Stretching the Canvas

The two provocative exhibitions now on view at the Ventura College galleries would not, at face value, seem to have much to do with one another. In Gallery 2, Los Angeles-based artist Diana Jacobs’ show combines large, rough-hewn canvas pieces and etchings, awash in ambiguity.

Meanwhile, over in the New Media Gallery, Seattle-based artist Nicholas Brown shows paintings that are, by definition, landscape images, inflamed with bright colors.

What the artists do share, though, is an exploratory attitude toward image-making, suggesting ulterior motives and meanings beyond the pale.

But they go about the process in opposite directions. One questions the nature of art; the other pushes nature toward art.

Jacobs calls her show “Letter of the Law,� in reference to the stubborn belief systems that keep social and political archetypes in place, often at the expense of deeper causes and issues.

She questions the semblance of data and truth, as represented in words and numbers.

Her large works, surprisingly, are made from unstretched, crumpled canvases that have been slathered with layers of paint, the backdrop against which stenciled letters and numbers assert themselves.

That the canvas has been folded and bunched suggests a cross between the intentions of an artwork and the cozy domesticity of bedspreads and curtains.

Yet the emphasis is on tension rather than complacency. In the piece called “Should,� for instance, the title is repeated like an irksome mantra of expectation, amid images of a baby, a house and the rhythmic regularity of a cardiograph.

Contrasting to but complementing these extroverted works are several small etchings. These pieces riff off the built-in nostalgia of antique family photographs--whether or not those images have any relationship to the artist or the viewer.

We’re left in a lurch, wondering about the identities of the subjects and the intentions of the artist. In the end, Jacobs’ art celebrates irresolution, perhaps to a fault.

*

The means and the end are clearer, and more sensuous, in Brown’s series of paintings. He calls his exhibition “From the Beach to the Mountain,� but that’s a bit like calling the film “Magnolia� a floral study.

Something clearly is up here as Brown swerves to the side of most landscape painter conventions. He’s an abstractionist with hiking boots on.

He savors glittery surfaces and textures and usually prefers the flickering thicket to the patiently observed detail. As seen here, he favors underbrush, leaves, rippling creeks, jagged stones. A piece like his fairly heroic portrait of a giant sequoia, “A Long Way Up,� is an anomaly, not the rule.

In all the paintings, the surfaces have been distorted in a recurring, stylized way, with a technique that looks like something between pointillism and the pixel-ish grain of low-resolution computer graphics.

The sum effect is a series of paintings that use natural settings as touchstones in another agenda: finding an artistic voice of one’s own.

DETAILS

Diana Jacobs, “Letter of the Law,� and Nicholas Brown, “From the Beach to the Mountain,� through Feb. 25 at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road. Hours vary: 648-8974.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].