Pliable Pictures

In her current show of manipulated Polaroids and other unusual photographic treatments at Buenaventura Gallery, Kathaleen Brewer deals with the Ventura County we know and love. The images themselves are fairly stock postcard-style depictions of local landmarks, such as Bart’s Books in Ojai and the Santa Paula and Fillmore train stations.

But it’s what happens after the shutter has snapped that counts. She treats the images, smearing them and altering their colors and contours, so that they seem to exist in some nether world between photography and painting. It’s as if we’re viewing scenes underwater or through the prism of dream vision.

On one image of the San Buenaventura Mission, with its edges softened and blurred, the artist has put up a small disclaimer, “IMAGES HAND-MANIPULATED, NOT COMPUTER!” However jarring the sign is in the calm setting of a gallery, it’s an important distinction in this age of computer-aided alterations of what we see.

One of Brewer’s series of images portrays “roadside memorials,” those impromptu shrines to traffic fatalities, set up where the accidents occurred. Bone-deep poignancy is built into these. In this case, the artist’s manipulations seem gratuitous, where straighter documentation would have told the story with less after-the-fact theatricality.

In general, though, Brewer’s work effectively manages to refresh our perception. It asks us to look anew at landmarks in our midst.

DETAILS

Kathaleen Brewer, through June 24 at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 648-1235.

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MUSICAL VISUALS: The plan was to present a companion exhibition to the celebrated Ojai Festival, documenting David Hockney’s sets for the two light operas heard there. That plan fell through, but a fitting substitute was rounded up in the form of photographs by Betty Freeman.

Freeman has, for many years, been one of the most notable friends of contemporary music on the West Coast, as an ardent patron of new music causes, commissioning new pieces and providing important nourishment and social interaction for composers and musicians of note.

Along the way, she has photographed many of the great musical figures of our day, and several of those images are seen here. As it turns out, Hockney’s presence is in the house, if on a token basis. His fragmented portrait of Freeman, tethered to her camera, hangs in the entryway to the gallery.

If this selection of works isn’t uniformly strong from an artistic point of view, the pieces relate directly to the Ojai Festival legacy, depicting celebrated conductors and composers who have been involved in Ojai. There are, for instance, candid shots of Simon Rattle from just before the “Sir” was added to his name.

Also from this year’s crop of visitors, we find early images of Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer of the fabulous “Blood on the Floor,” given its U.S. premiere last weekend, as a serious fellow ensconced in manuscript paper. Young Brit wunderkind Thomas Ades, also in town last week, looks more the tousled, romantic artiste, awash in both confidence and introspection.

John Adams, Ojai Festival music director in 1993, is shown in the proper light here, as a down-to-earth, great American music maker. He stands in the casual wind-blown splendor of Tilden Park, by his home in the Berkeley hills. Pierre Boulez, a looming figure whose appearances in Ojai are invariably memorable, is seen with iconoclastic theater director Peter Sellars, around the time of the controversial 1992 production of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du soldat,” done up in rap cadences, just after the post-Rodney King Los Angeles uprising. But wait--there too is the supposedly imperious Boulez, grinning, perched happily in his Mercedes convertible.

Undoubtedly, this exhibition will register on an emotional level with music lovers more than art lovers. Freeman has many classic and near-classic images in her growing oeuvre of pictures, which documents that select group of composers in the thick of things.

This exhibit is more about the Ojai experience than the best of Freeman, but it’s well worth a look. In part, these images serve as a reminder of the finer aspects of the new music pulse in Southern California, a scene in which Ojai plays an important part.

DETAILS

Betty Freeman photographs, through June 29 at the Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St. in Ojai. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; 646-0117.

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