Four Perspectives

Summer’s waning traditionally brings art exhibitions with sunny dispositions and idle mind frames. So it goes with the current four-person show at the Brand Library, “Four Women, Four Perspectives,” the title of which hints at its lax objective.

The artists here stick to their own corners and their own perspectives and any overlap seems mostly coincidental. No matter. It’s still summertime, and the viewing is still easy.

Fittingly, Jane Friend shows a nice, light touch with watercolor medium, but expressive of a given scene. Most often, those scenes are slices of life from her travels, in a market in Puerto Vallarta, or an image from Abu Simbel, Egypt, depicting a turbaned man dwarfed by huge ancient guardian figures flanking a portal. The painting called “Monet’s Garden Door” is an ephemeral scattering of colors and details to aptly impressionistic ends.

She brings it home while still referring obliquely to the Old Country, with paintings of the neo-Moorish facade of the Brand Library itself and the Mediterranean style of her own house. Yes, Eurocentrism runs hot in our extended neighborhood.

Virginia Jackman’s “Nite Studio” is awash in blue with a loosely brushed style and the moon beckoning out the window. A sense of nocturnal reverie pervades. Elsewhere, Jackman also leans toward Native American philosophy and culture, as in “Legacy,” a pueblo scene with an apparition of a departed one. The faces of departed elders are embedded in the knotty trunks of trees in “The Ancient Ones.”

An interest in myths and folklore courses through the art of Bonese Collins Turner, whose paintings often feature layers of landscape, vaporous spirits and sententious objects. “Present Spirits: Wishes Rising” is a hallucinatory desert vision with a looming wishbone suspended over a ritualistic order of stones. Reality is a tricky business in “Layered Cognition” which combines sacred remnants, a bird and hints of agriculture, its “layers” rendered literal on cutout layers of paper.

The resident assemblage artist of the bunch is Betty McDonald, whose work, almost inevitably, nods to the late Joseph Cornell. Simple objects taken out of context and placed into new contexts assume meanings that are not always easily read.

McDonald’s work also oscillates between the busy and the stark, though mostly leaning toward the former. A self-conscious social theme, something about the fragility and folly of nationalism, rings a chord in “Protection” with its tiny American flag sequestered behind an oversized glass case.

“Chandra” is a mysterious number, a box with a composite face decorated with frilly doodads and basking in twisted nostalgia, while “Warrior Mementos” evokes Japanese antiquity, with its small sword, costumes and paper lanterns.

The components in “Memento Mori” include an antique photograph, a pincushion, tiny birds, a rusty key, a shard of a manuscript and an old typewriter ribbon. The disparate elements cohere into some palpable semblance of a narrative, even though the connections are left hanging. Like McDonald’s other assemblage work here, despite the tension of its parts, they’re organized into neatly symmetrical designs.

BE THERE

“Four Women, Four Perspectives” through Sept. 9 at Brand Library Art Galleries, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. Gallery hours: 1-9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, 1-6 p.m. Wednesday, 1-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. (818) 548-2051.