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VENTURA COUNTY WEEKEND : SIGHTS : ‘Biomorphic’ Blends the Real and the Surreal

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On first impression, San Francisco painter Glenn Hirsch’s work, now at Ventura College, seems innocent enough. Machine-like shapes, ambiguous biomorphic images and alien life forms interact on strange landscapes in a kind of playful mode of surrealism, or, as he says in his artist’s statement, a kind of “psychedelic art.”

But there is turbulence rumbling and a mashing-together of both imagery and media. With such dream-laden works as “Dark Carnival,” “Indignant Pirouette” and “What Really Happened at Waterloo,” he mixes oil, acrylic, watercolor and the 3-D effects of layering paper. Forms and archetypes swim across the pictures, fuzzy of focus, and a carefully rendered, unsettled feeling hovers over the art.

Hirsch’s world, as represented by these paintings, is analogous to both dream states and to cyberspace. It’s a place where things are real and yet never real, perfectly logical and yet intangible and subject to chaotic occurrences at any moment.

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In the New Media gallery, prints from the college’s permanent collection make for a good companion exhibition, between Goya’s tragicomic etchings, Dali’s pre-digital “Dalivision” and Chagall’s spare fantasies.

Glenn Hirsch’s “Biomorphic Fantasies,” through Nov. 17 at Ventura College Gallery Two, 4667 Telegraph Road, Ventura; 654-6462.

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