Looking In, Looking Out

The central premise behind the fine Century Gallery show “Looking Inward” maintains that the three artists involved--Sinan Leong Revell, Jan Wurm and Mahara T. Sinclair--are channeling personal impressions, demons and angels through their highly stylized visual manifestations.

On the other hand, external forces and stimuli affect what filters through the artistic mind. The result is art born of the tension between imagination and the real world.

Most dramatically, Sinclair’s paintings address and subvert the strange, wondrous and forbidding world of “Alice in Wonderland.” The fantasy world that Lewis Carroll concocted has been thoroughly analyzed, deconstructed and otherwise revisited. In Sinclair’s “Alice” series, that fantasy domain is a playground for innocent daydreaming and spooky trips down psychological rabbit holes. Grotesque and generally unkind faces speckle the views, especially in the two huge paintings on unstretched canvas.

In these densely packed visions, an assault of vivid colors, an insane clownish posse of faces and a general sense of disorientation make for a dream yielding to a nightmare. Telltale signs in the compositions offer Alice--and us, by extension--snippy homilies: “May the Road Rise Up and Swallow You Whole” and “Get Lost.”

Contrast of light and dark elements takes on a different form in Wurm’s unsettling and unsettled paintings, which seem to bring German Expressionist themes to Southern California with a twist or two. Contorted figures and slashing brushwork combine with fragmented compositions, suggesting the influence of the great Max Beckmann, especially in his triptychs.

Wurm’s complex and oddly fascinating paintings have haunted underpinnings, not only because of their fractured picture-making strategies. Translucent and ghostlike figures swirl about people who are otherwise engaged in innocent, leisure-time activities, such as going to the movies, sunbathing, riding a train. Angst hums in the periphery of seemingly casual scenes.

If tension and a sly edginess govern the work of Wurm and Sinclair, Revell’s is the calmest and most meditative. The multimedia pieces of “Butterfly” spin off the inspiration of travels to Tibet and other parts of China with allusions to the mandala. The elaborate variations built around the iconic image of a butterfly are evocative of inner, metaphorical states of self-exploration.

Rough equivalencies of symmetry and spirals in her compositions make the link to mandalas clear, but the art itself is personalized. In this work, like others in the gallery, inward sensations and outward expressions meet on a more or less level playing field.

BE THERE

“Looking Inward,” through Feb. 24 at Century Gallery, 13000 Sayre St., Sylmar. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday. (818) 362-3220.