Art Review : Nature Isn’t as Simple as Some Installations in ‘Spaces’ Suggest

Installation art, the visual equivalent of fusion food, is a hybrid form that draws upon conventional ingredients and classic recipes but disregards the usual boundaries between them. As with its culinary counterpart, installation art has an anything-goes spirit that favors novelty.

Refinement is harder to come by. It’s all too rare in the show “Spaces of Nature,” at the Armory Center for the Arts, which features nine Northern California installation artists engaged, variably, with issues of the natural world. Earnest efforts abound in this selection, organized by Peter Selz for the Richmond Art Center, where the show first appeared. Formally, though, the work is mostly at loose ends, not tightly conceived enough to sustain attention, nor libertine enough to seduce the senses or spirit.

Tony Bellaver’s pseudo-scientific scheme to play nature sounds to potted trees before introducing them into a reforestation site is good for a momentary chuckle, and Laurie Polster’s cascade of aspen branches is elegant but slight. Pauletta Chanco does some heartfelt soul-searching in her video installation and wall-mounted sculptures, but the effect is leaden and tedious.

Daniel McCormick weaves handsome but unremarkable structures to be placed in a stream to help restructure its path. Keiko Nelson fills a room with ceramic spheres nestled in waves of sand, but the effort overwhelms the effect. And S. Mark Research (Sue Mark) simply--and simplistically--directs us to look out a window and place a special sticker on a spot that affords an interesting view.

Several works rich with implication and consequence do stand out in this motley crowd. Angelika Hofmann presents a sequence of glass shadowboxes containing dirt that partially conceals historic images of Native Americans, from their first contact with Europeans to decimation at the hands of the newcomers. The work speaks eloquently of the Earth’s mute power as both lure and witness.

In a 60-by-60-foot labyrinth of grass and stones (off premises, on the grounds at the Huntington Gardens in nearby San Marino), Alex Champion stages an opportunity for quiet introspection, a gentle earthwork for the soul.

“Living From Land,” Mark Brest van Kempen’s multi-part work, asks the profound and fundamental question: What have we come to regard as basic to survival? Brest van Kempen spent 30 days in the wilderness as a conceptual and experiential exercise. The records and artifacts he returned with are straightforward and modest, yet subtly revelatory.

He shows a grid of photographs of the meals he caught and foraged; a pair of maps, one topographical, the other annotated with personal landmarks (“where I slept,” “deer bones”); and a short, wordless video of him walking, digging for food, building a fire, examining the still-beating heart of a fish he’d just caught. The final sequence, as he drives back from nature to culture (the speed of the car seeming unnaturally fast after the pace of his footsteps) and roams the aisles of a grocery store, surveying an uninspiring array of packaged foods, deftly punctuates his record of a brief, memorable, destabilizing shift in perspective.

* “Spaces of Nature,” Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, through Sept. 12. (626) 792-5101. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.