Office Space

An industrial park adjacent to a naval weapons field seems an unlikely context in which to view art.

That’s one reason why audiences find The Office ? An Art Space so intriguing.

The gallery occupies a few rooms in the front of a suite of offices for a technical staffing firm. Such a low profile doesn’t drop a clue that behind the plate-glass façade, an alternative art scene is taking root.

The Office is Orange County’s own alternative art space. Though it falls outside any gallery district, it attracts artists and curators bent on exploring what’s new in contemporary art.

“In Orange County there are not a lot of places to show the kind of art that we show,” says owner Chris Hoff, 39. There are, however, a lot of what Hoff calls “beach scene” galleries ? particularly in Huntington Beach, where such images help to reinforce the “Surf City” identity. But Hoff, a Huntington Beach native, wanted to show the kind of art that is progressive, that asks questions rather than merely supplies a few pat answers.

He opened The Office three years ago. The enterprise is an addendum to his regular job as vice president of Two Roads Professional Resources, the staffing company he and his partners named for the Robert Frost ode to individuality. “I thought, well ? this is an office, so we’ll call it The Office. We got the white walls. We’ll just put in the track lighting.”

Hoff’s gallery exhibits artists working in New York and Europe, San Francisco and Asia, as well as those on the local cutting edge. He shows photography, video and installation, painting and drawing, even performance art. “We had a naked guy here,” he says, a bit of information that seems to underline the avant-garde intent of the place.

A self-described artist/art fan/collector, Hoff is also a poet, surfer and punk-rock survivor. His own work makes use of photography and sometimes sound in collage. It has been exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum and other venues and will be included in an upcoming group showtitled “From America” at the Museum of Modern Art in Minsk, Belarus.

Being an artist is a road of divergence, Hoff says: “You get to be our age and then you know what’s important.”

When he was in his teens, what was important was surfing and punk rock. These pastimes were so critical to him that he was asked to leave Huntington Beach High School a couple of years before his anticipated date of graduation.

Hoff was that arty type of high school kid who didn’t fit in, he admits. So when he was dismissed for failing to return from surf class one too many times, he says he “went down that road for a while,” the punk-rock-artist-surfer road less traveled. By the end of his 20s, he was cleaning up his act and asking himself, “What do I want to do with my life?”

Hoff returned to school and earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and then started to make his way in business. Still, his burning desire was art, and he was increasingly drawn to the overlapping L.A. art and music scenes for inspiration as both a producer and collector.

“By then I had the means to start collecting art,” Hoff says. He was trekking up to L.A., often to see the art being shown in alternative districts like Culver City and Chinatown and mid-Wilshire. He was becoming familiar with alternative art spaces in Los Angeles, New York and Europe. And then one day, he realized that right in front of him, he’d found the road home.

The mission of The Office is to bring people from different art communities together in a sort of cultural exchange between Orange County and the wide world. Like any other O.C. enterprise, Hoff says, it’s all about networking.

To that end, Hoff has also taken on the task of producing the OC Art Blog at www.theocartblog.typepad.com. The website, which he launched a year and a half ago, is a portal both into and out of the O.C. art scene.

The gallery now features Mark Dutcher’s solo exhibit “Go for Broken,” a series of paintings and sculptures that represent portals into the afterlife. The work addresses the question of how to memorialize a person, place, thing or experience. The references Dutcher uses evoke a sort of emotional scrapbook for the attentive viewer.

Dutcher’s show, which runs through March 31, is being reviewed in artUS, a national contemporary art magazine based in Los Angeles. That is a signal that The Office is showing up on the radar that scans important contemporary art. And as more shows get reviewed, more collectors are discovering the gallery.

As for the audience, Hoff hopes for an ever-growing, curious crowd.

“I hope we make it so it’s not intimidating,” he says. “In New York, nobody greets you when you walk in [an art gallery]. No one asks you if you have any questions about the work. We’re not snooty or intellectually arrogant.

“The art we show takes a little more effort. A little more curiosity. [It demands] you bring your own experience to a work.”

Hoff says Huntington Beach is the new Santa Ana of the Orange County art scene. By that he means to suggest that Santa Ana has maxed out its exhibit space, and talent is taking root to the southwest. “Santa Ana has no more gallery spaces,” Hoff says. “The lofts are too pricey now. Artists are coming here.”