What It’s All About : A Range of Approaches and Materials Transforms the Real World Into the 35 Works on Exhibit in ‘1999 Biennial’

What is your painting about? What story does it tell? Those questions make artists bristle. Fortunately, those questions began to lose relevance decades ago with the passing of the ironfisted reign of representation.

Given the opportunity to interpret these questions in their broadest sense, however, nine of the 10 artists in “1999 Biennial,” opening today at the Orange County Museum of Art, gamely answered.

Their replies reveal the fascinating range of mental and physical approaches open to contemporary artists of the ‘90s, a time when the art-making process may be intimately linked to “meaning” and works may be motivated by the need to grapple with such challenging questions as how we perceive the world around us or understand how it functions.

OCMA chief curator Bruce Guenther, who organized the 35-piece exhibit, selected recent abstract works by emerging California artists who he says are interested in the function of form rather than sociopolitical concerns.

Most of the artists are in their mid-30s and live in Los Angeles, unless otherwise noted in their statements, which follow.

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Laurie Reid (Berkeley) relinquishes much of her artistic control to gravity and other natural forces by allowing watercolor paint to flow down a small ramp covered with long, thin strips of paper.

“I like the fact that the work plays with chance, with things out of our control. . . . I mix the color, I determine what to throw out, so it’s an interaction between chance and determination, but it’s exciting to not know how things are going to end up. I also like being a spectator. People think of the painter as being solely responsible for creating a work, and I love that I’m just as much audience as creator.”

Another brushless painter, Kevin Appel layers acrylic on canvas with sharp-edged tools to create cool, contemplative, imagined home interiors that recall computer-generated architectural studies.

“The works function best when they straddle abstraction and representation and cause viewers to transport themselves into the space yet continue to reveal themselves, dismantling themselves into abstraction and pure paint. The comparison I use is John Singer Sargent. When you see one of his paintings from across the room, you see a woman in front of a dresser, say, but as you continue to look, the work falls apart into chunks of paint [during these] very strong abstract moments.”

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Ingrid Calame paints ethereal tableaux, often on translucent Mylar, which are based on a template of tracings she’s made of squiggly, blotchy street stains left by spilled oil and other fluids.

“I have questions about how things work in the world, how we understand things, so the work is about my questioning and is a very rudimentary model for how I understand things. For example, you don’t really know how your toaster works, but you have some kind of imagining of it. Or your body: You have a sense of your physical body, but there’s no way of really knowing how it works from experience. Even photographs of the inside of your body [can’t reveal the truth]. There would never be light [which is needed to take the photograph] on your internal organs.”

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Michelle Fierro’s paintings combine finely drawn lines with scavenged studio detritus--dried paint blobs, bits of paper--which she thinks of “as things people choose to disregard.”

“My works always seem to remind me of something else; they’re somewhere between representation and abstraction, so I feel like they tell stories. I hope that viewers get taken away on some story that occurs to them, whatever strikes them.”

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Kim Anno (Oakland) paints vivid, sensual stripes onto organically shaped wood “canvases” that she says are informed by Islamic, Moorish and Asian architecture.

“I am of mixed heritage--Japanese, Native American, Polish and Irish--one-quarter each, and I grew up in L.A., where my parents never had anything old. Everything was plastic and new, so I was always looking for something traditional and something that could [help me] understand where I came from. I decided I had to make my own things, and in a way, that’s what these pieces are about. . . . Also, often I’m thinking about how cloth or textile folds over a body, and in the imperfections and vulnerability of the painting and in revealing that” as a metaphor for human vulnerability.

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Jacci Den Hartog sculpts imaginary landscapes using plaster and polyurethane. Though the works are small, abstract and made of synthetic substances, she strives to convey a sense of spaciousness and recall such untamed natural phenomena as the “grandiosity of the mountains” and the “serenity of the valleys.”

“I’m interested in how landscape has historically and traditionally been depicted and how to work within that tradition in a very nontraditional way--by making sculpture as opposed to making paintings or [depicting specific] places. I’m also interested in how the landscape changes as you move through it, how it comes in and out of perception, depending on your position . . . and how to simultaneously incorporate kinesthetic and mental responses to the landscape in an object.”

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Kathryn Spence (San Francisco) makes what she calls “mud animals”--out of stuffed animals, furry bathrobes, mud--and other pieces that incorporate “degraded material.” “Untitled (Pigeons)” is a group of pigeons made of “bound bundles of street trash.”

In that work, “I was trying to make a piece about what we can touch and what we don’t want to touch and the idea of contact and respect and humiliation. We all have this sort of hierarchy of what we consider worthy of attention. It’s sort of a compartmentalization that goes on [concerning] what affects you and what you want to let in, and what you want to keep out. It makes us feel safe if we keep a lot of it out, but it also makes us feel out of touch.”

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Tim Rogeberg connected several fiberglass orbs into what could be a model of the solar system and placed this sculpture inside a 26-by-20-foot concrete pool. He wants viewers to walk into the pool--it’s got steppingstones--to interact with the piece.

“I was thinking about the development of space objects [like planets] and the evolution of the universe. But the piece isn’t so much a model of anything in particular. It’s more of a model of the way that models are made--the way that people think about things like the universe and try to picture things that are almost impossible to picture. Inevitably, most of those models are wrong.”

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Jeremy Kidd’s uses blown-up photographs of organic elements, shiny resin, matte flocking and sculptural pieces to unite “a number of different dualities and present them as a single whole where everything appears to work together: 2-D photography and 3-D sculpture, the synthetic and the organic, the shiny and the matte.”

“There’s a subliminal metaphor in these pieces about certain Eastern spiritual practices where duality is something that humans experience when they’re on the planet. When they leave the planet, they’re drawn back to a singular consciousness within the cosmic force or God or whatever you want to call it.”

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Steven Criqui’s flat, abstract still-life paintings hybridize modernism and pop with a “kind of Steve Criqui cartoony aspect,” as he says.

“They are about trying to make a picture of mind or trying to almost stand in awe of the mind, although that’s mostly happening in a real formal, nonverbal way. I was thinking a lot about how we look at objects, how is it we can look at the most rudimentary outline of a shape and attribute a familiar meaning to it. I started to read about object-recognition theory and about how the brain functions and perception works. I got really interested in the question of what the mind is, what consciousness is, and whether it’s a part of the body, or exists outside of the body; is it electrochemical activity or is it something else?”

* “1999 Biennial” runs today through May 9 at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission, $4-$5. (949) 759-1122.