Outsiders Elude 1 Show, Find Haven in Other

There is very little room for artists to operate “Outside of Tradition,” as a show by that name at Southwestern College Art Gallery unintentionally demonstrates. There is, however, a viable and vital “outsider” tradition, as another current show at the Oneiros Gallery amply proves.

Curator Leslie Nemour grouped the seven contemporary artists in the Southwestern show (900 Otay Lakes Road, Chula Vista, through April 6) on the basis of their affinities with folk art, primitive art and popular culture. In the all-embracing pluralism of today’s art world, such influences are hardly peripheral to the mainstream. The modernist tradition of the new and the post-modern trend of recycling the old allows such diverse modes of expression as trompe l’oeil painting, hard-edged abstraction and advertising-based wordplay to share the fruits of the contemporary art market and the attention of its audience.

The title of the Southwestern show is thus a glaring misnomer, but not all of the work included can be dismissed as easily. Nemour’s eclectic choices make for a tug of war between laughs, sighs and a disinterested malaise.

The heart and soul of the show are both centered in the work of Albert Chong, a San Diego artist born and raised in Jamaica. Each page of Chong’s small, accordion-folded book bound in dried fish skin reveals a different photographic impression, memory or vision--pears and dried flowers on a wooden table, an octopus on a cutting board, small animal skulls on a ceramic platter, feathers, shells, a sculpted mask, all assembled and recorded with fetishistic reverence.

Most of the subjects in the photographs were once living things. Chong preserves, assembles and photographs them, then frames the images with drawings, lace or fur. The entire process, its intimate scale and quiet exactitude, resonates with the power of prayer and catharsis.

In “Box for the Ancestors,” the visceral impact of Chong’s imagery is grounded in snippets of oral history written on sections of an extensive, copper-backed photographic book. A linear narrative never emerges; rather, Chong presents these memories of his father and his mother as isolated, but related still-lives. Like the photographs, they coalesce into a meditation on the continuity of life, through generations, through species, through the subtle transmutations of nature. All of this is made to fit into a box covered with dried fish skin, shells and old photographs, lined with copper and dusted with feathers.

At once a chant, a poem and a silent offering, Chong’s work is searching and potent. Its integrity and intimacy overshadow all of the other work in this show, including Leslie Samuels’ well-intended but sterile shrine installation and her masks that double as musical instruments.

Michael Peed’s cartoon-inspired wall reliefs have a faux -naive charm, as does his small, autobiographical comic book, “My Life in Bozeman.” The Montana-based artist, whose work is also on view through Sunday at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, writes with the disarming directness of a child as he packs the publication with descriptions of his daily life. Marcia Olson’s painted garments and unstretched canvases aspire to the same childlike immediacy. Densely patterned, their graffiti-like markings seem free-spirited, but are laced with a mature taste of the macabre.

Brent Riggs’ self-consciously provocative assemblages take swipes at religious sanctity and the “high art” tradition. They lack the depth and complexity, however, to be anything more than reactionary responses to the recent--and current--crisis in arts censorship.

The only happy deer ever to be found on the hood of a car is one painted by Michael Weix. The artist’s kitschy landscapes, all painted on detached car hoods and mounted on the wall, have the same forced innocence as the illiterate mother’s memoirs painted on Cindy Zimmerman’s “Commemorative Plates.” Both bodies of work carry implicit social commentary, but this can hardly be seen through the artists’ stunted visual humor.

Also at Southwestern, on the patio leading into the gallery, three artists have created site-specific works for a concurrent show, aptly named, “Outside of the Gallery.” Neither Peter Phillips’ surveillance-style tree house nor John Campbell’s innocuous birdbath sustains more than a fleeting glance, and David Jurist’s deconstructed villa with fountain is as sloppy conceptually as it is physically.

At the Oneiros Gallery (711 8th Ave.), a retrospective of paintings and drawings by Louis Monza affirms the appeal of the “outsider” artist--self-taught, free-spirited and often totally yielding to the power of direct observation. Monza, like others in this loosely-defined tradition, practiced a simple, yet spiritual art, recording his experiences, surroundings and imaginings in a sprightly style, marked by intensely bright color and simplified forms.

Monza’s vocabulary of forms spanned the visionary and the psychological as well, making him no outsider to art’s emotional potential, only to its commercial and critical morass. He did show his work, but drew the line at gallery representation, preferring to treat his art as a calling rather than a career.

Trained in his native Italy to create pattern designs for a furniture carver, Monza emigrated to the United States in 1913, at the age of 16. He worked on the railroads, served in the U.S. Army, painted houses and worked various odd jobs before returning to painting, drawing and carving in 1938. In the 1940s, he moved from New York to Southern California, where he died in 1984 at the age of 87.

Though many of the works here are clumsy and stiff, others reveal Monza’s ability to translate his sensitivity to the landscape and the human form in fresh, expressive terms. Two monumental figures, influenced perhaps by Monza’s passion for Mexican art, push stoically forward in “The Chair Carriers” (1952), their faces strong and serene, their bodies wrapped in cloths of vivid green, mountains of tiny chairs heaped on their backs. The chairs, amassed as a tight, delicate network of line, frame each classical figure with shimmering abstract pattern.

Several years earlier, Monza painted a portrait of a banyan tree with a massive, twisted trunk and branches that curl downward like ribbons. A woman walks by on the adjacent path, and several farmers work the surrounding fields. One man, however, stands still at the base of the tree, simply staring in wonder at the hollows and sinews of its extraordinary form. Nature’s spectacle captivates him as it did the artist, who marvelled equally at the land, its people and the fluid pigment capable of transcribing them.

The show continues through April 22.