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ART REVIEW: Hiding in plain sight

Josef Woodard, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

September 1, 2006 9:42 AM

If the artwork presently blanketing the walls (and floor) of the Arts Fund Gallery looks unusually fresh, and refreshing, that's a sure sign of success. The premise of the "Bright Young Things" exhibition was to dig beneath the surface of what we think we know about Santa Barbara's artist community and lend some equal time to the lesser-seen art made here.

Gallery Director Cody James Hartley responded to an inkling he had that Santa Barbara is blessed with a bounty of inventive artists -- in their 20s and 30s mostly -- whose work doesn't normally make it to the usual gallery walls in town. He went out hunting for this invisible tribe of artists deserving recognition and found plenty to choose from. In the end, he was limited only by the modest scale of the Arts Fund Gallery space.

Hartley was dealing with an elusive bunch and, too often, a literally moving target. Artists are infamously seduced by the ideal aspects of Santa Barbara, but the city's increasingly super-inflated cost of living has a habit of scaring away some of the best and brightest. Their, and our, loss.

"Landscape Over Grey," by David Kilpatrick, has bright figures struggling against an abstract winter scene. Below is Christine Gray's "Broken Computer," a witty, graceful painting of the woes of modern technology. The piece is on display through Sept. 15 at Arts Fund Gallery, as part of the "Bright Young Things" exhibit, which showcases the work of area artists who are mostly in their 20s and 30s.

Stopping at 16 artists (and a full house of 75 artworks), Hartley has done a fine job of ferreting out worthy talent from the midst and also in keeping the selection healthily varied. Most of the art here has a contemporary spin or ulterior motive but without falling too deeply into the pool of the cerebral. That description certainly holds true of the showiest piece in the space, Steven Soria's installation concoction, or "event," called "Identical Imperial." The basic sculptural housing of the piece, carefully constructed of cardboard, is a periscope-like structure, inside of which a wicked little pencil-drawn animation loop is screening.

We see a large pencil drawing of the same harbor on yonder wall in the gallery, and a large cardboard facsimile of a power strip lays on the floor -- all indicators of an avid, nonlinear imagination at work.

Even with the most "traditional" artists here, something is pleasantly askew. There's some mighty fine, conventional painting going on in Scott Anderson's "Elements" series, but the content turns peculiar.

"Elements: Water" is a lush painting of a woman in a gown against a blue background, her head and feet cropped out of the picture. Its sensuous ambiguity becomes it.

David Kilpatrick also knows how to paint figures but is hardly content doing only that. In his weirdly compelling "Landscape Over Grey," a vague vision of some wintry calamity, with heavily clad workmen attending some unexplained duty of salvation, is also a clever mash-up of the abstract vs. figurative dichotomy in disguise.

For pure drawing intrigue and droll wit, Christine Gray's delicate paintings may win the prize. Against neutral white backdrops, she gracefully details detritus and sources of everyday frustration in a painting like "Broken Computer." In the photographic and video arts, the artists chosen also have distinctive perspectives on ideas of how to push their media around. Photographer Danielle Rubi's series of canotypes includes traveloguing and portraits, with a fine, loose eye and exotic surface treatments of her media. In video, Leela Cyd Ross (seen recently at the UCSB student show) offers surreally funny takes on domestic and fashion "branding" of identity. For Marcelino Jimenez, the prevailing aesthetic is a wonderfully precarious one, with the artist's ornate yet junky assemblages half messy and half pristine.

In the best way, we're not quite sure how to approach these works, a situation also encountered in viewing David Sigismondi's "Cabinet from Ecology Series," an elaborate and funky cabinet of materials and liquids, which could either be a statement on cataloguing or on experiments gone dormant.

Warren Scultheis' large mixed media pieces, full of dripping, cloudy and dreamy effects, posits an abstract impressionist air, while Calico Brown's small acrylic and pencil abstractions on board summon up a naturalistic and biomorphic quality, while also seducing the eye on basic visual terms.

Moving further away from art world norms, Toby Keller's vinyl on aluminum pieces are simple black-on-white implosions, looking like print jobs or Rorschach tests run amok. Tidy, logo-like iconography, slightly Tiki flavored, makes for a charming and mysterious presence in the work of Zack Paul, as in the piece he wittily calls "My Favorite Brain Cell" (Is it a valentine or a requiem?). The design imperative takes a clever linguistic turn in Ethan Turpin's "Thought Patterns" series, in which drawings are built up from minute lines of words and run-on sentences. Layers of visual and verbal meaning entangle with, dance with and/or strangle each other.

Rummaging around this delicious and deliberately eclectic little smorgasbord of a show, the viewer senses a kind of satisfaction with the goods on display. At the same time, one senses that the goods here represent only a sampling of artistic energy humming and bubbling behind closed doors in the prim burg we call home.

Hopefully, this wonderful exhibition is the start of an ongoing tradition.

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

When: Through Sept. 15

Where: Arts Fund Gallery, 205C Santa Barbara St.

Gallery hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday

Information: 965-7321