Katy Stone: (Detail) Little Universe

You can take issue with Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra – the idea that contemporary life simulates “authentic” experience – but simulations, as any moviegoer will attest, are often highly engaging.  That’s definitely the case with “Tickling Thicket,” a provocative exhibit by Katy Stone and Yvette Molina, two painters with very different ideas about representing nature. 

 Stone brushes and pours acrylic paint on to clear sheets of Duralar which she cuts and reassembles into structures that recall terrestrial and aquatic plant life seen through a scrim of mutating cells.  These works appear in two formats: framed behind glass, like taxidermied specimens, and in complex, multi-layered installations that flow across walls in amoeba-like shapes over which floral forms are superimposed – a kind of sculptural version of cell animation minus the storyline.

Stone, who lives and works in Seattle, doesn’t spend much time in nature.  But she almost certainly fantasizes about it.  She works quickly and spontaneously, painting hundreds of forms a day in a monochromatic palette of white, amber and black.  These she assembles in improvised installations, creating the convincing illusion that they somehow sprouted organically.  “Little Universe (Terra),” an L-shaped installation, spans 21 linear feet with starburst forms pinned to the wall at a various angles to cast shadows through transparent media.  It’s a macroscopic view of a microscopic phenomenon.  ”Untitled (Thicket Heap)” is the exact opposite: a floor-to-ceiling construction in a tiny room that delivers what feels like an ocean-floor view of a kelp bed – a head-spinning tangle of limbs, vines, roots, stalks and tendrils interspersed with flora of indeterminate species.  The range of associative possibilities seems almost endless.

Yvette Molina: Lichen Whorl

 It’s doubtful that either artist is flashing any irony here.  Yet the concept of the simulacra seems to be embedded, if only because the obvious artifice of their materials contrasts so sharply with the authenticity of the response they elicit.  In other words, they become credible destinations, places where you’d want to spend time.

Linda Day: Pulse Beyond Between # 10

In “Horizons,” an exposition of nine acrylic paintings, Linda Day has taken the basic tenets of hard-edge, geometric abstraction and turned them upside down.  Where in the recent past she employed the orthodoxies of the genre — precise lines, bold colors and repetitive shapes — to create an optical buzz, her paintings now reveal something entirely different: references to landscape that inject moodiness into what has historically been an icy, formalist province.  

 Unlike Kenneth Noland and others of his ilk who formulated this style in the early 1960s, Day embraces beauty and the sheer tactile joy of manipulating pigment.  In horizontally stacked layers of mostly muted colors laid down in wavy and sometimes jagged lines that spill out over the edge of the frame, Day’s new paintings display a visible, archeological record of their creation. 

Pulse Beyond Between # 8

 You may think you’re looking at conventional stripe paintings, but such thoughts dissolve quickly.  How, exactly, this happens is unclear.  But there are clues.  One is that Day’s lines are never straight.  They roll and slope and pile up like towering confections in a plethora of close-hued colors whose glossy textures recall pulled taffy.  (From “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8,” a painting looks good enough to eat, I recorded more than a dozen shades before exhausting my color vocabulary.)  Another clue is that these colors are achieved by an improvisational process of layering which yields unintentional Rorschach-like artifacts that linger amorphously below the surface. 

 Bands of colors define themes and counter themes.  Gently loping lines tap out rhythms and polyrhythms, and subsurface shadow blots add accents.  If it’s true, as Josef Albers said, that “the origin of art is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect” then “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8″ qualifies as Exhibit A.  It’s an orchestra for the eye.

 The same holds for the other major work in this show, “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 10.” A large-scale (3 x 11′) mash-up of forest and sea rendered in blue/green shades, it evokes a never-ending horizon – something that hard-edge abstraction (or color field painting as it was also known) claimed to do but rarely achieved.  Day’s ambiguous lines and interleaved colors produce a hypnotic, transporting effect.  

Chime # 3

 It’s instructive to note what preceded the current Pulse series.  “Chime #3″, from a body of work made in 2006, features short vertical bands organized in a grid that start out pale at the edges and build to a searing orange crescendo at the center.  Combined, they form multiple perspectives of what looks like a constructivist cityscape bisected vertically by a superhighway — an update of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings in which opposing color swatches stand-in for ones and zeros to represent an information-saturated universe.  The contrast between the two bodies of work couldn’t be sharper; it demonstrates the distance she’s traveled in a short time.

 Stuart Allen’s sculptures, which reference light, space and flight with kites and other forms made from sail cloth, were an interesting counterpoint.  Five were on view here in “Measured.”

Stuart Allen: Air Water Kites

 One, a box kite, hung from the gallery’s clerestory ceiling; the other four were wall-mounted and used repetition as a key ingredient.  “One consists of seven sail-shapes affixed to a wall with turnbuckles; another featured 60 small box kites deployed perpendicularly around a corner, a possible reference to molecular geometry.  While Allen’s work deals with environmental factors, it typically appears indoors, which means it can sometimes feel a bit constrained when not arrayed across big spaces as it was in 2007 at the San Antonio Museum of Art. 

 Yet the opposite can also be true.  “A Kite for Flying in the Air” and “A Kite for Flying in Water” – two well-paired departures from Allen’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic – resemble battle shields garnished with braided rope.  That uncharacteristic piece of ornamentation thrust the work into a different realm, bringing to mind the kinkier aspects of Mathew Barney’s work, which in this context was not a bad thing. 

 Both Day and Allen seem to have inched out of their comfort zones.  Day simplified, Allen complicated, and in so doing they created a symbiosis of compatible opposites – one that points toward fresh and exciting directions for both.

 ”Horizons” by Linda Day and “Measured” by Stuart Allen closed at JayJay October 25, 2008.

With the humblest of materials and a truly cosmic vision of how they can be deployed in endless mutations, Emeryville sculptor Robert Ortbal has created a phantasmagorical universe of objects that play on familiar associations while at same time handily defying comparisons to any actual terrestrial, oceanic, microscopic and cosmic life forms you may have known.

 The first time I saw Ortbal’s work in mid-2007 I felt like I’d walked into an octopus’ garden.  Snake-like forms made from styrofoam-covered chicken wire writhed on the walls.  Plastic flowers attached to pink foam tubes mimicked bioluminescent creatures, while a series of wire-mounted Spaldeens seemed to satirize the very act of depicting aquatic plants swaying in the tide.  There were also objects that looked like they’d been cast from endoscopic views of the human body.

Cartographer's Dilemma: Charting a Sneeze (Detail)

In the intervening year, Ortbal’s practice of transforming everyday industrial materials into otherworldly forms has expanded into even more rarified zones, yielding shapes, textures, structures and associations that stretched even the elastic category of biomorphism.

 While Ortbal, 46, readily acknowledges the influence of a long-ago trip to the Great Barrier Reef, he eschews the organic label viewers tend to apply.  “When you’re making hybrid forms it almost always speaks of things from the sea, because when you’re looking at, say, coral, it’s an animal that looks like a plant.  It automatically has that ability to cross over and be slippery in its classification,” Ortbal explains in his sun-drenched studio.  In fact, Ortbal dislikes even calling what he does object building, preferring instead to see his output as “related to a system, part of something much larger.

Mistletoe

 ”I’m after essences,” he continues.  “I try to understand patterns in nature and how they combine and interact with human nature.  I’m trying to uncode how those things operate.”

 Ortbal traces the origins of his method to an NEA-funded research project he conducted in Europe in 2001 prior to building an “animated chandelier” that the UC Berkeley Art Museum exhibited in 2004.  In Europe he reexamined Rococo and Art Nouveau and came up with the idea of combining those motifs with “the essences of three distinct kingdoms: animal, vegetable and mineral to fuse this new type of work.”  But an even bigger breakthrough, he maintains, was “three dimensional patterning”- learning to break apart those 2-D motifs and reconstruct them in three dimensions to achieve a “twisting of space.”

Robert Ortbal in the Studio, Emeryville 2008. Photo: David M. Roth

 At his most recent solo show (”Neverland”), which closed in October at Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, Ortbal demonstrated that skill, adding to an already prodigious vocabulary.  Included were mirrored mylar sculptures that used reflected and refracted light as key compositional elements; a diorama-like polar landscape built from carved styrofoam that dangled from the ceiling; and several pieces that activated 3-D space in ways I’d not seen previously.  The most provocative examples came from his “Architecture of a Scent” series – wall-mounted sculptures that attempt to visualize the state of sensory confusion known as synesthesia.

 In these pieces, Ortbal employs what he calls “asymmetrical radial bursts” – flock-sprayed strands of wire that resemble Pick Up Sticks, which contrast hard-edge geometric lines with looping strands of colored wire that take viewers on a ride through multi-planar space.

 Of his attempt to give form to things that can’t be seen, Ortbal says: “It’s interesting to think of making work that is beyond our physical perception.  It frees me up and allows me to push on to a place that’s unfamiliar.” 

 Growing up in the art-poor San Jose suburb of Campbell, Ortbal did exactly that.  “Becoming an artist wasn’t even in the realm of possibility,” he recalls.  But while studying at SF State, he was smitten by the ceramic sculpture of Pete Voulkos, Ortbal saw a career path and went on to earn an MFA at UC Davis.  After a decade of scuffling he landed a full-time teaching position at Sac State three years ago, and has since been rewarded with numerous solo and group shows, a large commission at the Oakland Airport and a Eureka Fellowship.

 ”What I place paramount is my intuition,” Ortbal says.  That modus operandi seems to be serving him well.

Installation View: Strange Fascination

"Strange Fascination: New Sculpture by Julia Couzens," is a sprawling, near-gothic accretion of accumulated "junk" that is both installation and performance.  It spreads "parasitically" across floors, walls and ventilation ducts, and reveals a continuously changing face, owing to periodic revisions by the artist over a three-month run at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento. It’s Technicolor jumble cum jungle.  Spread out across a compact, low-ceilinged space, Couzens’ raw materials (steel cages, yarn, electrical tape, cloth, lighting fixtures, pipe cleaners, fabric, crocheted blankets and doilies) reveal an obsessive, hyperactive working process whose apparent governing principle is to resist any force (read: intellect) that might dictate a predetermined outcome.   Couzens, one of the region’s most accomplished artists, has intellect to spare, but she’s is adamant that her art not be "about anything."  "Art is a barricade to the act of making," she says, quoting Terry Allen.  But like many process artists who work intuitively with found (i.e. non-art) materials — Jessica Stockholder, Annette Messenger and Judy Pfaff are a few influences that come to mind — Couzens readily concedes that materials and objects carry their own charges, and that the working process often reveals unarticulated thoughts and emotions.  That’s certainly the case here.  But unlike previous Couzens exhibits where references to the body and to nature prevailed, these works, even with their allusions to natural forms, push right up to the edge of topicality, with symbols of domesticity and femininity abounding. 

Insomia

The centerpiece, "Insomnia", pulls viewers in with a black negligee suspended from the wall in the shape of a witch’s cap.  Midair, it connects — via a bra-shaped piece of fabric — to a highly ornamented chandelier that rests on the floor like an anchor.  The object is wrapped so thoroughly in tape that it appears to be painted — black.  Add to that, cords of brightly hued electrical tape and bits of cloth and you have something that borders on fetishistic.  What’s striking is how each of these elements is transformed into its opposite:  An otherwise sexy night gown becomes an outsize piece of Halloween garb; a light fixture becomes a weight, sunk by the artist’s Rococo excess.  Strangely, I felt as if the piece could become self animating a la Tinguely and dissolve in a puff of smoke.  The difference of course, is that the noise you hear isn’t mechanical, but a kind of psychic clanging in your head. Similar inversions of meaning take place in "Strange Fascination," the show’s title piece.  It’s a thicket of crushed metal cages crudely wrapped in colored yarns to which a crocheted blanket was later appended and twisted into the shape of a figure with bound feet.  To that point-blank (and wholly self-explanatory blast at suburban domesticity) Couzens added a small collection of crocheted bottle caps which she found in a thrift store.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a more blatant example of craft run amok.  Obsession, as evidenced by Couzens’ repeated use of yarn and tape to wrap nearly everything, is what gives this exhibition its nervous, animating force.  It’s a force that seems to call into question conventional meanings by linking the component parts of each piece in metaphorical chains of causality. 

Take, for example, the metal garden gate that is the focal point of "Untitled 2005".  Like the chandelier in "Insomnia," it, too, is wrapped in black cloth tape.  Far more ominously, Couzens attaches an ungainly assemblage of yarn and cloth that looks, literally, like a home-spun malignancy.  Beneath, on the floor, rests a heap of multi-colored fabric swatches known as tulle – the diaphanous stuff teen-age ballerinas wear.  Just don’t look for any Sugar Plum Fairies in this not-so-sweet home.

Before the Glorius

Couzens isn’t always trying to tear the smiling face off life’s surfaces.  Sometimes sheer beauty suffices.  "Before the Glorious" is a small, delicate, wall-mounted construction of hair-thin wire that looks like a wisp of smoke.  It is a throwback to an earlier period in which organic abstraction – particularly references to dense foliage in the Sacramento Delta — played a more central role in Couzens practice.  Another reminder of Couzens’ lighter side is an untitled "drawing" made from tiny bits of orange tape on notebook paper.  The pieces are arrayed in a mandala-like fashion, a code to be deciphered, but also savored for its pure, lyrical quality.  As a child growing up in Auburn, Couzens spent a lot of time outdoors "digging," she says, "for China."  Now, in the same spot, caring for an aging parent, the two sit side by side on a sofa.  One cross-stitches; the other wraps found objects in yarn, tape and electrical wire with no apparent sense of irony.  The mother’s obsession is self-contained and oriented to completing a specific task.  Couzens’ operates unconsciously, directing her energy outward — "Pushing my way through a thicket, hard in my position" is how she describes it.  That act, in and of itself, summarizes as well as anything, the sort of material alchemy that has always been at the center of Couzens’ art.  Think of it as surrealism without a manifesto. Peter Stegall’s work couldn’t provide a sharper contrast.  A painter who’s leaned toward shiny, alluring surfaces and shapes that recall Matisse cutouts, Stegall is a formalist to the core.  Weight, balance, form, spacial relationships and especially color, are his paramount concerns, and in "Paintings and Constructions," he proves just how well he can juggle those elements.  The paintings, most of them about a foot square, are highly seductive owing to gloss enamel paint.  Problem is, these flat, brilliantly colored surfaces don’t always give viewers a way in, even though in larger works Stegall warps the forms to add dimensionality. His 3-D constructions — enamel-coated, wall-mounted, wood pieces, also about a foot square – tell a different story.  They look like models for the kind of massive steel sculptures seen public spaces.  The advantage, here, at this intimate size, is that you can really see the artist’s thinking.  It’s a potent synthesis of Constructivist shapes and multi-colored lines of the sort favored by Sol Lewitt.   The lines appear as stacked grids, and are interrupted by various shapes (triangles, circles, half-circles, squares and biomorphic shapes and lines) that cast provocative shadows.  Whether they’re an overt nod to painter Elizabeth Murray or a wry comment on the act of painting itself is hard to tell.  What’s clear is that Stegall’s acute attention to detail and his mastery of form, color and balance are things to behold when he expresses himself three-dimensionally.  Here’s hoping he gets the opportunity to do so on a much larger scale.

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  "Strange Fascination: New Sculpture by Julia Couzens" and "Paintings and Constructions" by Peter Stegall closed February 26 at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento.