Tidal Pull

What you may notice first are the shiny, wave-lapped stones, painted with obvious care and attention to the tiniest details. But the stones, carefully arranged and observed by the painter, also serve as metaphors--for social injustices, ecological fragility--and as ritualistic stagings.

Such is the painterly world of Connie Jenkins, beautiful and poised on the surface but built up from depths of concept and emotion. Jenkins, an accomplished and sensitive artist who has taught at Ventura College for several years, hasn’t been seen enough in Ventura County. That makes her current show, a compact survey of 30 years of work at the Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Camarillo, an event worth catching.

This is another show well-served by the open, spacious gallery. The largest painting is also strangely calm, defying its scale. “Baja: 6/24, low sun, low tide” bears a title that sums up the Zen-like appreciation of time and place, in its languid view of shimmery twilights and reflections of the setting sun adding colors to the natural palette.

Jenkins tends to like tidal areas, the zones where land and water meet and change is the constant.

“Reflections” depicts a rainbow-like variety of stones, painted with her usual precision and looking slicked by waves, nature’s rock tumbler.

But Jenkins’ real world concerns, and sympathy for tragic sociopolitical events are also woven into her deceptively relaxed imagery. The cruciform arrangement of stones on the sand in “Una Cruz, para el Pueblo de Pepeishtenango, Cabanas” commemorates victims of the civil war in El Salvador.

Similarly, “El Playon: War Memorial” is a realization of her own staged scene in which skeletal remains are scattered amid jagged, volcanic rocks, a memorial to those massacred in El Salvador during the 1980s.

As her art became more politicized in the ‘80s and she found ways to integrate it with her social awareness, she became more attuned to the link between mind and eye. Earlier paintings are less about landscape and beachscapes than cultural maneuvers and art-about-art ideas. “Bag of Tricks,” from 1971, pulls a post-Pop Art stunt, using color-flecked floor tiles as a ground for the heroic subject--a brown, rumpled Hefty bag. The veined marble orbs on sand in “Beached Balls,” from 1977, look ahead to her more elaborate beachscapes.

Recent paintings, from the late ‘90s, are much smaller, but also more densely packed. She again applies her exacting touch in presenting point-blank views of creek-side sites, in which the lack of a central subject and the visual trickery of reflective water is the point.

But in these paintings, too, forces lurk behind the graceful images, as hinted at by titles like “Waiting for El Nino.” There is always a storm, social or ecological, just out of view of the artist’s, or any of our, sightlines.

Over the past two years, Studio Channel Islands Art Center has built itself up with a steady growth on the for-now tranquil grounds of the former Camarillo State Hospital and future Cal State Channel Islands campus.

It has recently transformed a large room off the main gallery space into a separate gallery for artists with studios in the complex. The saga of one of the county’s finest “young” art spaces continues, apace.

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DETAILS

Connie Jenkins, Paintings: 1970-1999, through Oct. 21 at Studio Channel Islands Art Center, 79 Daily Dr. PMB 270 in Camarillo. Gallery hours: Thurs-Sat., noon-3 p.m; 383-1368.

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