The Finegood Comes of Age

Never underestimate the calm, magnetic power of a good art gallery. The West Hills region of the San Fernando Valley has enjoyed such a space since 1987 when the Finegood Gallery opened.

Nestled upstairs in the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Center, the Finegood is a clean, well-lighted and not modestly scaled space, the site of many group exhibitions. In celebration of its 13th anniversary, the gallery is hosting a roundup of 38 local artists who have shown there before.

Fittingly, the exhibition is all over the map in terms of medium, message and quality. But the sum effect is an affirmation of the artistic energy that has breezed through the walls for over 13 years, a ripe old age for a gallery.

Ruth Weisberg, dean of the USC School of Fine Arts, judged the exhibition and includes an intriguing work of her own, the mixed media piece “Where Was I.” It is a happily distracted portrait of a woman lost to reverie or the arms of Morpheus, or both. Visual waves of energy envelop her form.

Figurative work takes on many shapes and ideas in the show. Daniel Marquez’s “Travesias Rio Bravo” is a vivid mono silk screen image of a woman and child wading across a river, presumably to a new land and a new life.

The most imposing paintings are Merrilyn Duzy’s mystical landscapes bathed in dark tones with bursts of incendiary red and orange. Such titles as “Gathering Storm” and “Night Falls” hint at the brooding character of her imagery, with hints of comic turbulence and unexplained infernos that could be interpreted as apocalyptic visions.

Abstraction rears its head from the tumbling hard-edged geometries of Marjorie Sievers’ painting to the earthier blend of Mary Ziegler’s “Organic Forms.”

Dona Gelb’s “Flying Buttress” takes an architectural term referring to solidity and moves it to a poetic extreme in an image of precarious wedges in a state of seeming instability.

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Emotional unrest surfaces in Diana Jacobs’ “Old Wounds” with its red, tissue-like gashes in the canvas, and Nancy Jacobs’ “Witness.” The work’s eight frames hold old photographs and mementos of a familial past blackened by tarring, burning and splattered paint.

Nostalgia has been brutally interrupted, which naturally leads us to suspect a Holocaust reference.

On the lighter side, Blossom Friels’ loopy banner “Nesting” and the messy assemblage of “One of a Kind” exude a beautifully frumpy, collage-like flair. One of the better pieces is Marlene Capell’s “PortalIX,” a roughhewn abstract painting that does double duty. Appearing to refer to a vague, portal image, it suggests a hunk of a painted door.

As for the sculpture, diversity is as much in evidence as in the two-dimensional work. Karen Coburn’s “New Growth” depicts a gangly, mutant form, suggesting a Brancusi-meets-Alice Carroll look.

Half-human, half-tree, it grows out of a gnarled lump of earthy matter. The figurative element is no less abstracted in Vladimir Antanian’s “Burning Memories,” a complex shape, festively painted and bowing to the influences of Cubism and Constructivism.

Comparatively, Lezlie Kussin’s “Gun Control” is far more direct in its effects, dispensing a socially charged message. In her assemblage work, strange vending machines dispense not children’s toys, but weapons and bullets. That these items attract and sometimes wind up in the hands of children is the point.

BE THERE

Group art exhibition through Sunday at the Finegood Art Gallery, Bernard Milken Jewish Community Center, 22622 Vanowen St., West Hills. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. (818) 716-1773.