Loyola Gallery Puts Its Faith in Religious Art Exhibit : The show, which focuses on Jewish and Christian rites, is designed as a reminder that secular works are not always irreverent

By LISBET NILSON

March 24, 1991 12 AM PT

<i> Nilson writes regularly about art for Westside/Valley Calendar</i>

This Easter and Passover season, a show at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery is launching a fresh term onto the Los Angeles art scene: “artists of faith.” It serves as a reminder that not all serious contemporary art addressing religious issues is necessarily irreverent.

“Passover / Passion: Artists of Faith Interpret Their Holy Days” brings together in one pointedly ecumenical exhibition installations by local artists Ruth Weisberg, who is Jewish, and Michael Tang, who is Catholic; paintings by Judith Margolis, who is Jewish--and a complete suite of “Passion of Christ” engravings from 1512 by the German master Albrecht Durer.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Loyola Marymount’s late president, Charles Casassa, who worked to foster good will between the Jewish and Christian communities in Los Angeles, gallery director Gordon Fuglie said.

Fuglie said the installation by Tang, a Jesuit on LMU’s art faculty, represented a “repository chapel”--according to the Catholic faith, one that holds the bread that has been consecrated by a priest as the body of Christ for Communion. The accouterments in Tang’s piece, he added, hark back to the more traditional liturgy that prevailed before the reforms of Vatican II in the late 1960s--a liturgy that some Catholics find more richly mysterious than its modernized counterpart.

“Michael’s chapel--with its crumbling frescoes and its flowers that will wilt over the course of the exhibition--is a metaphor for this loss of mystery,” Fuglie said.

On a recent weekday, Weisberg was aligning donated flagstone strips on her large installation, “Passing Over.” In it, a tight stone-lined passage opens out toward an arcing ladder, constructed in forced perspective, that appears to leap over a 20-foot scroll. The scroll is painted with scenes from the Sinai Desert.

“I’m basically trying to re-create the landscape of Passover and the Revelation--to give the viewer the experience of moving through the metaphorical landscape from darkness to light,” Weisberg said. The nine-foot-long stone passage, she added, is meant to “recall both the houses that were passed over in the biblical story but also more modern places of oppression.”

The four large paintings by Judith Margolis each elaborate on different aspects of the Passover story. One piece, Margolis said, reflects on the teaching that the Red Sea did not part for the people of Israel until they were nostril-deep in water--a high-water mark of faith.

Margolis said she fielded a variety of responses from people who heard she was doing work for a show on a specifically religious theme. “Someone said to me, ‘Oh, that’s nice--what are you going to be doing? Paintings of Seder plates?’ ” she said, adding that people expect art on a religious theme to be either iconoclastic or “not only traditional--but boring.”

Margolis said she found the phrase “artists of faith” a promising one. “It means,” she observed, “that it’s something to be engaged in.”

“Passover / Passion: Artists of Faith Interpret Their Holy Days” through April 13 at the Laband Art Gallery of Loyola Marymount University, Loyola Boulevard at 80th Street, Los Angeles; (213) 338-2880. Open 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. The exhibition will be closed for Good Friday and Holy Saturday; and April 5 and 6.

TRAINS AND HIGHER PLANES: For confirmation of the strong spiritual content of the paintings by Duncan Simcoe and the mixed media works by Michael Schrauzer--which are on view together at the John Thomas Gallery--one need only look at some of the titles on the gallery price sheet. Listed there are “Abraham Saying Goodbye to Ishmael” and “Jonah” among Simcoe’s works; and “The Dark Wood/Annunciation,” “The Last Judgement” and “Grace and Casualty” among Schrauzer’s.

As Simcoe explains in an artist’s statement accompanying the show, he explores aspects of the Judeo-Christian narrative and his own personal story in paintings that feature images derived from railroads and trains--an effect of working in a studio next to some actively traveled tracks.

The works by Schrauzer--for whom this show is his first in a commercial gallery--are constructed as if they were altar pieces, although that is not necessarily the term he would use, the artist said.

“They’re definitely religious in inspiration,” he said. “But I mean them to be open to everybody whether they’re religious or not.”

Elements in Schrauzer’s work include painted hands, trees and open skies, and objects such as gold-covered nuggets, squares of copper and a miniature chair. “The sky is a heavenly sky--it’s not that there’s nothing there, it’s beyond our comprehension,” Schrauzer said. “The materials are . . . objects we can comprehend.”

In no way are the pieces meant to be an ironic commentary on religion. “I am so sick and disgusted with irony and lack of sincerity, with people having nothing to believe in,” Schrauzer said. “It’s very easy to be ironic. But it’s hard to make a positive statement.”

Duncan Simcoe and Michael Schrauzer through April 13 at the John Thomas Gallery, 602 Colorado Ave. No. B, Santa Monica; (213) 396-6096. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

FROM A DISTANCE: It’s not every day that one can travel to West Los Angeles City Hall for an instant tour of spiritual destinations worldwide. But that is what is being offered through April 5 in the lobby gallery, which is showing some 100 images by Canoga Park photographer Claire Rydell.

“Mirrors of Faith: A Collection of Photographs From Five Continents Through Forty Centuries” includes images from India, Thailand, Jordan, Israel, Latin America, China and the United States--to mention just a few locales. Many feature sacred architecture.

Some of the photographs are made more exotic because of their connection with countries involved in the recent Gulf War or because of their current political inaccessibility. “I just got back from the Middle East a year ago,” Rydell said. “Within two months’ time it was impossible to go to some of the places where I had been.”

The photographs are hung in eclectic juxtapositions: A Spanish cathedral at sunset hangs next to a shot of a shrine to the Virgin Mary in a New Jersey farmyard, for example; a statue of Christ the Redeemer from Rio de Janeiro flanks a glimpse of cycladic church architecture in Mykonos, Greece.

Rydell said that during her travels, she was struck more by similarities in religious monuments and practices than by differences. “It really does make you think that the world is one,” she said.

“Mirrors of Faith” through April 5 at the West Los Angeles City Hall Gallery, 1645 Corinth Ave., West Los Angeles; (213) 237-1373. Open 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.