ART REVIEW : Salo Work Retreats From Bank to Gallery

Removed from the lobby of the Wells Fargo Bank Building in Newport Beach last month after vociferous tenant complaints, Deanna Salo’s beach-debris installation has found a new, if temporary, home. It’s part of “The Third One Out,” an ecologically themed group exhibit (through Friday) at BC Space gallery in Laguna Beach.

It’s easy to see why people in a corporate environment would not be receptive to the piece--made of squashed pieces of Styrofoam fashioned into columns, heaps of such miscellaneous items as plastic bottle caps, a Styrofoam head encircled with throw-away cigarette lighters, and wreaths made of balloons, ribbons and aluminum foil.

The artsy-craftsy, homemade appearance of this motley assortment is surely remote from the slick, urbane veneer of objects people generally consider to be “tasteful” or “upscale.” Unfortunately, the piece also appears deficient in the rigor and focused presentation one expects from serious contemporary art.

If, for example, the columns were meant as a tongue-in-cheek reference to soberly conceived cultural monuments, then the masses of other items don’t seem to fit into the program. Ringing the head with the lighters (“Oh, it’s wearing a necklace!”) was a vapid, cute gesture that could have been resisted. The wreaths are merely perky objects devoid of apparent meaning or symbolism. And so on.

In the end, the piece seems little more than an earnest attempt at grouping objects by type or organizing them into familiar shapes. Although Salo writes in her statement that “the ultimate irony is that trash can become art,” she doesn’t imbue the piece with a convincing metaphorical or transformational quality.

The installation really works best in a straightforward, didactic way, as a testimony to the shockingly careless leisure habits of people in a natural environment. In fact, it might be a good idea for the gallery to post prominently the fact that Salo collected all the colorful flotsam and jetsam on daily walks across a mere quarter-mile stretch of the fastidiously groomed San Clemente beach.

Another untitled work by Salo is a breezy, back-to-the-future archeological spoof about the “Ozoners,” the late-20th-Century folk who are mucking up the ozone layer of the atmosphere.

A fast-food chain’s “Big Gulp” cup attached to the piece suggests, the text says, that these extinct folk must have been “an average of 12 feet tall.” How preposterous, in other words, that anyone of normal proportions would require such a monstrous utensil.

Other, wildly diverse work in the show is by Greg Erf, Robert Ketchum, Laura Parker and Michael O’Neal.

Erf’s double-image photographs--disparate objects photographed separately and precisely matched up in unusual ways--suggest that even the most common objects in the post-industrial landscape can be seen as bizarre and curious. With the addition of a few strategic lengths of masking tape, an anti-aircraft gun on one site becomes the bizarre nosepiece of a crane and a pair of steel girders on another lot. A slender pole at the edge of a dusty field appears to balance a pile of thick pipes lying in front of a disused gas station.

Seemingly just another example of traditional color landscape photography, Ketchum’s lush color images were shot specifically to demonstrate the logging industry’s encroachment on the 17-million-acre Tongass rain forest in Southeast Alaska. Parker’s enigmatic series of images--in one, a topless woman in front of a humble building holds out a few rocks in red-streaked hands--isolate aspects of nature that seem part of a mysteriously accusatory ritual.

Michael O’Neal’s “Yours From the End of the Century” is a series of dark and disconcertingly sloppy photographs of decrepit, abandoned housing and stacks of unused construction materials in the area of Los Angeles bordering the delay-ridden, unfinished Century Freeway. Although O’Neal’s artistry is nothing to crow about, his message about the toll that the project has taken on the community comes through with a grim clarity.

This installment of “The Third One Out” continues through Aug. 2 at BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach. The gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Information: (714) 497-1880.