Boehm Shows: Shallow, Deep

SAN DIEGO — “Beyond Numbers,” Ming Mur-Ray’s new installation at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery, springs from a relatively modest premise: We who live in contemporary, urban America have been reduced to numbers--Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, credit card numbers and so on. Despite its simplicity, Mur-Ray finesses this theme into a provocative show eliciting a range of questions and sensations.

In contrast, Ben Anderson’s installation, “A Balance Is Something,” which shares the Boehm Gallery space with Mur-Ray’s work, skimps on the sensations it offers viewers but hints of a weighty, conceptual premise concerning the continuity between nature and culture.

The two shows launch Boehm Gallery’s new season and also help kick off “IN/SITE 92,” the two-month, San Diego-to-Tijuana program of artists’ installations organized by Installation Gallery.

Mur-Ray, who was born in Hong Kong and now lives in La Jolla and New York, concentrates her focus on individual identity--what comprises it, what affirms it and what denies it. In the larger of two parts of the installation, she confronts us with “The Glass Wall,” which diagonally bisects one room of the gallery. On the wall, mounted in a grid, are 55 glass panels, each bearing a sandblasted string of numbers and/or letters. The shadows of these pale inscriptions fall softly on the wall behind, and the immediate impact is that of a memorial or even a columbarium with its grid of tombs. The wall has a hushed seriousness about it, as if an austere tribute to nameless, fallen souls.

The souls represented by those numbers have not fallen at all, however, but are living Americans of various professions and races. On the reverse side of the wall, Mur-Ray identifies them as such, using black letters on plexiglass panels that also form a grid. While the numbers on the other side of the wall all run together in the mind, with no particular distinction, the words on these panels can at least be easily equated with human beings. “Artist/Greek” reads one, “Forklift Operator/Caucasian,” another.

Like a census-taker, Mur-Ray approached these men and women at random and recorded an identifying number for each, based on their own passport, license or other form of identification. While the numbers reduce these people to anonymous cogs, the professional and racial classifications help restore some of their individuality.

Like the so-called “glass ceiling” that prevents women from going beyond a certain level of professional advancement, Mur-Ray’s “Glass Wall” is presented as a sociological fact to be challenged. The uniformity imposed on us when we are assigned numbers contradicts the diversity that actually characterizes our culture. Mur-Ray helps restore some sense of individuality to the holders of those numbers by giving them descriptive labels as well, but she goes the furthest to humanize those numbers in her self-portraits, a series of small, haunting images mounted in an adjacent room.

These are imprints of the artist’s own face and arms as well as other objects and textures, made on small steel panels painted with oil. Mur-Ray’s features appear as highlights on a dense surface of rusty brown. Some of these marks bear the texture of gauze, others the fluid rhythms of feathers. In one image, the artist turns her head down gently to smell a sprig of flowers; in another, she scowls. Several of the self-portraits are paired with numbered panels similar to those in the glass wall. Through this juxtaposition Mur-Ray establishes the existence of a chasm separating sensual beings and the sterile numbers that define them.

These paintings are vital clues to the artist’s life--to any life, really, in the way they reveal a breadth of emotion within real, palpable form. In their resemblance to death masks and shrouds, they suggest that the enduring qualities of an individual’s identity can best be found by looking at his or her physical appearance and not by rifling through the ID cards in his or her wallet.

Anderson, who also lives in San Diego and recently received his master of fine arts degree from UC San Diego, invites viewers of his installation to walk up a sloping wooden floor in one corner of the room. From this slight rise, the rest of the room takes on the quality of a panoramic landscape. Listening to the recorded sound of crickets, one can gaze at the installation and absorb it slowly. Unfortunately, Anderson hasn’t provided enough to occupy even a slow gaze for very long.

In the center of the room rests a large tangle of thick branches and tree trunks that support an elegantly crafted wooden boat. The boat tilts upward in front, as if riding the branches like rough waves. The scenario feels reminiscent of the smaller, sculptural installations of UCSD professor Ernest Silva, whose empty, painted canoes perched on tangled skeins of wood speak of solitary quests, journeys artistic and otherwise.

Anderson’s work exploits the symbolic potential of the boat form less successfully than Silva’s. It turns the viewer’s attention to craft, instead, and the relationship between the roughly hewn branches and the finely sanded vessel that emerged from just such limbs. Source and product are intimately linked; they are merely different manifestations of the same evolving, physical substance.

Human alterations of the natural world need not be negative, Anderson seems to imply. A low “Balancing Tank” that Anderson has constructed to take the alkalinity out of water, to “make it more like rain,” reinforces the notion that natural and unnatural worlds can and should be allies. Unfortunately, it does so with minimal poetry and scant passion.

Boehm Gallery, Palomar College, 1140 W. Mission Road., San Marcos, through Sept. 30. Open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday-Saturday.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

PROFESSOR TO EXHIBIT

San Diego State University art professor Richard Baker opens a new show of paintings Sept. 12 at the Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles. The show continues through October 10. . . .

Italo Scanga, on the faculty at UC San Diego, will be exhibiting through Oct. 17 at the Ro Snell Gallery in Santa Barbara.