Childish Obsessions

Currently in the Ventura College galleries, two artists explore childish things, with motives both innocent and otherwise.

For painter George Tapley, the iconic image of Mickey Mouse has of late been an obsessive subject, and he shows a healthy selection of his imagery depicting the beloved rodent, in clever and compromising positions, in Gallery 2.

Down in the New Media Gallery, photographer Laurie Long cagily bases her work on the nostalgic influence of Nancy Drew. In the show, “Becoming Nancy Drew,” she shows crisp color images of dramatized scenes with a Nancy Drew stand-in next to fuzzy detail photographs taken with a pinhole.

The grown-up in us interprets the scenes such that the woman-in-peril imagery triggers a sense of dread.

As adults, we tend to have ambivalent relationships with the legends of our childhood: We like to see them both respected and trashed, a dual function that Tapley happily fulfills. He portrays Mickey in blasphemous settings, as in “The Lynching,” “McCrucifix” and “McSplat,” in which the grisly subjects are implied in the titles. In so doing, Tapley is having his way with an innocent American hero, but also questioning the nature of modern, mass-media mythology.

* George Tapley and Laurie Long, through Oct. 10 at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road in Ventura. Call for hours: 648-8974.