Out & About / Ventura County : sights : Going Deep : Ventura College exhibit uses found objects to illustrate ocean’s power, fragility.

Oceans are not static, neutral bodies of water. They’re fragile, evolving organisms, highly sensitive to abuses--witness the closures of area beaches due to polluted water, or the scourge of oil spills.

They can also tell us about what’s going on inside by delivering messages on the shore.

They belch up pieces of ravaged boats, metamorphosed driftwood and other human-made objects.

The fragile state of the Pacific Ocean is just one of the themes that resonates in the artwork of Laura Lynch, whose current show, “Swept Away--Pacific Series 1996-1999,” makes for a dramatic first exhibition in the Ventura College art gallery season.

The Santa Barbara-based artist’s past work has included politically charged sculpture taking aim at nuclear power.

Here, she became a beachcomber with a cultural mission.

She went to the source, the beach, and created a provocative body of work made from found objects boat parts, rope, old buoys and the like.

The result is work with a built-in rugged charm, a tribute to the mariner’s instinct but armed with a strong ecological sensibility.

The message behind her medium is paradoxical: On one hand, she nurtures the romantic ideal of creating things from the flotsam washing up on shore, sometimes from nature but more often from human sources.

But the work also makes us aware of the intrusion upon, and exploitation of, the sea.

Conceptually, the form and content in her art keep folding back on themselves, creating both a sensual attraction and cautionary dread.

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There are aesthetic ploys at work as well. Boat-shaped sculptures are made from old boat scraps, creating a recycled poetic justice of material and subject. “Ode to a Searaker” has, as its base, a painting of a sinking boat and is adorned with an actual lifesaver ring and neatly placed boat pieces.

The decaying materials provide their own narrative mystique, triggering our curiosity about the real stories behind the boat ruins.

“Buoy Bouquet” is a gathering of buoys and scraps thereof, assembled in the form of a flower arrangement, as in a valentine to the ocean--or perhaps a funeral wreath?

“Evinrude” is a more abstract assemblage, liberated from representation but conveying a strong sense--even a smell--of beachcomber bliss.

One recurring motif in the exhibition is a “red skerries saver,” a reassuring, bright red housing for a lifesaver and length of rope. It appears in a bold painting (oil on “found boat pieces,” of course) and also as an element in a painting of one of Lynch’s haunts, Miramar Beach (a wonderful, semi-secret beach by Montecito, near the artist’s home.)

She sees the red structure as a “symbol of hope,” but, as with the other aspects of her art, it could also be read as a symbol of alarm. Between the two poles, her art finds its meaning.

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Currently in the college’s New Media Gallery, Chiyomi Longo shows mixed-media pieces with a meditative buzz.

This is a show in which the numerous pieces, with titles such as “Sound of the Elements,” “Convergence” and “Contentment Within,” are carefully placed around the rectangular gallery space, creating a continuity more about the whole than the parts.

Each piece suggests layering, with different planes of visual activity as if seen through milky, perforated screens on the surface.

Through the innate repetition, rhythm and sequential quality of their presentation, we get a sense of looping, musical logic at work, also evoked through the title, “Resonance and Dissonance.”

So it’s not surprising, somehow, to read that the Japanese-born and Santa Rosa-based artist derives inspiration from the musical tradition of the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi.

In a statement, she writes that “the music of the shakuhachi exemplifies the duality of emptiness and fullness, sound and silence; it is the primal influence of my life and work.” It is, fittingly, fine art with a musical subplot.

DETAILS

Laura Lynch, “Swept Away--Pacific Series 1996-1999,” and Chiyomi Longo, “Resonance and Dissonance,” through Sept. 30 at Ventura College Gallery 2, 4667 Telegraph Road in Ventura. Call gallery for hours; 648-8974.

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