Winter Wonderlands

We in Southern California, where December’s climate doesn’t differ radically from May’s, might easily find ourselves pining for the winter of which we’re deprived. Or so we tell ourselves and our snowbound friends back East while sipping spiked eggnog poolside. But we digress, sort of.

Certainly, the response to the snowy scenes and images of snow-covered objects in the “Snow Show” at Natalie’s Fine Threads depends on the perspective of the viewer. For Southern Californians, the imagery is likely to appear exotic and evoke thoughts of ski trips yet to be taken.

A few of these photographers have also been seen this month in the fine exhibit by the photographer’s group Camera Illuminata at the Thousand Oaks Community Gallery (through Sunday). Chief among them are Larry Janss, whose beautifully spare “Cedar Haiku” depicts gnarled trees against white. Sterling Chow, another Camera Illuminata member, deals with the way snow confers a dematerializing effect on trees in his punningly titled “Three Amigos.”

Stephen Schaf’s atmosphere-loving, Americana-leaning black and white imagery has also been showing up in area galleries regularly, but his work here is of a different, and distinctive, ilk. The theme, of course, is snow, and Schaf’s weirdly striking image of a bench blanketed in snow may be the most memorable image here.

He also nabs attention with the photograph called “Basset Hound,” the subject of its title trudging chest-deep in snow in front of an old Virginia house. The dog is slightly out of focus, as if caught charging the photographer, protecting its property from a camera-wielding invader.

Funny how snow alters commonplace objects and scenes (especially for those of us who don’t experience snow on an annual basis, disrupting life as usual). Jim Snidelar’s “Snow Angel” is mundane, a shot of a man and his VW, but the frosty covering of snow changes the basic reality of the image.

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Stephen Harrison’s majestic and mysterious “Alaska Range One” offers an aerial view of awesome white peaks on top of the world, geographically speaking. Terry Lynne Dushan’s “Crystal Forest,” on the other hand, comes in close and intimate, for an image of snow melting off branches, reverting to its basic state.

Winter is a relatively permanent state of mind in Michael Moore’s “Julianhaab.” Moore has assembled a raggedy composite image of small photographs, emphasizing the horizontality of the Icelandic coastline, its sculptural hunks of iceberg juxtaposed with barren, rocky coast. Austere beauty is the upshot.

Barren in another, vaguely romantic way, Jim Kohs’ images from Bodie during winter gives the noted ghost town north of Mono Lake an added air of historic desolation. The underlying message of this tasty exhibition is that snow does strange and wonderful things to the world as we know it, particularly when you don’t even have to think about, let alone own, a snow shovel.

DETAILS

“Snow Show,” through Jan. 13 at Natalie’s Fine Threads, Upstairs Gallery, 596 E. Main St., in Ventura. Gallery hours: 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday, noon-4 p.m., Sunday; 643-8854.

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The View at 20: The “original limited edition monthly” known as Art/Life is celebrating its 20th anniversary, a landmark for a project that has a global reach and a grass-roots, not-for-profit mission. For at least half its life, the enterprise has had its home base in Ventura, where founder Joe Cardella moved just before a 10th anniversary show in the old Momentum Gallery in the Livery.

Cardella started Art/Life when living in Santa Barbara and based it in New England for a few years while living there before settling down in Ventura. But the notion of a “home base” is elusive in this case, as its contributors come from far shores, it is distributed in such lofty outlets as Manhattan’s MOMA and its cyber-sister operation, www.art-life.com, is expanding.

Recently, the balance of visual art and poetry has shifted toward an almost even split, and Phil Taggart, the poetry editor, presided over a party and poetry reading in the Livery Theater earlier this month. A toast, then, to a creative job well done and a milestone achieved.

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