Side by side yet far apart

The images are vulnerable and strong ? a sawed-off hand still holding a knife; a towering redwood in the forest; abstract vertical and horizontal lines of color; and a sand installation.

All of the images come together in the Huntington Beach Art Center’s contemporary art exhibition, “Talking Heads.”

“I wanted to bring together artists who are completely different from each other and show their work side by side,” said curator Darlene DeAngelo.

The four featured artists are all faculty members at universities in Southern California. The art includes large-scale drawings by Joseph Biel of Cal State Fullerton, acrylic paintings by Linda Day of Cal State Long Beach, mixed-media works on paper by Rebecca Hamm of Azusa Pacific University and a sand installation by Connie Zehr of Claremont Graduate University.

“I want my work to have the harshness of reality contrast with more poetic, lyrical things,” Biel said. Biel added that much of his work is a result of collision of opposing qualities ? humor and tragedy, the banal and the bizarre, stoicism and vulnerability.

“One without the other would be false,” he explained. “I want to depict the world we live in as a reflection of our times.”

Inspired by Buddhist and Hindu paintings, Linda Day speaks of a process of filling in and emptying out to achieve a state of harmony.

“I have a lot of sounds in my studio, from the ringing of the telephone, jazz music from my husband’s office upstairs, street traffic, which constantly surround me,” she said.

Day’s work in the show uses fields of simple vertical or horizontal bands of color. Each band’s width and the color contrast between them create a rhythmic movement toward the center and outward.

A self-described information junkie, Day began working on her “Pulse” series using a triangle shape inspired by the typical structure of Hindu temples in India. “The structure reflects the universe. As a western painter, I like the simplicity of that shape, its directional force and its symbolic resonance,” she said.

Day’s “Pulse #11” uses psychedelic yellow, green and various shades of both colors to create horizontal jagged patterns on the panel, in contrast to Hamm’s “Wilderness Park,” which stretches across on the opposite side of the wall. Using bright-red oil paint to paint a 360-degree view of the park that Hamm observed in Claremont, her experience in nature naturally which embraces the viewer.

“I didn’t want my work to feel fixed. Many of the views I painted have changed or are no more because of erosion or human interference or development,” Hamm said.

Her paintings of the natural environment within 21 miles of where she’s lived have become memorials of that time. Hamm’s style of tacking one painting on another using pins, resemble plans in an architect’s studio. “It helps the works to remain layered and movable, with the potential of variable scale besides showing its transitory nature,” she said.

Connie Zehr’s striking sand installation “Leavening” will be swept up at the end of the exhibition on April 15. Zehr, a longtime veteran of sand installations, used different sizes and shapes of tortillas besides red and black sand as her main palette.

“My work is specific to how I am feeling at the moment and I also bring in things from my personal life,” she said.

The Ohio native loves the desert and plucked pansy flowers from her garden to directly scan and print them from her computer. She then pressed her flower prints on to wet tortillas and allowed them to dry out.

“I have had a lot of fun doing this,” she said.

Zehr is a two-time winner of the National Endowment for the Arts and Fletcher Jones grants.

“I am fascinated with the colors, shapes and power of the desert landscape,” Zehr said. “Working with a sand installation gives me the opportunity to do something that’s immediate and part of the natural world.”hbi.30-artcenter-CPhotoInfoNC1PDGAU20060330iwi65ikn(LA)Rebecca Hamm’s ‘Red Tree’.