Digitally Enhanced

The husband-and-wife pair of Cynthia Wands and Eric Boyd demonstrate with their show at the Orlando Gallery that computers can be valued aesthetic allies.

Wands’ work samples and reconfigures ancient imagery, hunted and gathered from art history and molded into fantastical collages. Photographer Boyd uses the digital darkroom to reinvent photographs he takes, pushing them toward the surreal and quasi-abstract.

Nudging concrete and archival imagery into a realm of mystery is a theme explored by both artists and one alluded to in the show’s title, “Romantic Mythmaking and the Goddess Mythologies.” Transformation and the changing of images through computers is key in the artists’ work. It is acknowledged, in the title to Wands’ tapestry-like collage “Quilt of Lies.”

Her “Anatomy of Desire” is a seamless paste-up of anatomical elements tinged with eroticism. Wands’ piece “Seduction of Music” includes a staff of music notation threaded across the top of the composition with courtly 18th-century dancers distorted and echoing.

Boyd takes photographs, often nude studies, and subjects them to various visual manipulations that would seem to negate the originals’ status. Key anatomical features are altered and stylized to the point of redirecting our attentions. The spherical buttocks in one of the “Window in Her Soul” series becomes a study in curves and, in “Judith,” the squatting model’s surfaces are reinterpreted to suggest an experiment in the nude-as-abstraction.

“ ‘Tis a Fine Line that Separates,” with its image of a draping nude figure blanketed in a surreal, fuzzy texture may refer to the line between reality and mythology. In “Hecate,” redefinition reaches a peak with its composite of three views of a goddess woven into a forest-like setting. In this piece, reality is upset and enhanced.

Time Honored: The VIVA Gallery in Northridge celebrates its third year with a series of one-person shows paying tribute to notable artists from the region. The first of the series, through Jan. 27, is a show of watercolor work by George Labadie. The 85-year-old artist spent years in the commercial art world and has become an admired teacher and artist. Many of the paintings are genial and well-crafted, by-the-book watercolors. Labadie can apply a crafty hand to the portraits, nudes, landscapes, cowboys and American Indian scenes common to the Sunday painter scene.

The best work in the gallery comes as a series of pleasant surprises, sometimes dealing with subjects as commonplace as folks lounging on park benches. “What’s for Lunch?” (the question refers to a pigeon’s appetite) and “Park People” are painted in an expressive style that accentuates loose brushwork and a prickly, high-contrast approach to light.

“Curtain in Five,” an image of dancers backstage, has a natural flair that catches us off-guard. So does “Coatrack,” a view of nothing more dramatic than a man putting on a coat. In the back of the gallery hangs a “Self-Portrait” of the artist in midsketch. From that image, and from all evidence here, Labadie is a man who is ever in midsketch. He has submitted to a life in various orbits of art-making.

BE THERE

Cynthia Wands and Eric Boyd, “Romantic Mythmaking and the Goddess Mythologies,” through Jan. 27 at Orlando Gallery, 18376 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (818) 705-5368. “VIVA 2001” by George Labadie through Jan. 27 at the VIVA Gallery, 8516 Reseda Blvd., Northridge. Gallery hours: Wednesday-Friday 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday noon-4 p.m. (818) 576-0775.