ART REVIEW : Weird Images Rescue Center for Contemporary Art’s Ho-Hum Show

Fledgling artists soon learn how to do the juried show hustle.

Agonize over your recent work, choose a few pieces to photograph (oops, better buy another roll of film), bundle up the slides with your entry fee and hope that some harried art world person is still in a tolerant mood by the time the slide carrousel clicker pops your handiwork on the screen.

The annual juried exhibit at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is one of the exceptions to the Slide Rule, however. This year, Edward Den Lau, director of Space Gallery in Los Angeles, combed through about 200 works in varied media by artists from Los Angeles to San Diego to arrive at the selection by 33 artists featured in the show.

Too bad this way of making a selection doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good show. What viewers get here is pretty much the usual mishmash of ho-hum collage, sloppy and poorly focused mixed-media efforts, featureless painting and clunky sculpture.

But there is some good news.

Dixon Wolf of Rancho Cucamonga scoots together three disparate images in each of his black-and-white photo groupings. The results have a weird, low-key powerlessness, like a Roz Chast cartoon or a monologue by a self-deprecating New Wave comic.

In “Landscape (Passages) Foundations,” he juxtaposes photographs of a huge tree with a carved-in door, a bay-windowed house under construction and a group of stones piled up to create a building foundation. The point seems to be an odd little investigation of the identity of architectural features and the activity of making architectural objects.

“Landscape (Barney) Foundations,” reveals a more deadpan way of grouping images: a photo of a guy in a goofy Barney Rubble/Flinstones suit is surrounded by skimpy, barren views of a sliding glass door on a wall and a mailbox at the curb in front of an empty dirt “lawn” stretching out from a tract house. There is a sort of laughing-at-the-banality-of-suburban life posture in the juxtaposition that has its oddly compelling side.

Ann Mudge of Cardiff offers a clear, thoughtful image--seemingly about structure and freedom, urban constraints and the wzillfulness of nature--in her wall piece, “Diehard 3.” Steel mesh forms six skyscraper-like columns that jut out from the wall at right angles. Inside these stiff structures are steel-wool tree shapes with wire tentacles that leap out of the tops of the enclosures.

Jeff Reed, who lives in Monrovia, has made something of a specialty of his antic bar scenes. Although it seems time for him either to develop these gently humorous paintings and drawings further or to move on to other territory, they do have a cartoonish charm.

“Happy Hour and Hors d’Oeuvres No. 2” features meatball-grabbing, board-game-playing, beer-pouring, big-eyed denizens of a neighborhood saloon. Two guys piggishly lower their heads to touch their plates; a woman floats horizontally as she pours a beer for her companion; a fellow in a tie talks on a pay phone. Minus the improbable Chagall-influenced details, you have seen it all before--though probably not in a painting, come to think of it.

Froukje Schaafsma’s mixed-media piece called “H” is a delicate, dreamy thing, a medley of H-words (hacksaw, homage, Hemingway, hornet, henchman, hey! and so on) chalked here and there on a green background. There are also drawings of a hammer and a hacksaw, a handbag, a yellow bird (hummingbird?), a fish (hake?) and possibly other things that take a while longer to leap out of that bright green surface. (Why green? one wonders, though there don’t seem to be any color names that begin with H.)

Some of the other pieces that show a certain freshness don’t push far enough--like Bernard Kouzel’s one-liner (photographs of cracked, chipped yellow speed bumps grouped under the title “Yolk”), Tim McGuire’s printed paper collage, “Temptation, Desire and Guilt,” and Steve Osborne’s untitled domino-themed assemblage.

But surely the strangest work in the show is a tiny, amateurish and evidently hastily rendered painting on a piece of old wood carefully set on a gold-framed piece of rose-colored burlap. The subject seems to be a bucolic strip joint (a white building says “GIRLS”) nestled within yellow leaf-speckled trees. Who is Juan Rosendo of Laguna Beach, one wants to know, and why does he paint like this?

The eighth annual juried show remains at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art through Aug. 12. The center, in Space 111, Harbor Business Park, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana, is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 549-4989.