AT THE GALLERIES / LEAH OLLMAN : Layering Efforts Short of Mark : Art: Exhibitions by Barbara Sexton and James Anderson lose the way in works that mix images and words.

SAN DIEGO —  Barbara Sexton draws on maps, large geographical survey maps of the state of California. Atop these surfaces loaded with implications about scientific accuracy and political expediency, Sexton overlays words and images that suggest a critique of some of the institutions housed by our state. An odd friction results from the layering of the precise, coolly informational maps and the elusive connotations of Sexton’s images. That friction has the potential to ignite some mighty sparks, but more often than not, it simply abrades, unproductively.

Sexton, a local artist, is at her best in her show at David Zapf Gallery when she bolsters the formal layering in her work with a layering of meanings--when the maps and the words or images address one another, at least obliquely. That is the case in “Kill Points,” where she superimposes the words “Location, Location, Location is Everything” over a map and its overlaid image of a man aiming a gun, his own body overlaid with a diagram of optimal target zones. By using the familiar real estate maxim in an unconventional context, she draws a parallel between real estate zones and vulnerable spots on the human body. These both are places where you either kill or make a killing.

Another, smaller work from an earlier series has a poignancy that the more recent works have sacrificed for a bitter dryness. “Mystery + History = My Story” hints at the personal, and at the hidden and often suppressed tales that lie behind every individual’s life. A figure dives gracefully over a segment of stone wall here, a dramatic demonstration of the capacity to overcome obstacles. In her statement accompanying the show, Sexton refers to her family’s escape from eastern Europe at the beginning of World War II, and it is this family history that gives such an image tremendous resonance and weight.

Elsewhere, however, Sexton is cool to a fault. Her obsessive hatch marks veil the maps, and their absence selectively reveals them. References to rape, religion and Naziism float across the surfaces in standard block letters. Rarely are the relationships she establishes between words and images discordant enough to spark insights, offensive enough to yield a productive backlash or personal enough to engage the heart.

* Barbara Sexton’s show, “The Left Is Right,” continues at the David Zapf Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., through Dec. 19. Open Friday and Saturday 12-5 and by appointment (232-5004).

Sexton will give an informal lecture at the gallery at 3 p.m. Saturday.

James Anderson also subscribes to the strategy of layering seemingly disparate words and images, an approach with implicit links to the visual overload in contemporary culture and also to the disaffected relativism that haunted the art world through the ‘80s and lingers still. In his show, “Breadcrumb Trail” at Sushi, Anderson lives up to his title by depositing a string of clues, incomplete in themselves. Unfortunately, these works, though visually intriguing at times, fail to cohere in any directed or meaningful way.

Anderson, who lives in Oakland, works imaginatively with photo emulsions, imposing their evidentiary imagery on raw wood, glazed porcelain and beneath thick layers of fiberglass. The photographic image has a flirtatious yet persuasive presence on these unusual surfaces--it asserts itself as the representation of reality, then gives the stage over to an admitted fiction. The dynamics of the materials here are impressive, but the imagery is not. In “Quiver 1, 2 and 3,” for instance, a single photographic image of a guitar has been imprinted on a series of kitschy porcelain figurines. The overlay of the real and the clichee’d has the potential to be fascinating, but that potential is not realized here.

* Sushi Performance and Visual Art, 852 Eighth Ave., through Dec. 12. Open Friday and Saturday 12-4 and by appointment (235-8466).

ART NOTES

“Luna Luna,” the much-anticipated temporary outdoor art park planned for Balboa Park, will not be coming to San Diego after all. The collection of 28 works by such internationally-known artists as David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Georg Baselitz was approved unanimously last year by the city council for temporary placement at the site of the former naval hospital, known as Inspiration Point.

According to Deputy City Manager Bruce Herring, the city waited in vain for months for confirmation of the arrangement from the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, which owns the collection. Now, the window of opportunity during which the Inspiration Point site is available has nearly closed. Land improvements on the site are scheduled to begin there in the middle of next year. If the “Luna Luna” agreement had gone according to plan, construction on what the Birch Foundation called the “territory of surprises” would have begun last December, with the art park open to the public earlier this year, for a duration of approximately one year.

Herring said he doesn’t know why the arrangement hit a snag, and representatives of the Birch Foundation did not return repeated phone calls.