Hidden Life

If you haven’t been to the Albinger Archeological Museum lately, or at all, now’s a good time to pay a visit. It’s a modest structure, housing artifacts dug up from Ventura’s history--variously Chumash, Spanish and Chinese--and leading to an actual dig site next to the Mission. It is home to secrets of past lives.

And currently, tucked between aged findings and artifacts are the small, resonant works of Jane McKinney. Over the past couple of years, McKinney’s series of distinctive, enigmatic landscape works have appeared regularly around the area. But in this particular space--chock-full, as it is, with physical manifestations of history and culture--the paintings have an added strangeness. In this place, a bottle is more than a bottle.

Likewise, McKinney’s landscapes, moody vistas done in pastel on sandpaper, are like windows into secret lives of their own. A hedge is more than a hedge.

The basic template of this ongoing series is simple: Bushes, hedges and other vegetation are viewed as dark, huddling masses set into in the waning, transitional illumination of twilight. Light creeps in around and in between the plant forms, suggesting the pull of a distant life force, in pieces with matter-of-fact titles like “Break in the Hedge” and “Early Evening.” The relationship between light and form becomes the subplot of these images.

There is power to be harnessed from the patient, recurrent study of a particular idea or image, as seen in Monet’s haystacks or Soutine’s meat portraits. The subjects themselves are relevant to a point, but the process of repeated artistic observation creates a life and a meaning of its own.

At face value, McKinney’s landscapes look simple, even obsessive, variations on a theme. Below the surface, though, something intriguing and ambiguous this way comes. It’s a welcome sight, especially in a setting like the Albinger.

* Jane McKinney, through May 10 at Albinger Archeological Museum, 113 E. Main St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-2 p.m., Wed.-Fri.; (805) 648-5823.

CLU Exhibit: Norwegian photographer Grete Kvaal set out to chronicle the rugged life of a reindeer-herding woman in a project called “Karen Anna and her Siida” (a siida being an extended family that herds together). As seen in a fascinating exhibition of images at Cal Lutheran University’s new Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Humanities, it’s another world.

With touches both artful and anthropological, Kvaal gives us a vividly etched portrait of a lifestyle in a far-flung corner of the world. The far northern Saami people remain a rare indigenous culture relatively untainted by the increasingly homogenous influence of contemporary, mass-media-induced reality.

Our protagonist, Karen, weathered of face and hardy to the bone, is seen interwoven into a profusion of antlers and rough terrain, attending to a way of life dating to the 1600s. Since reindeer themselves are rare and mythologized creatures, they add mystique to the built-in exoticism of the imagery. In a different, anomalous image, we find Karen strolling the aisles of a brightly lit market, looking a bit out of place in her fanciful, traditional garb.

Kvaal also shows works from her “Sand” series.

* “Women and Their Reindeer Herds,” photography by Norwegian Grete Kvaal, through May 10 at Cal Lutheran University, 60 W. Olsen Road in Thousand Oaks, Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Humanities. Gallery hours: 8 a.m.-8 p.m., Mon.-Fri.; (805) 493-3489.