Triple Exposure

The Janss/Nichols Gallery in Thousand Oaks, tucked in a business park between Thousand Oaks Boulevard and the freeway, is among the nicer art spaces, physically, in the county, and well worth seeking out.

But that is the icing on the cake: On its walls, the gallery has implemented the valuable aesthetic mission of presenting fine art photography, via established masters and current practitioners.

Larry Janss’ love of the medium comes naturally, since he is a fine photographer in his own right, and at the moment, Janss the gallery keeper becomes Janss the artist as part of a three-sectioned exhibition.

Janss’ corner of the gallery features images that have been seen in the area before, including his close-up portraits of the pensive Polynesian beauty “Liat Dreaming,” suitably soft-focused around the edges.

He finds fresh inroads to landscape photography in the balance of road, mountains and blanketing clouds in “Highway to Heaven” and the odd convergence of jagged rock formations and casual brush strokes of nebulae overhead in “Cloudscape.”

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One recurring visual theme is Janss’ love of, and curiosity about, water, in all its fluid, unpredictable and sometimes surreal splendor.

In “Wheeler Gorge,” water flows down the local waterway, transforming into a more elusive, milky substance as it rushes over a small fall. The mysteries of water show up in tight close-up shots of its rippling surfaces, aiming at an expression of its malleable nature.

A selection of works from the JNG Collection includes pieces by Ansel Adams and the geometric pattern of Brett Weston’s “Roofs, Spain.”

As the title suggests, Weston manages to convey the warm exoticism of the foreign locale but tightens his conceptual focus on a specific detail of the location, crossing over from travelogue to visual poem.

The most striking piece of this part of the show, though, is Eikoh Hosoe’s “Bee and Woman,” an enigmatic studio shot and a study in texture and contrast.

A nude woman, as white as can be, lies on her belly, staring intently at an insect on the floor. She appears detached, mesmerized or both. Or is she stunned, by a virulent bee sting or fear? We are left to venture an interpretation, but the image impresses with its own visual merits.

In the third corner of the current show, emerging young photographer Ryan Hunter shows a modest, nicely done work, displaying a willful diversity of subject matter and interests.

The calm, well-composed appreciation of European sights, from the riverside vista of “Bathe” to the ancient arches of “Canterbury Cathedral,” is in stark contrast to a series of photographs from the front lines of rock music.

“Anger” conveys the sense of a rock show, in the sweaty confines of the Troubadour in Los Angeles, as a claustrophobic caldron of energy, generated and released. Other rock performance images zoom in on the torqued faces of musicians in the heat of action.

If there is a point in Hunter’s selection of works, it may be the coexistence, and tense relations, of radically different cultural poles.

A spike-haired, black-clad young man is viewed from behind, voyeuristically, against the sleek post-modern architecture of the Getty Center. The piece, titled “American Dream II,” shows music buffs with Mohawk haircuts awash in the intensity of live music. “American Dream III,” conversely, is a Rockwellian scene, with a group of Little Leaguers pledging allegiance to the American flag, prominently placed in a corner of the composition.

It’s as if to say vive le difference, in culture, society, coiffures and photography.

DETAILS

Photography of Larry Janss, Ryan Hunter and “The Best of the JNG Collection” through Feb. 11 at Janss/Nichols Gallery, 1408 Thousand Oaks Blvd., in Thousand Oaks. Gallery hours: Tues.-Fri., 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; 497-3720.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com