Underexposed

Just over a year ago, the Ventura art scene suddenly found itself with a refreshing anomaly--the Atget Gallery, named after famed French photographer Eugene Atget and devoted to fine art photography.

It seemed to come out of the blue. There are good photographers in the Ventura County region and some degree of interest in the medium, but not, it would seem, enough to support such a gallery, especially in its location, off the beaten path and far from the walk-up crowd on Main Street.

Good things in the art world sometimes die young, and the gallery is closing after Tuesday. Before it goes, though, it will be part of this afternoon’s Artwalk, connecting various art spaces in town.

Owner Monika Blinkley, a photographer herself, held several impressive shows in the compact, neatly redesigned space but is moving on after this month, partly because of what she perceives as a lack of support here. Blinkley said she will be going to her native Poland for a bit of soul searching and possibly return to start another gallery enterprise.

Ironically, the gallery’s swan song exhibition, called “Art Repressed, Art Expressed,” is unlike past shows in that Blinkley didn’t have much hands-on involvement. These are the fruits of student artists involved in a study abroad program earlier in the summer organized by Ventura College instructors William Hendricks--who has had an important role in this gallery’s life--and James Graca. What we find are artworks by students who visited Munich, Prague, Vienna and Budapest.

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It’s a happy pell-mell of a show, densely packed with pieces, mostly of a collage nature, celebrating the students’ travels and cultural research in Eastern Europe.

On the whole, the show has the feel of a big, loose-around-the-edges, collective collage. Adding to the atmosphere of an exotic yet everyday alternate reality, a tape of ambient sound from the Prague subway plays in the gallery, a sonic veneer on the art-watching experience.

Travelogue aspects and cultural history mix with the students’ own creative urges, each with a different spin. Clover Bradford’s fixation on the Art Nouveau movement, and Gustav Klimt in particular, is expressed in pieces that both document a quest for the roots of that style and adopt the style itself. Claire Laroche has a tidy sense of design, with a clever mobile celebrating artifacts photographed in Munich, among other observations.

By contrast, Sylvia Ontiveros’ aesthetic is rough-hewn, literally trashy. A perforated, graffiti-spattered trash can contains various artifacts from abroad, including Hungarian beer cans and that universal symbol of gastronomic corporate imperialism, a McDonald’s coffee cup. Julia Ionov shows tableaux bursting into three dimensions, while others are content to convey foreign local color with currency and snapshots. For Lee Wilson, the clever assemblage includes such found objects as a brochure for the “Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments,” rusty cans and a bumper sticker reading “Got Prague?”

In an exuberant show full of fairly dense pieces, including idea- and data-stuffed journals, work like Jason Walke’s stands out by virtue of restraint. He depicts various architectural sightings--one for each city visited--mounted on curving sheet metal. The material, with its three-dimensional nature, lends an added tinge of architectural quality to the work.

The faculty advisors’ work, not surprisingly, shows greater artistic skill and forethought than their students’, but that’s not to say they lack breezy charm. Gonzo conceptualism is the metier of James Graca, who has cooked up an elaborate fictional ruse concerning the exploits of one “Otto Kremler, Fugitive Clown.” The red-nosed, wild-haired character is depicted slipping across borders and sitting in Freud’s chair, in a layout suggesting an FBI dossier.

Hendricks’ sensitive eye as a photographer is evident in his assemblage, which offsets carefully observed details from travels with corporeal objects. A vintage key and a tiny fork serve as hard evidence of having “been there,” in collusion with his stylized photographic visions.

Generally speaking, the show is a lighthearted, Old Country-loving finale for a fine gallery. File under: Nice while it lasted.

DETAILS

“Art Repressed, Art Expressed,” through Sept. 28 at the Atget Gallery, 1484 Main St., in Ventura. Hours: Sunday, noon-4; Monday and Tuesday, 2-6 p.m.; 652-1122. The Midtown Art Fest runs from noon to 4 p.m. today. Maps are available at the Midtown Resource Center at 1700 E. Thompson Blvd., Ventura.

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