Little Illumination From ‘Light as Substance’

Light paints many of our best-remembered experiences: Sunlight glinting on a wave, glancing off a row of icicles, illuminating a stained-glass window. Moonlight and the glow of campfires. The grainy atmosphere of twilight and the private flicker of candlelight. The blinding light of the desert at midday.

So you might imagine an exhibition of art that deals specifically with the physical, emotional and spiritual qualities of light to be filled with marvelously subtle works. “Light as Substance,” an exhibition at Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery, is not that show. But it does have some redeeming features.

An elegantly designed catalog contains essays--by curator Jerry Burchfield, an artist who teaches photography at the college, and artist Clayton Spada--that discuss the history of light in art (photography, Impressionism, the Light and Space movement of the 1960s) as well as light-related advances in technology and issues in religion and metaphysics.

And there are a few truly magical pieces.

Angie Bray’s delicately radiant installation, “What . . . Now”--the most beautiful piece of hers I’ve ever seen--consists of rows of small, rectangular pieces of film dangling from the tips of pins stuck partway into the wall, like pieces in a quilt that have not yet been pieced together.

Light striking the film makes visible the ghostly images of dead trees, so pale as to be nearly invisible. Like dry leaves, the rectangles tremble now and then in the gallery’s air currents. Light glistens on the smooth surfaces and creates rows of reflections: slightly askew rectangles tinted pale rose, gray-green and pale gray. The effect is of a subdued yet rhythmically lively fabric pattern, a tender symphony of subtle tones.

Although Bray’s work wisely resists nudging the viewer toward a single definitive meaning, these quiet signs of life suggest that one answer to “What . . . Now” is the reassuring sequence of spring following winter and the possibility of renewed creativity following a period of mourning.

Tom La Duke’s “Breath of Light” is also a lovely thing; you’d never guess its chief component is Super Glue. Gleaming under a strong light, lines of glue are suspended in air like a fairy’s trapeze.

Hiroshi Sugimoto uses hours-long exposures to make black-and-white photographs of movie-house interiors. Illuminated solely by the light from a projected film (which reads simply as a brilliant white rectangle), these picture palaces reveal unexpected details. Architectural moldings stand out in the soft blackness, and the rows of seats become patches of darkness illuminated by pinpoints of light, like a convoy of fireflies.

Photographer Richard Misrach is well known for his unusual photographs of the natural world, in which long exposures give familiar sights a sense of unreality. In an image titled with an astronomer’s documentary precision--”Polaris Over Ak-Chin, 11. 5. 96, 11:42 p.m.-11.6. 96, 12:31 a.m.”--the desert sky at night becomes a molten mix of orange and yellow shot through with curving white dashed lines representing the stars.

Barbara Berk seems to be in search of an elusive aura in her installation, “Between Coming and Going.” Walking into the compact, translucent-walled space, a viewer immediately feels the intense heat emitted by 48 burning candles on tiny ledges that encircle the room, bathing it in an amber glow.

The single plume of smoke on the wall and the little piles of wax on the floor are reminders of the passage of time. But that’s too easy and obvious. Could Berk have meant the heat to evoke wry thoughts of hell in a would-be spiritual environment? The simplicity of the piece proves its undoing, yielding no striking metaphoric dimension.

Jim Merritt also relied too heavily on his raw materials in “Titled Sector,” an outdoor piece (in front of the art building) in which a cable links two tall, blue-painted stakes.

Unlike La Duke’s wondrous Super Glue construction (which also benefits from its miniature scale), Merritt’s is pedestrian. Observed in the bright midafternoon sun, the cable just looks like a cable, not (as the catalog note would have it) “a radiant line of reflected light.”

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Similarly, there’s nothing compelling about the interaction of sunlight and the metal surface of John Sanders’ homely, sprawling pyramidal sculpture, “Zephyr,” positioned between the theater and the administration building. It didn’t help to be carrying vivid memories of Richard Serra’s rhythmic and mysterious steel sculptures at the Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles, pieces that have enormous presence quite apart from the quality of their surfaces.

A third outdoor sculpture, Sheila Pinkel’s Native American-influenced “Solar Clocks II,” has become a launching pad for skateboarders. They have smashed through the painted wooden surface that functions as a seasonal sundial and tampered with the water-filled gnomon (sundial column), which catches the light reflecting from the campus duck pond.

While the thoughtless damage is deplorable, it also demonstrates how radically cultural values can shift over time. Ignorant of the markings on the piece, indifferent to its fragility, the skateboarders saw only a springy low-lying pyramidal object. For them, “light” means being able to zip through the air like a human asteroid.

* “Light as Substance,” through Tuesday at Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery, 9200 Valley View Road. Free. Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesday. Free talk by artists Simone Adels and Tom La Duke on Monday at 1 p.m. in the college’s Fine Arts Building, Room 112. (714) 826-5593.