‘Vessels’ Speaks Volumes

Exposed rafters and all, the fine art gallery space at Art City is one of Ventura County’s best places to view art, and that is partly a byproduct of the communal atmosphere of the hosting environment.

Art City is, after all, a kind of micro-city, usually buzzing with activity, often of the sculptural variety.

So it makes sense that, although rambling group shows both on the walls and on the floor are the norm in this Ventura space, the current exhibition is devoted primarily to art in three dimensions. This time, the “wall art”--painting and photography--clearly takes second billing.

“Volumes and Vessels” shows plenty of what the title promises. The exhibit also manages to underscore the generous amount of sculpture activity in the county, down here by the river and into such drier climes as Ojai, the source of token examples of work by famous ceramists Otto Heino and the late, great Beatrice Wood.

Art City founder Paul Lindhard usually has something to say and to show in group exhibitions here, and this one is no exception: He shows the crude obelisk-like “Prayer Stone” and alluringly rough-hewn platters.

His unabashed love of stone, and the secrets they might contain, comes through here, as when he adopts a descriptive title for his material, antique verde marble, calling the piece “Chocolate Guacamole with Clouds.” Fair enough.

Other material-based references crop up, too, as in Jill Vander Hoof’s witty “Nuts,” capturing the wrinkly reality of walnuts but in marble.

The “Corporaluteopolois,” by Michelleno is a mutant clam-like structure, its innards revealing a flaming core, in a display that suggests art-about-artful-nature.

Cultural references apart from the conventional Western front also enter the exhibit picture. JoAnne Duby’s “Volume of Primary Matter/Chinese Writing Rock” ventures east, and familiar Nora Yukon ventures down into resident American soil, with one of her native American-inspired assemblages.

Also on the assemblage end of the spectrum, Judith Bonzi Dubrawski’s “Spin-a-World” is a commanding little thing, a compact bronze representation of an antique amusement park ride that appeals to a taste for kitsch but also offers a more metaphorical subplot, indicated by the work’s extended title, “In Darkness, One is Lit by the Light of Another.”

Even some of the two-dimensional work here alludes to concrete objects, such as Don Ulrich’s series of mixed media depictions of vessels.

Weighty shapes consume the compositions, with tactile markings and scrapings on the surface pushing beyond traditional flat-planed representation.

By contrast, painter Carlisle Cooper’s “Spatial Abstraction” is more cerebral, looking like cosmic debris and energy harnessed in an orderly framework.

In other space news, Char Baptiste’s “Loophole” finds a figure in a spacesuit, or virtual reality get-up, lost in an ambiguous, faceless dimension.

On the post-surrealist painting front, Helga Vanden Berge’s delightfully bizarre imagery features melting, distorting anatomy and odd, potentially sexual allusions.

The debt to Dali is clear, but so is the peculiar zest of her own vision.

The most imposing visual drama in the room is stated with the greatest subtlety in Russell’s McMillan’s conceptual work on the back wall, “Duality Consciousness.”

As explained in his artist’s statement, McMillan intended to examine an oblong form divided into two equal parts and to convey paradoxical energies on many levels of life, from left-right brain division onward.

Metaphorical possibilities aside, McMillan’s art speaks for itself in grand yet controlled terms.

A calm, repeating formal gesture combines with a wriggling creative energy. That’s a fine formula for seeking out the quiet, if elusive, truths contained in the process of making art.

In short, there is good reason to head down to Art City these days.

DETAILS

“Volumes and Vessels” through July 30 at Art City, 31 Peking St., Ventura. Hours: Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; 648-1690.

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