Spring Palette

Art of a certain type makes perfect sense in the Ojai Institute, where Chloe Murdock is showing a rambling assortment of paintings this month.

Her new works are displayed around the institute’s living room, overlooking the lush landscape around this hilltop site. Head upstairs to the “Quiet Room” and there are more of her paintings, such as the peculiarly effective “Chair with a Cat Sarcophagus” next to the library of Krishnamurti videotapes. In general, it’s hard to view this art without noticing its hosting environment, in that a complementary relationship exists between the venue and the artist, maker of meditative-yet-muscular pieces.

Calling the show “A Spring Exhibition” may reflect as much on the energies contained within the work as the time of year. Murdock’s works, painted with a ruggedly impressionistic style, seem to express an edgy beauty that could be interpreted as a vernal thing, the time when regeneration and reassessment have their field day and senses feel a bit raw.

Her best works veer more toward landscape than figures, as with her “Swiss Landscape” or “Rose Valley,” with its post-impressionist’s palette in action. In “Liberating Nature,” a forest scene is depicted in dark, murmuring imagery, a vaguely mystical projection of nature’s quiet force.

Where creatures, human and otherwise, enter the picture, metaphorical ideas are flung about. “Unknown Moment in Tuilleries” is an orange-suffused park scene, as if conveying a private epiphany in the shadow of the Louvre.

Even more enigmatic and striking is the painting “Wolf Meets Civilization,” projecting an ambiguous aura of danger or volatility. A hot orange area in the composition abuts a pyrotechnical burst of hues in the upper left, with the figure of the title lurking ominously into the color-inflamed picture plane. It’s not unreasonable to guess that the image could be an allegory of spring having sprung.

DETAILS

“A Spring Exhibition-New Paintings,” by Chloe Murdock, through April 29 at the Ojai Institute, 160 Besant Road in Ojai. Gallery hours: 2-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat.; 646-2536.

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R.I.P. ICONS: Meanwhile, over at the Childress Gallery this month, the subject is death rather than new life in the show titled “Homage to Local Markers.” The focus here concerns the heartfelt memorial gestures of the living, in the form of makeshift crosses and markers outside the formal cemetery setting.

Often, these impromptu markers show up on roadsides, as site-specific tributes to people who have died in the line of traffic. Sometimes, what could be viewed as quirky personal touches, such as a cross-like shrine with motorcycle handlebars, are the most deeply felt expressions.

Ojai-based photographers Kathaleen Brewer and Joel Anderson have taken this iconography to heart, inspiring sympathy and curiosity with their reportage. The matter of artistic approach is open to question: Both photographers have relied on photographic effects rather than playing it straight.

Brewer uses manipulated Polaroids, with their wavering, distorting visuals, and tinted black-and-white images to exaggerate imagery that might best have told its story without adornment or altered visual states. Nonetheless, Brewer offers inherently poignant scenes, even without our specific knowledge of the tragedy behind the images.

In one scene on Highway 166, where many of these markers are located, an impromptu Catholic shrine, with flowers, photos and a small cross, is propped against a barbed-wire fence. In another, on Pacific Coast Highway by Emma Wood Beach, a pieced-together, nonsectarian shrine sits next to a rock with a touching scrawled message, “I MISS U SON.”

Anderson’s color shots of a marker for the 17-year-old Darnell Bangs have a sense of drama heightened by their fragile, refracting light and glints of visual debris. By contrast, he lets the image do the work in his view of the more formal and elaborate gravestone, in a cemetery proper, of Vincent, 1919-92. We reflexively view the marker of a man who lived a full life differently, with more of an accepting eye, than that of a young man cut down before his prime.

As Anderson writes in a statement, he is dealing with the “stirring of tacit emotions through ornament,” but that objective, intellectual aspect of the work is only part of the story in this refreshingly offbeat, emotionally charged show.

On one hand, these crosses and shrines are a kind of found folk art, created and placed with intense feeling on the part of their creators. Observing them from a more detached perspective, now twice removed as we view them through the viewfinders of these photographers, we’re left with a moving, yet nonspecific empathy. Our hearts go out, but with our heads in the lead.

DETAILS

“Homage to Local Markers,” through April at the G. Childress Gallery, 319 E. Roblar Dr. in Ojai. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Mon.-Sat.; 640-1387.