EXHIBIT AT THE GALLERY STORE : NATURE, ART BLEND IN ‘HABITAT’ WORKS

SAN DIEGO —  For nine years, Donald Hughes has been director of exhibitions at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. He has been an artist all his life.

Hughes’ latest works are now on view at The Gallery Store, which is in a splendid new space, itself a work of art (724 Broadway) that the store has occupied since its recent relocation from its Hillcrest site.

Not coincidentally, Hughes’ works of art reflect his occupational activities. They are dioramas, those realistic environments, usually behind a sheet of glass, in which three-dimensional foregrounds with animals in reconstructions of their natural habitats, including plants and rocks, blend imperceptibly into painted two-dimensional backgrounds.

Hughes uses this traditional museum format and his professional skills to create unique works of art. As a group entitled “Habitat,” they are suggestive, narrative scenes that are commentaries about man--not in the environment of nature, but in the environment of the imagination. Hughes’ dioramas are weird and subtle, so be prepared to spend some time with them.

His materials are whatever comes to hand as discards from the Natural History Museum--small animals and small painted backgrounds. In adapting such found objects to his own purposes, his closest forerunner was probably American artist Joseph Cornell, who made small boxes with surreal content. They were not, however, illusionistic. As Hughes has commented, “The diorama as an art form has had no ‘serious’ place in art history.

“Dioramas confront viewers with believable, or almost believable, scenes. There is no need to learn a visual language to understand them as one must do to understand Abstract Expressionism, or have a historical perspective so necessary to decode contemporary art. What you think you see is what you get!”

The six works exhibited in the upstairs gallery of The Gallery Store are immaculately installed, as they would be in a museum. They are, however, placed below adult eye level, just right for a child. Perhaps Hughes’ purpose is to require some physical effort on the part of viewers and to induce in them some sense of childhood wonder. The practical purpose for the low height, the artist has revealed, is to hold viewers’ eyes down so that they won’t look into the illumination source and dissipate the illusion of what they’re seeing.

A visitor moving in a counterclockwise direction first sees “South and West,” ostensibly a conventional enough scene with a bird hovering over a nest and a rat on the ground below. But look again. The bird holds a threaded needle in its beak. There is a key in its nest. And the rat has wings!

“La Bote” features a child’s Western boot at which hummingbirds feed through small red holes. One bird, however, lies crushed beneath the boot’s pointed toe.

Hughes is capable of humor as well as sinisterness. In “Sub-Drumble,” a rat holds a yellow pencil in its tail. Yellow markings cover the rocks that are its habitat.

In an effort to eschew the “cuteness” that seems unavoidable in the use of small animals, Hughes has used man-made objects in natural environments in his most recent works. A pistol buried in dirt and a prayer card of Mother Elizabeth Seton, made into an identification tag, against a distant view of green hills and purple mountains, are the contents of “Modern Domains.”

“Penetration of Faith” includes a penknife stuck in the crotch of a sycamore tree carved with a variety of mystical symbols. A white box in dry leaves below is stencilled “RATTLESNAKE.” In the right-hand corner, barely viewable, is another crumpled prayer card: a stretched hand surrounded by saints.

Finally, the last piece in the show, although the earliest made by the artist, is “Short Lines,” a black snake wearing nine rings on its slender form. Of this work, Hughes has observed, “The snake itself is a line. The rings are round lines. And I was also thinking of short sentences as lines, like ‘I love you’ or ‘I do.’ ”

Hughes’ dioramas are provocatively enigmatic works of art open to multiple interpretations. Their meanings for the artist himself evolve as he makes them.

The exhibition continues through May 31.

Hughes has just announced his resignation from the Natural History Museum. He will soon take up duties as curator of exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.