Going for Layered Look, Collages

While the pro- and anti-museum merger forces duke it out in Laguna Beach, focusing on just about every issue except the overriding one of developing a clear and venturesome artistic vision, a couple of small exhibitions offer welcome relief.

Photographic work by Martha Fuller and Teresa Bischak is at BC Space through May 31, while the Peter Blake Gallery is showing collages by Michael McManus (through Sunday).

Fuller specializes in dense juxtapositions of black-and-white imagery based on photographs taken during her travels. In the past, these tantalizing glimpses of a private vision have often been hard to decipher.

But in her new series of silver gelatin prints and Polaroid transfers, she has found a particularly conducive subject for allusive reverie: the complex of feelings that bear on erotic longing, desire and conception.

Though this work does not always successfully distinguish the artist’s vision from the cliched or romanticized treatments of similar material by others, it wins over the viewer by virtue of its intensity and moody allure.

In “Litero,” the most clear-cut of these works, Polaroid transfers of video clips are mounted on a folding screen, recalling the ones behind which screen goddesses once coyly retired to disrobe. The clips are from recent movies based on graphic love stories set in “exotic” locales of the past: Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” Jean Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea” and Marguerite Duras’ “The Lover.”

The images--of coupling bodies, women lying in bed looking transported or desirous--are detached from their context, just as they are when we conjure them idly in our minds long after the film is over. On the inside of the screen, a small wooden box adorned with a nude scene from “The Piano” holds a pile of short swaths of white fabric, each twisted into a knot.

The single knot in a length of white cloth is the central image of Fuller’s recent work, at once symbolizing a complication, a pause in the stream of things, a form of union and an action that is very easy (such a knot would slip right out with one firm tug) to undo.

The knot image reappears in “Shadow Box I,” where it is juxtaposed with a grid of dreamy visions: a blur of light, a gleaming body of water, mountains in mist and light filtered through a closed shutter (an image suggestive of the cloistered Indochina setting of “The Lover”).

One spot of color intrudes: a photograph of a little chick, suggesting the concrete results of a romantic union. Deliberately jarring, this juxtaposition is indicative of Fuller’s willingness to risk a radical shift in tone in pursuit of the translation of intense feeling.

Fuller’s most powerfully allusive piece is “Wings,” a grouping of large silver gelatin prints with bleached-out backgrounds that have been arbitrarily “shadowed” in the darkroom. Imbued with a vintage cinematic aura, a woman stands with her bare back--slightly mottled by the shadow of an unseen object--to the viewer. She reappears in another “frame” as an intensely gazing face seen in front of a gravestone.

Grouped around the images of the woman are photographs of birds with blurry wings in motion, converging on an unseen piece of carrion while hyenas watch. The juxtaposition implies a sense of vulnerability and foreboding coupled with impending annihilation. In the context of the rest of the works on view, the unspoken subject is the underlying terror of sexual surrender.

Though also involving layers of imagery, Bischak’s work--part of a graduate studio art project for UCLA--is very different in mood, conveying meaning almost entirely through texts incorporated within the digital images.

“Out of Context” consists of illustrated interviews with emigres, most of whom are saddened and perplexed by Americans’ lack of empathy for cultural differences and scant knowledge of the world.

The imagery in these works is either routine (passport photos, American flags, family snapshots, objects indicative of the subject’s career) or stereotypically “dramatic” (crumpled pieces of metal, a framing device that looks like prison bars).

The narratives also tend to sound rather pat (a dancer from Romania: “My life is a big test”; a Polish man unhappy in Eastern Europe: “I didn’t like how people dealt with business”). Even when the subject is more forthcoming--such as the Nigerian woman who felt uncomfortable being stared at by skinheads at a nightclub--the text doesn’t probe deeply enough or offer enough context.

Perhaps Bischak wasn’t sufficiently trusted by her sources, or maybe she had trouble coaxing out deeper revelations--or editing the responses she got. Possibly, her sources were simply unable to articulate their feelings in detail. But somehow, she doesn’t manage to elicit the very specific cluster of reactions and emotions that define a personality and make for an engrossing work of art rather than simply an illustration of an idea.

*

Michael McManus, a former chief curator at the Laguna Art Museum, has long been a familiar figure on the Orange County art scene. I remember once watching him draw on a napkin at a bar. I wondered idly whether he made “real” work of his own. But many of us who thought we knew him were caught by surprise when his show opened a few weeks ago.

McManus’ thematic series of mixed-media collages are visually alluring, drenched in radiant color and filled with syncopated arrangements of printed papers, geometric shapes, stamped imagery and metallic paint. But these small works on notebook paper aim to be a good deal more than eye candy, as their titles suggest.

The 11-part “American Spirit Series” is a subtly allusive meditation on ecological and military-industrial issues. McManus arranges a narrow range of imagery (notably, vintage U.S. products, wartime “bonus” stamps and a rubber-stamped bear) on the yellowed pages of a World War I-era agricultural tract. A superimposed metallic X “burns out” the imagery beneath it, suggesting themes ranging from crop destruction to burning cigarettes and the wartime “scorched earth” policy.

More visually dense, McManus’ 22-piece “American Prayer Series” combines bits and pieces of Americana (U.S. flag stickers, yellow “happy faces,” cheerful ‘50s-era human faces, dime-store silver stars) with elaborately detailed images of demons, gods and goddesses associated with Eastern religions, and various other global artifacts.

Little visual jokes pop up here and there, such as the juxtaposition of a suburban American woman and children in a backyard with an elaborate Indian vegetative motif, or the smiling Hindu goddess who looks (in this context) rather like an American beauty queen.

In this topsy-turvy universe, the complex, moody Hindu cosmology provides a wry counterpoint to the rah-rah superficiality of the Religious Right.

McManus’ third body of work, “Don, Joachim, Tom and Bob: Don and Joachim”--a tribute to a previous generation of Orange County artists (the late Don Hendricks and Joachim Smith, Tom Holste and Bob Schmid)--is a much slighter affair that perhaps requires a bit too much insider’s knowledge. McManus actually seems more personally indebted to another longtime figure on the local art scene: Paul Darrow, who made his mark with dexterous manipulations of collage elements.

* Work by Martha Fuller and Teresa Bischak at BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach. Hours: 1-5:30 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday. Through May 31. Free. (714) 497-1880. Collages by Michael McManus at Peter Blake Gallery, 326 N. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday. Through Sunday. Free. (714) 376-9994.