Rough Stuff

It’s hard to avoid the expectation of hilarity when heading to the upstairs gallery of Natalie’s Fine Threads to see a show called “Kansas City Alice and the Fraidy Kats.” Snickering frivolity seems built in.

Sure enough, a kind of humor, alternately dry and brusque, finds its way into the paintings and mixed-media works of Kansas City-bred and now Oak View-based artist Alex Alderete, blessed with a scruffy energy and no undue fussiness.

But there’s more: the “fraidy” part, a certain hum of anxiety and possible dread, is there, too, in roughly equal portions.

Alderete’s fundamental mission may be summed up by the title of one of the most commanding works here, “Search of the Basic.” It’s an oil-on-masonite painting, teeming with orange and dark red forms, visited upon by blue shapes and ambiguous bits of text, like pieces of a conversation picked up in the din of a crowd.

Likewise, the imagery seems nabbed out of a visual din and stirred up, in search of basic meaning.

As if thinking of the larger exhibitional picture rather than just individual pieces, Alderete punctuates bigger works with smaller, sequential paintings, such as the small square “Flesh Series” woven through the gallery.

Here, flesh tones, curvy hieroglyphic lines and hints of blood combine in mysterious ways. “Rebirth” and “The Space Between You and Me” are made up of six small square panels each, with a black surface scratched to reveal buried color energies underneath, as if struggling for expression and release.

Interpretations are often left fairly wide open. Two untitled mixed-media on masonite works feature a brutish choreography of blobs, drips, scrapes and shapes, potentially sexual in nature if the viewer’s mind wants to go there.

In his “Confrontation” paintings, crude block letters spell out potentially harsh messages, but the works are funky, obscured and goofy enough to avoid being truly confrontational, in this age of “South Park.”

Alderete manages to project an artful, deceptively casual presence.

The artist finds a way to express a personal style with a freewheeling vocabulary of scratched surfaces, side-swiping brush strokes and assorted visual debris.

Overall, we get a sense of artistic impulses caught on the fly, committed to art before being fully formed and polished. It’s a refreshing slap in the face of convention.

DETAILS

“Kansas City Alice and the Fraidy Kats” by Alex Alderete, through Aug. 28 in the Upstairs Gallery at Natalie’s Fine Threads, 596 E. Main St., in Ventura. Gallery hours: Tue.-Sat., 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., noon-4 p.m.; 643-8854.

Art Overheard: Richard Dunlap, the Santa Barbara-based but widely shown artist, musician and sound tinkerer, has a fiendish yet subtle way of steering around the obvious.

He is prone to finding new musical uses for rubber bands, Fisher-Price push toys and flash cameras, without blinking or breaking a smile. His art somehow walks that fine line between humor and the seriousness of intellectual probity.

Dunlap has had an international presence over the decades, particularly when he exhibited his sound-art works in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

But he has shown up locally, as well, with works that tend to provoke thought, meditation and muted laughter.

Almost 20 years ago now, Dunlap had a big show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, taking over the main McCormick Gallery with “Intersphere,” an installation piece using hypnotic, kinetic projections on the wall and performance elements, including a Keith Jarret-like half-hour piano improvisation each afternoon.

It was one of the most memorable site-specific shows ever housed in that space.

This summer, Dunlap has taken over the Contemporary Arts Forum with a richly deserved retrospective show curated by Peter Frank. Clearly, Dunlap follows the line of Conceptualists, post-Dadaists and other crackpot artists back to Marcel Duchamp, the man who turned a toilet into art.

Dunlap finds his raw materials--his functional “found objects”--outside the bathroom and grants them new life.

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Two of his best-known “found material”-based pieces from the ‘70s are here, in shiny new form. His “Rubber Band Table,” pictured in a Life magazine story on sound art 20-odd years ago, resembles a poker table but with rubber bands stretched around four microphones set up like tiny posts of a boxing ring.

Plucked, rolled and otherwise manipulated, they produce a curious, and soothing, sonic melange that transcends the apparent prank of the conception.

Tinkly Fisher-Price toys make up the instruments for his quasi-Minimalist performance piece “Concentrics” (performed as part of an evening of his works at the Center Stage Theater a few weeks ago).

His “Listening Tubes” are simply PVC pipes of varying lengths, with accordingly varying pitches when tapped with special sponge-fitted mallets.

Dunlap works in two dimensions, as well, and that aspect of his art includes “Systems II,” from 1971, a painting based on a rippling pattern of dots that complements the repetitive, looping nature of his music.

Also on view, in one corner of the gallery, is a representative tableaux of elements from “The History of Animals,” his elaborate installation-performance put on as part of the “Pulse 2” show at UCSB in 1990.

Sights and sounds converge in a strange meld of references that, the longer you contemplate them, assume increasing degrees of self-defining logic and, true to the Dunlap code, increasing expressive grace.

DETAILS

Richard Dunlap, “A Retrospective for Eyes and Ears,” through Aug. 29 at the Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara. Gallery hours: Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., noon-5 p.m.; 966-5373.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.