Dread Alert: Angst Rules

Freud would have a field day with the head-trippy exhibit “The Human Psyche,” on view through May 27 at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana.

Indeed most of the angst-riddled humans depicted in the small ceramic sculptures of Sally Craig, mixed-media prints by Patrick Merrill and oil paintings by Marilyn Prescott and Lenny Stitz seem ready for a good psychoanalytic session on Freud’s fabled couch.

If this feels like a downer, there’s actually a lot of vitality to “Psyche.” All its high anxiety--meshed with a good command of line, form and color--makes for an energizing, provocative show.

If you’re hooked on the middle-class psychotraumas of HBO’s hit mob series “The Sopranos,” you’ll dig the dread and dysfunction dished out by the “Psyche” quartet.

Craig has the most fun of the group with her punny ceramics that play on the word bag, as in handbag, plus current slang for interest, concern or groove.

Craig’s bag is the plight of contemporary women caught between the expectations of a male-dominated society and their drives and dreams. Her inventively shaped ceramic purses and tote bags--often with small nude figures of women attached--brim with the symbols of the feminine search for identity.

Her “Unrealistic Expectations” looks to be modeled on a sleek Fendi or Gucci tote but spews bunches of tightly coiled springs.

Words--shop, sex, work, wash, perform, clean, cook--circle a kind of turnkey on one side of the tote. On the other a chalk-white female figure is spread-eagled, sprouting three arms and four legs.

Just wind her up and watch her try to do the impossible, to be Superwoman, Craig seems to say.

If Craig’s femmes seem trapped in stereotypes, Prescott’s females feel noble and heroic.

Make that she-roic, on the Xena Warrior Princess order, searching for innate power in a mythic world.

In “The Swimmer,” Prescott’s she-ro floats in a watery realm, her green and lavender hair wild, her face alert and beautiful. In “The Seeker” we see her from the back, clutching what look like giant feathers as a seemingly omniscient bird hovers over her.

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By contrast Stitz gives us women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, lost in pain. In “The Pleasure of Despair,” a female figure clutches her neck, eyes closed. Above her, the canvas oozes hues of blackish-green paint, the fungus of depression.

Merrill also plays powerfully with pain, the pain of being male in a world in which men are expected to be violent, or at least, aggressive. His men look skinless, their muscles and bones exposed and hurting badly. His two-panel “Laius & Oedipus” from the “We Are Our Own Father” series shows one man shooting another, the victim falling backward.

Strong stuff.

Yet raw as it is, the brain stew served by “Psyche” is hardly seminal. Edvard Munch did primal despair better.

Anguish has long been heady fuel for artists.

To Craig, Merrill, Prescott and Stitz it is what gutsy, budding vision is all about.

SHOW TIMES

“The Human Psyche,” work by Sally Craig, Patrick Merrill, Marilyn Prescott and Lenny Stitz, Cal State Fullerton Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Through May 27. Free. (714) 567-7233.