Diminutive but Deep

Small-image shows, such as the one now at Ventura College, have a number of benefits, apart from their obvious diminutive parameters. One virtue is the concentration of art per square foot in a necessarily limited gallery space.

By the time you get through looking--and squinting--at the collection of works in the second annual Small Images show at Ventura College’s Gallery 2, it feels as if you have traveled down a busy road of disparate art--all in the space of a relatively modest gallery.

And you have. The show covers enough ground to qualify as a fairly broad survey of art in the area, both on the wall and in the sculptural realm.

Crude charm accounts for the appeal of Dale Dreiling, whose acrylic on plywood image “Money Problems” sports a rumpled surface and an image of a man holding burning currency. It’s edgy without resorting to explicitness. Bill Woolway’s work is funky in a different way, its fetchingly simple style reminiscent of rural folk art, or enlightened child’s play.

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It’s quite another matter with the polished mannerisms in Robert Hildebrand’s layered photographs, which, with a kind of dreamy longing, allude to floating remnants of classical antiquity.

Collage is well represented here, and in a variety of ways. Virginia Sandler’s “Border Crossing” is a mixed-media piece on canvas, its dark-toned blend of images evoking the sense of anxiety and glints of hope. M. Helsenrott Hochhauser’s mixed media palette includes wire, charcoal and handmade paper.

The inspired neo-collagist Jan Kunkle shows fresh variations on her own refined collage sensibility, with vertical strips of “found paper” tinted, as if seen through color filters.

Another graceful collage practitioner, Susan Savage, is nicely suited to the small-images dictate. She works well in tight spaces and understands how much material to fling into a composition--as in “The Substance of Dreams”--before it feels crowded.

Printmakers include Blossom Friel, whose nervous, scratchy abstractions contrast sharply with the realist bent of Teresa Zepeda. Somewhere between those poles, Barbara Bouman Jay’s “Past Echo” series conveys an interior world of her own, only partly linked to the one we know.

Familiar local artists show up in the bunch, as well, to the credit of the whole.

We are accustomed to the enigmatic landscape aesthetic of Jane McKinney’s recent work, and it works wonders on a small scale. For Suzanne Shechter, who has explored some intriguing and somewhat oblique approaches to figurative art, her two small-scale gouache pieces look like psychedelic variations on antique snapshots.

Brian Hollister’s small abstract paintings invite close examination, with their allusions to landscape elements.

And in three-dimensional art, the pickings are similarly eclectic. In one, Cheryl Thomas mixes skill and whimsy with “Mercy Seat,” a ceramic comfy chair perched on a pedestal, as if in a grand tribute to the power of leisure.

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Hanna Lore Hombordy shows one of her sculptures combining traditional clay with actual eucalyptus leaves.

Jeff Berman plays with material on his own terms, with funny fool-the-eye vessels that might appear as ceramic pieces, but are actually concocted from the “lowly” garden variety stuff of papier-mache and Spackle.

Lest the exhibition seem casual, there are some striking ideas, small and otherwise, flung about the gallery. In this gathering of images and objects, small, again, proves relative.

* Works from Small Images Competition, through Feb. 26 at Gallery 2, Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road in Ventura.

Questions of Material: Further investigations into material are undertaken in the work of Shirley J. Judy, whose clay monoprints and sculptures are currently being shown in the New Media Gallery.

Judy has shown her work at the G. Childress Gallery and elsewhere in the area, and it’s informative to see a larger sampling in one room.

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Essentially, her work combines abstract convergences of lines and shapes, and occasional figures in silhouette, presented with an almost childlike freedom in the way imagery is splashed together.

But her titles--”Computer Life,” “Heavy on My Mind,” and “Family Shelter,” to name a few--tip us off to emotional dynamics encoded in the art.

One of the more plain-spoken moral aphorisms, “Can’t Take It With You” envisions a boy with a wheelbarrow full of material wealth, swirling in a cloud of the artist’s trademark, decorative debris.

Local color enters into the process in unorthodox ways, as she incorporates kelp and driftwood as fuel to fire her kiln.

On non-narrative terrain, her clay sculptures involve a diversity of vessels, places, vases, and with a variety of glazes and surfaces.

* Shirley Judy, in the New Media Gallery. Gallery hours vary, call ahead: 648-8974.