Learned Response

College art departments can run the risk of becoming self-enclosed. But it needn’t be thus, of course, especially in a small community. Or so figured Gerd Koch, a recently retired Ventura College teacher and noted painter in his own right.

Koch, who has been doing fine work running the Studio Channel Islands Art Center, put out a call for artist-teachers at the county’s community colleges--Ventura, Oxnard and Moorpark--to submit work for a show under one roof, in one more-than-suitable gallery space.

It was a magnanimous and logical gesture, yet a rare appeal across institutional lines. The resulting exhibition, “3: Art Department Faculty Exhibit,” has no particular place to go in terms of a curatorial theme, but it does offer a rare window on the artist brain trust in these schools. Happily, it’s a diverse bunch.

Oxnard College’s Jacquelyn Cavish shows “Winter Light No. 3,” an interior painting that blends warm hues that seem to melt into one another, an effect leaning toward the influence of post-Impressionist Bonnard. Dorothy Orr’s abstract painting “May Revision” refers, in a sideways fashion, to floral matters and a visualization of organic behavior itself.

Bob Moskowitz’s “Fourth of July,” a canny piece with scruffy charm, is a snapshot-like backyard portrait with a twist or two in its index of subjects: a mother, a son, a sheep and a model rocket, with enigmatic relationships among these elements. Barbara Harvey’s “Where Past and Future Collide” veers toward the ambiguities of collage--colored by hazy intrigue--with veneered strips of newsprint alluding to the history-mashing character of the title.

Carlisle Cooper, a veteran of Ventura College, shows one of his signature paintings, “Mariachi Man.” Its subject is depicted with the artist’s familiar technique, as seen in a recent Art City retrospective, stirring up a swirling, post-psychedelic visual effect around an otherwise traditional subject.

Photography is well-represented in the show and in diverse ways, often steering clear of conventionality. Stephan “Schaf” Schafer’s “Bad Hamburg, Germany,” romanticizes its large rural image from the Old World with the softened edges of infrared film. Jim Englund’s shameless punning in “Two Heads Are Better Than One” relies on a double-image technique to portray a literally two-faced fellow.

John M. Grzywacz-Gray of Moorpark College depicts a nude couple with a detail-obscuring process, similar to solarization.

One of the presumably “straight” photographs here, but whose subject matter invites interpretation, is Bill Hendricks’ “Ernesto’s Hands.” A quixotic view of out-of-focus hands, it’s a cryptic portrait in miniature. Photographer Albert J. Winn, also from Moorpark, lets his subject do the talking: a desolate room, with empty metal beds, seems to embody stark, wistful emotions in “American Jewish Landscapes, Deserted Summer Camp.”

In sculpture, the range leans toward the peculiar, including a loony tableau, Doug Sutherland’s “Mr. Mickey Finds Himself in a State.” It’s a piece basking in Disneyland-esque lore, in which a somnolent (or is he deceased?) carnival barker lies atop a coffin with a cheesy desert vignette inside its glass-lined interior.

In the center of the gallery floor stands Bruce Freeman’s “Pillars of Beauty and Strength,” a tall rectangular shape with serigraphs of pieces of female anatomy, like a fragmented nude study awaiting reorientation, Rubic’s Cube fashion.

Myra Toth’s sculptural aesthetic is subtler. Her ceramic/mixed media pieces, looking like unidentifiable organic forms, allude to nature in ways that are less explicit than personalized.

Koch’s inter-college party was a fine idea, and it’s a show worth heading off to the fringes of Camarillo’s verdant fields to see. It brings about a mix of locally based artists, taken out of their usual group-show contexts and not normally seen together. In addition, it’s a hearty reminder that, in college art departments, those who teach, indeed, do.

DETAILS

“3: Art Department Faculty Exhibit,” through June 10 at the Studio Channel Islands Art Center (on the campus of CSUCI). Gallery hours: Thurs.-Sat., noon-3 p.m.; 383-1368.

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